Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan

The all-female Takarazuka Revue, founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater, is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and archival research, Jennifer Robertson explores how the Revue illuminates sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, modernity, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan. By situating the Revue within its social, historical, and cultural contexts, she challenges both stereotypes of "the Japanese" and Eurocentric assumptions about gender performance and sexuality.