Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on LGBT Studies
Year: 2025
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Of Jackets and Brushes: How Cross-Dressing Women Disrupted the Status and Gender Order of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Japan
Dr. Daniele Durante
ABSTRACT:
Between the 1730s and 1840s, in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto groups of women who belonged to different social classes, including prostitutes, commoners, warriors, and high-ranking women, donned the haori jacket, a garment usually worn by men. In the 1740s and 1840s, legislators enacted specific sumptuary laws to forbid this practice as it encouraged the mixing of women from dissimilar social backgrounds. However, in the legal texts the lawmakers did not specify the complex social, political, and cultural reasons why such mixing brought about by urban women’s (mis)use of the haori was considered problematic. To fully understand this aspect of the phenomenon, it is therefore crucial to study supplementary sources which offer a more comprehensive overview of the issues linked with the practice. Examining ‘miscellanies’ (zuihitsu, literally ‘following the brush’) written by intellectuals of the time, this paper suggests that urban women’s donning of the haori destabilised the very foundations of contemporary society: early modern Japan and particularly its major cities were in fact structured as a garrison state wherein each individual occupied a precise ‘status’ (mibun), which was visually signaled by his or her clothes. Furthermore, attire also optically denoted a person’s gender. By serving as visible indicators of one’s status and gender, dresses functioned as what Herman Ooms has termed ‘social tattoos’. This paper argues that by wearing the haori urban women altered their markers of status and gender, thus shaking the social, political, and cultural organisation of the state at its core.
Keywords: cultural construction of clothing, early modern Japanese mibun system, law and literature, societal attitudes towards gender-variant people, urban culture