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Neo-Onnagata: Professional Cross-Dressed Actors And Their Roles On The Contemporary Japanese Stage, William Hamilton Armstrong Iv

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Neo-Onnagata: Professional Cross-dressed Actors and Their Roles on the Contemporary Japanese Stage explores the representation of male and female gender in the contemporary Japanese theatre. I particularly discuss a specialized subset of Japanese actor: the neo-onnagata, a contemporary theatre counterpart to Japan's highly stylized classical kabuki tradition of cross-dressed representation. This dissertation represents my attempt to provide these basic aims: to situate the contemporary Japanese cross-dresser in Japanese tradition, to show how cross-dressing acts as a sharp social commentary and mirror, and to introduce some little-represented cross-dressing actors of the contemporary Japanese stage to the academic community at large. In …