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Thursday, March 28, 2024


Conference/Symposium - Europe & Africa

Wakashu as a Third Gender and Gender Ambiguity in the Edo Period

SOAS University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square,
London, United Kingdom
Oct 19, 2016


Detail: This talk will suggest that adolescent boys in early modern Japan, called wakashu, constituted a third gender in the Edo-period sex/gender system. This will be demonstrated by examining the “sexual grammar” of a 1675 illustrated text by Hishikawa Moronobu that purports to promotenanshoku, or pederastic male-male sex. This text requires more than just the categories of “men” and “women” to account for its what we might call “rules of combination.” The paper will also untangle three relatively distinctive meanings of the word “wakashu”: 1) as a pubescent pre-adult male who could engage in both heterosexual and homosexual relations, 2) as the junior partner in ananshoku relationship, and 3) as another term for kagema, or male prostitutes connected to the kabuki stage. The paper will demonstrate the relative clarity that prevailed in the representation of wakashu up until the mid-eighteenth century, and then the gender ambiguity that appears in several of the works of Suzuki Harunobu and some of his contemporaries. Such ambiguity lessens in popular imagery by the end of the century, but a new kind of cross-dresser, the haori geisha, becomes prominent in the Bunka-Bunsei eras (1804-1829).

Phone No.: +44 (0)20 7898 4893
Contact Email: [email protected]
Site URL: http://www.soas.ac.uk/jrc/events/seminar-and-events/19oct2016-wakashu-as-a-third-gender-and-gender-ambiguity-in-the-edo-period.htm

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