Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies Devising Kabuki Female-Likeness

This book is a feminist reading of the history of gender performance and construction of the female role players, onnagata, of the Kabuki theater. It is not limited to a "theater arts" focus, rather it is a mapping and close analysis of transformative genders through several historical periods in Japan (the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries). In particular, the work focuses on undoing of binary genders, the sensual ambiguity of boy-ness, youth, and female-likeness and the cultural development of the aesthetics of eroticism, nostalgia, and cruelty based in female-like transformative gender acts. The work is also a visual cultures study as it draws not only on literary sources but also prints, photographs, film, and video documentation.

Katherine Mezur is an Assistant Professor in the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College, Oakland, CA. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Dance, emphasis on Asian Performance, from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She is a feminist scholar, director, and choreographer whose research focuses on gender studies, corporeality and media, and transnational performance in the Asia Pacific region.