User:NominallyNaomi/Cross-gender acting

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• To improve this article, I'd like to simply add more information in several places, particularly regarding France and Ancient Greece. Currently, the article doesn't discuss the theatre traditions of Ancient Greece very thoroughly, which is surprising considering the Greeks pioneered many of the tropes and traditions of modern day theatre
• The French tradition is rich too: look at people like the Dieulafoys
• I'd also like to reorganize the article for less redundancy in terms of mentions of the English Renaissance: there are two separate sections that elaborate on it (sort the article by time rather than apparently randomly)
• I'd also like to expand the lead to give more of an overview of the actual contents of the article, rather than just the definition of the term

Cross-gender acting, also called cross-gender casting or cross-casting, refers to actors or actresses portraying a character of the opposite sex. It is distinct from both transgender and cross-dressing character roles.

Cross-gender acting often interacts with complex cultural ideas about gender. It has a diverse history across many cultures, including English Renaissance theatre, French theatre, Japanese theatre, Indian theatres, and Ethiopian theatre.

In many contexts, such as English and Indian theatres, cross-gender acting is linked to the oppression of women. In roles where men play women, often this cross-casting occurred because women were not permitted to perform. These roles often decreased in popularity as women gained this right.

Female cross-cast roles are commonly young boy characters, or, in the case of theatre companies like the Takarazuka Revue Company, male heroes.

Modern American cross-gender acting, especially in musical theatre roles where men play women, is often employed for comedic effect.{{Citation needed|{{subst:DATE}}}}

One of Louis XIV's costumes in Ballet Royal de la nuit, 1653

Cross-gender acting in France

Jane Dieulafoy, who hosted gender-bending theatre salons in her home

Much like England, France also had a tradition of cross-casting, but by the second half of the 17th century these roles had dwindled. They existed in unique forms during the reign of Louis XIV however—mainly in comedy, school drama, ballet, and opera. By the mid-sixteenth century, female actors in France became more and more common, but they were selective in the roles they wished to play. French female actors did not want to play unglamourous or “ugly” women, so these roles were often cross-cast. One example of this is the nourrice, or “nurse” archetype—a male-acted older, humorous, post-menopausal woman whose undesirability contrasted the primary female roles played by women.

In the Ballet de cour tradition, men often played women. Famously, King Louis XIV performed in many such roles. For Louis XIV, cross-dressing in a theatre context was not satirical but rather a show of power. When performing, these men dressed in distinct costumes. They wore skirts, but their hemlines rose above the knee, displaying their thighs in a style that would have been prohibited for women but was permitted for men. This placed these roles in a third category that was neither man nor woman precisely.

Into the 19th and 20th centuries, French anthropologist Jane Dieulafoy and her husband Marcel hosted private salons where they staged classical plays. The genders of the characters stayed true to the original texts, but the actors were cast blindly with no regard for gender.

Cross-gender acting in India

In the Indian context, Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi theatrical traditions from the 19th and 20th centuries cast men in female roles. Where women lacked public visibility, these roles introduced audiences to the idea of women in public life. Female impersonators allowed audiences to engage with femininity. Women could then use the traits that were considered acceptable in theatre characters as a pathway into their own public life. Within theatre itself, female impersonators also created niches that female performers could occupy later.

In China

Going back as far as the Tang dynasty, both men and women played roles of the opposite sex in theatre. For women in the Yuan dynasty, cross-gender acting was liberating, as playing men allowed to embark on scholarly pursuits typically restricted from women. Despite this partial liberty, female actors were treated like prostitutes. During the Qing dynasty, women were prohibited from performing at all due to imperial anxieties about female sexuality. This led to the development of female impersonation techniques such as cai ciao (false-foot skill), which simulated a woman's bound feet. After the May Fourth Movement in the 1910s, women were permitted to perform again, and both men and women were cast true to their gender.

Cross-gender acting in Ethiopia

Throughout the 20th century, a Western theatre tradition developed in Ethiopia, starting in 1913 with the the play Ye Awrewoch Commedia by Tekle Hawariat Tekle Mariyam. All parts were played by boys. As the tradition grew over the decades with the development of new theatre companies, the boys themselves were unhappy playing women; some feared embarrassment, while others were afraid of being recognized in their feminine roles. At the boys' urging, the troupes began actively recruiting girls.

At the Empress Menen Girls' Boarding School, Ethiopian scholar, writer, and politician Senedu Gebru wrote and directed plays for her female students between 1942 and 1955. With the students' parents as audience members, these plays were performed at the end of the school year. Girls played both male and female roles.

After the fall of the Government of the Ethiopian Empire and with the opening of the Theatre Arts Department at Addis Ababa University, the 1970s saw further efforts to involve women onstage. Male-as-female cross-casting thus fell out of fashion.

Modern American theatre

Increasingly, American theatre is cast "blindly," in which roles are determined based on talent, regardless of "gender, race, age, and body type."

Gender-sex politics in cross-gender acting

Otokoyaku characters, men played by women, in a 1939 Takarazuka Revue performance

Within Japan's Takarazuka Revue Company, their most notable feature, besides their show-stopping extravagant productions, is the role of their otokoyaku character. This is the popular male character played by trained female performers that specialize in exuding the dreamy, heroic, and graceful man of women's dreams. To further explain the role of the otokoyaku ‘male’ character, Lorie Brau contends that, "The otokoyaku does not represent a 'nama no otoko', that is to say, a 'man in the raw', but an idealized, 'beautiful' man-a man without dirt, sweat, roughness, and a need to dominate. The otokoyaku's female following see her as a version of this kind of androgynous, safe beauty rarely found in real men". Therefore, while the otokoyaku presents a male guise that is the “risoteki na dansei” (ideal man) women are attracted to, the otokoyaku also creates an admirable attraction from female fans because they embrace a type of androgynous freedom and non-constrained continuum of gender. As female performers, fans see women breaking the confines of societal female expectations, as well as embracing the femme side of the male-masculine image. However, despite this progressive multi-dimensional role of the otokoyaku, the reality of how far these interpretations could be expressed by the actual female performers was quite the opposite.

With the creation of the Takarazuka Revue Company, Ichizō Kobayashi intended to use the troupe to reinforce the patriarchal status quo of Japan by training his female performers how to be obedient women and “good wives and wise mothers”. Despite the non-conventional female position as the otokoyaku, this too played into patriarchal ideologies. Jennifer Robertson mentions, “Kobayashi theorized that by performing as men, females learned to understand and appreciate males and the masculine psyche”.

References

Brooks, H. (2015). Actresses, gender, and the eighteenth-century stage : playing women. Palgrave Macmillan.

Fairleigh, Madison. (2023). Shakespeare Re-Dressed : Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. 2008. Dickinson University Press. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Hornby, Richard. (1996). “Cross-Gender Casting.” The Hudson Review 48, no. 4: 641–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3852010.

Howard, Jean E. (1988). “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4: 418–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870706.

Kemp, Sawyer. (2019). “Shakespeare in Transition: Pedagogies of Transgender Justice and Performance.” In Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, edited by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, 36–45. Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.7.

McClure, L. (Ed.). (2002). Sexuality and gender in the classical world : readings and sources (1st ed.). Blackwell Science.

Sedinger, Tracey. (1997). “‘If Sight and Shape Be True’: The Epistemology of Crossdressing on the London Stage.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1. 63–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/2871401.