SOURCE: Takakuwa, Yoko. “Performing Marginality: The Place of the Player and of ‘Woman’ in Early Japanese Culture.” New Literary History 27, No. 2 (Spring, 1996): 213-25.

In the following essay, Takakuwa considers the problem of marginality and status of “other” of the Kabuki female impersonator in the closed society of early modern Japan.

The economy of our culture can be analyzed in terms of what it has excluded in its (hi)story (histoire)—what meanings are marginalized in the textual system we inhabit. During the Edo era (1603-1867), the Tokugawa shogunate adopted a policy of seclusion in 1633 and carried it out by 1641, in order to interdict Christianity and protect home trade. Japan closed the door from then until 1854 when America forced the country to open up to foreign intercourse. It was in the course of the radical cultural paradigm shift at the turn of the sixteenth century that a woman originated...