ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance and contribution of women with regard to the art, and traces their place in contemporary noh as professional or amateur performers, wives to noh actors or part of the audience. Noh is often considered an all-male performing art, although women have never been absent from its history. Women have been performing noh from the very beginning of the genre in the fourteenth century. However, the exclusion of women from official history paved the way for the construction of noh as an exclusively male performing art. The erasure of women through noh aesthetics is intimately linked to that on the level of social structure. Although there have always been women dancing noh, in the course of its history the notion of noh being based on the male performer's body became deeply rooted in this homosocial and patriarchal community.
