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- Title
Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama.
- Authors
Jackson, Reginald
- Abstract
How should we understand the role robes play within noh dance-drama's enactments of femininity? In the above poem Genji's jilted lover, Rokujō, bemoans her inability to keep her vengeful spirit from besieging the Lady Aoi, for whom Genji has spurned her. Within the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu's early eleventh-century narrative, to bind the hem was to tether the restless spirit to its host's body, like a tourniquet stanching spectral energies from seeping to infect victims. The famous noh play Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), in which Aoi is played not by an actor but by a short-sleeved robe (kosode), activates the poem's metaphor onstage. Moreover, the Japanese poem's final term, tsuma , signifies both as "robe hem" and "wife," foregrounding a gendered dimension sutured to problematic notions of feminine deportment and mobility whose dramatic manifestations merit exploration.
- Subjects
ROBES; FEMININITY; NO; DANCE; AOI No Ue (Theatrical production); NARRATIVES; METAPHOR
- Publication
Theatre Survey, 2019, Vol 60, Issue 3, p355
- ISSN
0040-5574
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0040557419000255