Abstract Book of the 9th World Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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The Agency and Motivations of Gender-Variant Women in Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Daniele Durante
ABSTRACT:
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, a number of 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 investigated 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 zuihitsu (miscellanies), newspapers, and magazines and by applying the concept of agency developed by cultural anthropologist Sherry Ortner, this paper aims to explore the complex social, cultural, and economic motivations for which gender-variant women adopted a male gender performance. By achieving this result, the paper will improve our knowledge about the lived experiences of gender-variant women in early modern and modern Japan.
Keywords: Gender History; Japanese Studies; Practice Theory; Social History; Women’s History