Visuality and gender in modern Japanese theater: looking at Salome

Abstract

As part of a collective project to map the changes in the sense of vision and visuality in modern Japan, this paper focuses on theater and the environment around it, and asks what gender, sexuality and performance had to do with vision and visuality, as physical operation and as social fact. Examining the circulating images of women as performers and performers as women, this paper argues that a significant change occurred in Meiji Japan which aligned in new ways the categories of gender, sexuality, performance, visuality and the body. That alignment opened up possibilities for new forms of disciplinary control as well as for new forms of resistance and pleasure. These possibilities can be illustrated by the various versions of Oscar Wilde's Salome that came into view in Japan at the turn of the century, especially the competing performances of Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako in 1914. Matsui Sumako's triumphant performance was paradigmatic of the modern formations of visuality and gender, and Salome's ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ can be understood as a synecdoche for that formation.