Week 7 Discussion question (turn in on Thursday)

1) Do onnagata make clear the distinction between gender and biological sex? Or do they blur it? Do they reinforce or subvert normative gender roles for women? Why?

Analyze Yoshizawa Ayame's "Actor's Analects" to see how an Edo period onnagata thought about these issues. (Note that there is useful information about terminology used in "Actors Analects" in the study questions for this week!)

Support your points using Bernstein's article (which reviews the difference between gender and biological sex) and Robertson's article (which discusses the Edo period development of Neo-Confucian gender stereotypes for women). To help you along, I've provided two important quotations from those articles.

Here is Bernstein's explanation of the difference between gender and biological sex (p. 2):

Gender, unlike sex, is not a biological given, but is, in the words of Evelyn Fox Keller, "a socially constructed and culturally transmitted organizer of our inner and outer worlds." Whereas sex roles refer merely to the fixed range of capabilities of female and male genitalia, gender roles are sociohistorical conventions of deportment arbitrarily attributed to females or males. "Women" and "men" are culturally created categories. Our goal is to understand continuity and change in Japanese ideals of femininity, in the processes by which women were trained to approximate those ideals, and in the ways that their actual roles diverged from these ideals.

Here is Robertson's take on onnagata (p. 106):

The paragon of female-likeness in Tokugawa society remained the Kabuki onnagata: male actors who modeled gender constructs developed by male intellectuals. In effect, women's hypothetical achievement of "female" gender was tantamount to their impersonation of female-like males, who, in turn, were not impersonating particular females but rather enacting an idealized version (and vision) of female-likeness. Bakufu [Shogunate] ideology did not and could not accommodate women's control over the consrtuction and representation of "female" gender.