Gender Performativity in Japan

This paper explores gender issues Japanese daily life or traditional and contemporary shows. Specifically, it looks at gender politics in a number of performing arts, highlighting ways in which humor constructs the feminine. Like eroticism, humor builds on a fascination with the real ambiguity of gender; and reciprocally gender is sensually and humorously fashioned. Humorous performances arise from the aesthetic disturbance or subversion of historically specific gender prescriptions, just as the child develops role-playing strategies to understand what makes a male and a female body, game or activity before assimilating the gender divisions that prevail in her world. Gender is understood in this paper as a sort of unfinished picture that people have fun crafting.