The Onnagata as Female Impersonators in Japanese Theater and Magnus Hirschfeld’s German Sexology

Abstract

This article traces reciprocal processes of knowledge transfer in the reception and dissemination of sexual science between Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how German ideas about Japan influenced evolving concepts of masculinity – both in medical discourses of sexual science and popular controversies in early homosexual movements – and how these ideas in turn were received in Japan in context of the modernization that followed its opening to the West. The article focuses on the reception of the Japanese onnagata – male actors who played women’s roles in Japanese Kabuki Theater – as transvestites and female impersonators. It traces a wide spectrum of forms of reception and knowledge transfer beyond the direct translation of sexological texts, and it examines the forms of linguistic and cultural translation that informed the personal interactions and exchanges at the crux of this history. This view offers a new approach for critically assessing how the universal, natural-scientific claims of German sexual science were applied to culturally diverse phenomena.