SOURCE: Franko, Mark. “Where He Danced: Cocteau's Barbette and Ohno's Water Lilies.” PMLA 107, no. 3 (May 1992): 594-607.

In the following essay, Franko discusses the presentation of gay identity and gender roles in Cocteau's “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette” and the Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's performance of the piece Suiren.

In the current period of AIDS activism, the primary critical operation of gay studies has been the cultural analysis of homophobia.¹ Focusing on the poetics of disempowerment, this analysis recalls earlier feminist discourse. Like women, gay men are also victimized by the projections of a “male gaze,” but the issue of the eroticized versus the phobic investment of that gaze affects them differently. The feminist seeks to deny the erotic investment of the male gaze, to expose it as phobic, whereas the gay male exposes its ostensibly phobic quality as a screen for its eroticism...