Dancing Around Rituals of Gender
Some cross-dressing is grounded in disciplined ritual, not gender identity.
By Paul L. Vasey
Photo-illustration by Janelle Delia using photos from the Shamenchi Odiri Festival by Paul Vasey (with permission).
“Eight boys perform a traditional dance dressed as girls wearing kimonos and carrying lanterns.”
So read the notice for Shamenchi Odori, a festival that takes place every year in the mountain village of Yase, Japan. My interest was piqued, but not because I was unaware of similar phenomena. For decades now, I have conducted research in Samoa and the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, on adult males who dress in female-typical clothing, wear make-up, and style their hair in a feminine manner. How might this Japanese festival compare?
I soon learned that Shamenchi Odori is held each October on the grounds of a 10th-century Shinto temple built on the slope of Mount Hiei. The temple houses a shrine dedicated to Akimoto Tajimanokami (c. 1647-1714), a senior counselor in the Edo shogunate. Tajimanokami interceded in 1710 to preserve Yase’s land rights and status as a tax-exempt zone when both were under threat. Shamenchi Odori—which has been variously translated to mean the “dance of gratitude,” the “pardoned land dance,” and the “land free of tax dance”— was created to honor him for this benevolence.
Ideally, the eight boys who participate in the festival are all first-born sons, aged fifteen. These days, with fewer children being born in Yase, boys who are somewhat younger can be enlisted to participate. On the evening of the festival, powder, rouge, and lipstick are applied to the boys’ faces. They are then dressed in identical furisodes (kimonos with long, swing sleeves, traditionally worn by young unmarried women) that are patterned with delicate flowers. Having been transformed into what some sources describe as “maidens,” the boys stand stoically in the foyers of their homes, on display for admiring spectators.
After sunset, the boys assemble in the village center and elaborate lanterns are placed on their heads. These are strung with colourful paper streamers and decorated on twelve sides with intricate kirigami (paper cutouts) depicting humans, animals, botanicals, and mythical beasts. Rice husk candles are placed inside the lanterns illuminating them to dramatic effect.
The boys then proceed single file to the base of Mount Hiei with the flickering lanterns atop their heads. Once there, they ascend a stone staircase, up the forested slope of the mountain, all the while accompanied by beating drums and chanting worshippers. Upon reaching the temple, they begin to repeatedly circle in front of Tajimanokami’s shrine. This, as it turned out, was the traditional “dance” that I had read about in the festival’s telegraphic notice.
“Lantern dances” originated in the 16th century and have all but disappeared from the Japanese cultural landscape. Shamenchi Odori is one of only two that remain, a vestigial cultural practice and the only one involving cross-dressed boys. Despite its designation as an intangible cultural asset, the festival could accurately be described as an obscure event. Most people in Kyoto, which is a mere 10 kilometers from Yase, have never heard of it. In a world where it can sometimes feel as if there is nothing left to discover, Shamenchi Odori remains a hidden gem.
When it comes to complex cultural practices, people often do not know why they do what they do.
In advance of the festival, I wondered whether Shamenchi Odori was some sort of public tribute to feminine boys. The ethnosphere is nothing if not diverse, and some very unusual cultural practices exist out there in the realms of gender and sexuality. After all, in other cultures where I have conducted long-term research, there are community events—beauty pageants, parades, and dances—at which feminine males take center stage in an atmosphere of celebration.
But this speculation soon proved to be well off the mark. The Shamenchi Odori boys showed no signs of effeminacy whatsoever. After the festival, I observed them, makeup-clad and dressed in their now disheveled furisodes, roughhousing as adolescent boys typically do all over the world. Villagers with whom I spoke confirmed that the festival was in no way a celebration of boyhood femininity.
So, why were the boys cross-dressed? When I put this question to various festival participants, it seemed as if they had never given it much thought, and answers varied.
Some emphasized the boys’ quasi-religious role, from which girls were barred. But even if this were the case, why not let the boys dress in a gender normative manner? Why mimic the appearance of girls, who, after all, were supposedly barred from being lantern bearers?
Others linked the boys’ cross-dressing to furyu odori—traditional folk dances that originated in Japan’s late medieval period. During these events, participants wore all manner of elaborate costumes while dancing together, often in a circle and often to honor the dead. But given the plethora of costumes one could choose from, why cross-dress? Indeed, examples of furyu odori exist during which boys wear costumes that have nothing to do with girls’ clothing.
Another explanation I heard for the boys’ cross-dressing harkened back to the 14th century. The story recounted to me goes as follows: Emperor Go-Daigo (c. 1288-1339) originally bestowed tax-free status on the citizens of Yase for helping him flee a political enemy, the samurai Ashikaga Takauji (c. 1305-1358). During his clandestine escape, Go-Daigo dressed as a woman to evade detection by Takauji and his henchmen. Yase’s boys, I was told, cross-dress in remembrance of this event.
But why cross-dress in remembrance of a purported event that was only tangentially related to Shamenchi Odori’s purpose, namely to honor Akimoto Tajimanokami? Furthermore, why would boys assume this role? Why not cross-dressed men, who would, after all, be age-appropriate choices if one was trying to recreate Go-Daigo’s supposed flight?
All the explanations that were offered for the boy’s cross-dressing had the quality of post-hoc reasoning. It was as if the gracious and accommodating villagers of Yase were being asked for a specific reason why the boys cross-dressed and felt obligated in the presence of a curious Canadian researcher to provide one. This type of post-hoc response is not uncommon in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. When it comes to complex cultural practices, people often do not know why they do what they do. Given this, interviewees sometimes manufacture explanations or, when pressed, will simply say, “It’s our custom.” While satisfying for locals, such explanations leave much to be desired when viewed from the perspective of the ethnographer.
I reckoned that there might be an explanation for the boys’ cross-dressing that none of the villagers had mentioned. This involves wakashu—a term employed during the Edo period to refer to “beautiful male youths.” The Edo era timeframe (c. 1603-1868) during which wakashu were recognized coincides well with the period during which Shamenchi Odori was launched (c. 1715). Like the Shamenchi Odori boys, wakashu were known to wear flower-printed furisodes and make-up. They also staged furyu odori-inspired dances, a performance style that some of the Shamenchi Odori participants linked to the cross-dressed boys’ commemoration of Akimoto Tajimanokami.
Perhaps Shamenchi Odori’s cross-dressed boys are simply the modern expression of a role that was formerly played by wakashu. The practice of dressing boys in feminine attire may have stuck throughout the centuries owing to humans’ remarkable tendency for high fidelity copying of cultural traditions. This tendency is automatic, unconscious, and difficult to inhibit or suppress. In ritual contexts, the human propensity for “super-copying” may slip even further into overdrive, since practitioners stress the importance of getting all the ceremonial steps “right” for supernatural interventions to “work.” The more steps a ritual has, the more it is perceived as efficacious, thus discouraging the deletion of ritual elements—even seemingly trivial ones—and further encouraging high fidelity copying.
Just as most Westerners have forgotten the original reason costumes are worn on Halloween, so, too, the citizens of Yase may have forgotten the original reason why boys cross-dress during Shamenchi Odori. If my theory about the wakashu origin is correct, this might explain why those involved in the festival struggled to explain the role that cross-dressing played in their festival and why their accounts varied so considerably. This might also explain why the furisodes and makeup that were once appropriate for wakashu take on an enigmatic cross-gender aura when donned by boys in the modern context of this event.
Regardless of whether this conjecture proves correct, speculation of this sort requires an openness to questioning participants’ self-reports. But a willingness for such skepticism—especially when it is extended to another culture, as I have done here—is strongly discouraged in many academic quarters. Yet when such inquiry is forestalled, all we’re left with is unquestioning faith in each participants’ “lived experiences” no matter how implausible or contradictory those might be.
Understanding the objective reality of sexual and gender diversity often requires that we interrogate participants’ (inter)subjective perceptions. As the autogynephilic blogger, Zack M. Davis has written: “If introspection were sufficient to reveal the true structure of human psychology, it's not clear why we would even need to do science; we would just know. It's precisely because careful observation and experiments can tell us things about ourselves that we didn't already know that science is useful.”
A willingness for such skepticism—especially when it is extended to another culture, as I have done here—is strongly discouraged in many academic quarters.
Shamenchi Odori is not the only devotional ritual in which cross-dressed boys play a central role. In ancient Greece, two boys dressed as girls led the Oschophoria, a festival honoring Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. During the Chamayavilakku festival in Chavara, India, boys seek blessings from Bhagavati, the goddess of limitless energy, by dressing as girls and holding votive lamps up to her in penance for their sins. In Mannō, Japan, boys dress as girls and dance during the Ayako Odori festival to pray for rain.
Is there any overarching explanation that might account for why cross-dressing features so prominently in these institutionalized events that span such very different cultures and timeframes? The American humanities scholar Camille Paglia has opined that male transvestitism during religious rituals serves a propitiatory function, signalling reverence, sacrifice and ingratiation. The cross-dressed boys’ key role in honoring Akimoto Tajimanokami during the quasi-religious Shamenchi Odori festival could be seen as consistent with this idea.
In addition, Mircea Eliade, an influential Romanian historian of religion, has argued that ritual androgyny has deep mythical roots, rendering incarnate the coincidentia oppositorum, the non-dualistic union of opposites. According to Eliade, from time-to-time humans feel the need—if only for a moment—to symbolically efface their differentiated and determined condition, effecting a mythical return to the primeval state before creation, where all form dissolves into oneness and divinity is more closely approached. Many cultures seem to have landed on ritual androgyny as one means by which this need is achieved.
Perhaps cross-dressed boys, who are not fully mature, are better able to encapsulate a sex and gender coincidentia oppositorum than cross-dressed men with their more pronounced secondary sexual characteristics. Edo era citizens certainly seemed to think so. When performing on the kabuki theatre stage, wakashu were thought to be experts at projecting androgyny, or as the Japanese historian Imao Tetsuya puts it, “floating between the polarities of male and female, synthesizing sokuji, the principle of both sexes, thereby radiating neutral ravishing sexuality, and thus pleasing both men and women.”
This disciplinary narrowness and siloing of thought underscores for me (yet again) how important it is for students of human behavior and psychology to engage with non-Western cultures.
Some scholars have argued that wakashu constituted a “third” gender that existed during the Edo era, but I find these arguments unconvincing. It seems to me that “third” genders exist in socio-cultural spaces when a subset of males (or females) are recognized both by themselves and other members of their society as being neither men nor women. But all Edo era adolescent males were identified as wakashu. In the absence of a separate group of age-matched male peers who identified (and were identified by others) as something other than wakashu, the “third” gender label makes no sense. In thinking through this issue, I was reminded that, when academic ideas like “third genders” are valorized, the temptation to embrace them will always exist, even in the absence of supporting evidence.
What’s more, as I sifted through possible explanations for cross-dressing by the Shamenchi Odori boys, I was given pause to think about the narrow bandwidth of ideas that Western academics often draw upon when formulating hypotheses for socio-cultural phenomena in other times and places. I doubt that disciplined ritual, let alone propitiation or coincidentia oppositorum, spring to mind when most self-proclaimed “gender experts” think about cross-dressing in childhood. These days, it seems far more likely that “transkids” (the folksy moniker for children who have been labeled as transgender) would be invoked as the knee-jerk explanation by those with cultural tunnel-vision.
This disciplinary narrowness and siloing of thought underscores for me (yet again) how important it is for students of human behavior and psychology to engage with non-Western cultures through fieldwork and to mine historical sources, ethnographic or otherwise. Doing so can result in transformative new ways of thinking and help correct biased, incomplete, or even erroneous views regarding the human experience. Admittedly, this is a very tall order, but, in the absence of such comparative work, we will never accurately grasp the full sweep of humanity, let alone our universal nature. I’m hardly the first person to point out that the study of modern Westerners and a myopic focus on theory will only take us so far.
For me, Shamenchi Odori has served as an edifying reminder that some gender-bending is enacted for wholly ritualistic purposes and signals nothing about non-normative gender identity. This insight, while certainly not new, deserves reclamation and greater appreciation. It has not been imaginatively absorbed in many Westerners circles partly due to ideological efforts that encourage us to see contemporary Western transgender phenomena everywhere in history, culture and nature, but also because such rituals largely lie outside of the Western cultural tradition. In those areas of the non-Western world where ritual cross-dressing occurs, its purely ceremonial nature is more evident to cultural insiders.
Indeed, when I asked the Shamenchi Odori boys how they felt about being cross-dressed, they simply said, in good communal spirit and with muted pride, “It’s our tradition.”
About the author
Paul L. Vasey, PhD, Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Neuroscience, conducts cross-species and cross-cultural research on sexuality and gender.