ABSTRACT
Androgyny involves the scrambling of gender markers—clothes, gestures, speech patterns, and so on—in a way that both undermines the stability of a sex-gender system premised on a male-female dichotomy. This chapter begins by summarizing the spectrum of English and Japanese terms for and usages of androgyny and, in this connection, review the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality. It then moves on to the main project, which, after an introduction to the Takarazuka Revue, is to explore some of the ways in which androgyny has been deployed to both support and subvert dominant representations of women and men in Japan. The chapter shows how androgyny has been constructed, performed, practiced, and deployed by real females and males, who include the Takarazuka actors, their fans, and their critics. Androgyny, as a "surface politics of the body," has been used historically to interrogate the naturalized dualities of male and female, masculine and feminine.
