The Agency and Motivations of Gender-Variant Women in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Abstract

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, a small number of biological women adopted a male gender performance. Scholars have examined the strategies governments and police deployed to push said women to adopt a female gender performance in alignment with their anatomical sex, however experts have not yet taken into due consideration the points of view of the gender-variant women themselves. By critically analysing contemporary testimonies on gender-variant women who lived in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan as recounted in court sentences, miscellanies, newspapers, and magazines and by applying the practice theory developed by cultural anthropologist Sherry Ortner, the paper aims to investigate the complex social, cultural, and economic motivations for which gender-variant women adopted a male gender performance. By achieving this result, the paper will advance our knowledge about the lived experiences of gender-variant women in early modern and modern Japan.