The Kagema of Japan through Sexological and Popular Discourses in the Interwar Period
During the pre-modern Japanese period (1603-1867), kagema were young apprentice kabuki female impersonators (onnagata). They belonged to a specific social class and gender categories. They were also the object of an erotic appreciation comparable to the courtesans of the red-light districts. From the modern period (1868-1945), which corresponds with the westernization of Japanese society, kagema disappeared cause of the assimilation of western sexual norms and gender regime. During the 1920s, the modern categories generated by Western medicine and psychiatry reread the kagema and erected them as symbols of “sexual perversion” (hentai seiyoku), associated with inversion and effeminate. Then, in the early 1930s, the media used the term kagema to refer to contemporary cross-dressed sex workers. This paper seeks to shed light on how kagema have been rewritten and reappropriated in modern Japanese discourses through gender categories and sexual norms imported from the Western Area.