Conclusion

During World War II, the shojo subculture experienced a cooling period when it was considered unhelpful to the Japanese government’s eugenicist and pro-natal stance toward women.[1] Immediately after the war, however, it returned in magazines and books, most notably Nakahara Junichi’s magazine Himawari. In the post-war years, the genre would feature mainly heterosexual romances, but the queerness of shojo would not be completely erased. Boy’s love became a popular Shojo offshoot featuring same-sex male relationships. Studies of the popularity of boys’ love with Japanese female audiences have explored how female readers and writers projected their own desires on the male characters while being able to dodge the shame by acting out the desire with bodies not their own.[2] Likewise, Takarazuka, the mecca of the shojo subculture, struggled during wartime when its performance was limited to only propagandistic productions approved by government advisory boards. But like the shojo subculture, it would experience a significant renaissance in the second half of the twentieth century, cementing its place in Japanese popular culture. The theater continues to put on productions today and garner large, dedicated audiences of women even beyond the national border.

In terms of contemporary incarnations of female-to-male crossdressing, as mentioned in the introduction, Dansō individuals live and work in Tokyo and, alongside the increasingly popular genderless style movement, contribute to an urban landscape filled with increasing avenues to express the full spectrum of gender identity. Marta Fanasca and Michelle H.S. Ho’s studies reveal a community based around bars, cafés, and escort services where Dansō individuals meet primarily female clients, mirroring the lives of the geisha and actresses of the past. However, they differ in their ability to exhibit their queer identities outside the realm of performance. One of Michelle H. S. Ho’s subjects in “Queer and Normal” expresses concern about this distinction.  Twenty-five-year-old Hiyori wants others to understand Dansō as more than just something they do as a job to please clients; it is who they are.[3] Ho’s interview with Hiyori also reveals that the Dansō population connects themselves to older traditions like the Takarazuka’s Otokoyaku to support the discourse of “gender crossing practices as futsu (normal).”[4] Regardless, Dansō has a complicated relationship with the LGBTQIA+ community in Japan because they feel the limited identity categories do not represent them but also because they do not identify with the antinormative stance common in queer rhetoric post-World War II. Ho believes this should force us to consider queer’s relationship to normal. In the same vein, as this capstone has demonstrated, this visual and material culture that moved in and out of mainstream acceptability historically should also question whether queer is inherently abnormal, particularly in the case of femininity and normative expressions of it.

When viewing the various images of cross-dressed women at the start of this capstone, more questions than answers arose. Who were these women? What function did these images serve? How did people respond? By answering these questions and highlighting the importance of these objects, this study has also made visible the throughlines between the queer expressions of Japan’s past and present. These women were performers for private clients and packed theaters. Their gender play and androgyny were momentary, but it was impactful because of the visual material that expanded the play beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the performance. For other women, these boundary-defying objects inspired how they might question and reimagine the boundaries of femininity. For Government officials, they represented a challenge to the social order that had been designed to categorize and police its citizens.

Furthermore, if a long tradition of queer expression exists in Japanese culture, then is queerness mutually exclusive to Japaneseness? Should queer Japan be solely defined by its relationship to Western queer communities rather than based on its distinct history and culture? This project does not hold the answers to these questions but instead contributes to a larger tapestry of scholarship attempting to reconstruct a record of this complex past. Future investigations will lend to the visibility of marginalized pasts to legitimize the belonging of those living in the present and provide them with the generational record they were previously denied.