Title: Takarazuka
First published: 1998
Description: The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan.

The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways.

Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.
Subjects: Ethnology, Musicals, Popular culture, Sex role, Social life and customs, Social structure, Takarazuka Kagekidan, Theater, Ethnology, japan, Theater, japan, Popular culture, japan, Japan, social life and customs, LGBTQ anthropology, Ruth Benedict Prize, Ethnologie, Théâtre, Rôle selon le sexe, Structure sociale, Mœurs et coutumes, SOCIAL SCIENCE, Anthropology, Cultural, POLITICAL SCIENCE, Public Policy, Cultural Policy, Manners and customs
Places: Japan
LC classification: GN635.J2 R62 1998