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Paper short abstract

This study explores how community-based performers in Kyoto, Japan, promote social understanding through artistic practices linked to visual and performing arts, focusing on drag queens and presenting archiving case studies through documentation and preservation.

Paper long abstract

This study examines how community-based performers in Japan have promoted social understanding through artistic practices that intersect with visual art and performing arts. With a particular focus on the Kyoto area, it centers on the activities of drag queens as a form of locally rooted cultural practice and situates these performances within broader social and historical contexts. The study focuses on a stage performance organized by drag queens that began in the Kansai region in 1989 and continues to the present. Featuring performances by drag queens and DJs, the event is notable for the participation of individuals from diverse backgrounds, including sexual minorities, heterosexual women and men, and drag queens of foreign nationality. This diversity has played a crucial role in shaping a distinctly Japanese drag culture characterized by intersectionality and multilayered social relations. As one of the longest-running drag queen –organized stage performances still active in Japan, this event holds significant cultural and historical importance within Japanese performance history. By presenting drag as an open and accessible form of stage art rather than one confined to nightlife spaces, the event has continuously expanded the social reach and cultural meaning of drag performance. Since the 2000s, these artistic practices have extended beyond live venues into museums and cultural institutions through exhibitions of archival materials and staged performances. However, despite growing public visibility, there has been little systematic effort to comprehensively document, organize, and preserve these activities as an archive. From the perspective of a practitioner who has been engaged in drag performance as a heterosexual female drag queen since 2004, this study documents and organizes materials related to these artistic practices. In doing so, it seeks to make visible cultural expressions that have often been marginalized. Furthermore, the study examines how this community-based performance context has fostered stage performers regardless of gender or sexuality and how participants have formed and articulated their identities through these practices. Ultimately, the study offers practical insights into how archiving community-based art can contribute to the development of a society in which diverse values and identities coexist.

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Paper short abstract

This study investigates how the queens of a drag show in Kyoto, through their performances, challenge pre-established gender and identity frameworks, espousing a ‘principle of monstrosity’ that shapes their experience, especially in terms of gender, out of drag as well.

Paper long abstract

In the popular understanding, a drag queen is a gay man dressing and performing as a woman. A closer look at drag communities around the world, however, reveals how definitions based exclusively on pre-established notions of gender and sexuality obscure a much more varied and complex phenomenon. Current research on the topic has started to shift the narrative on drag, but much of the available literature still relies on ‘Western’ notions and on identity politics that do not necessarily reflect the reality of the drag world beyond the areas usually examined, such as the Euro-American sphere. The vibrant, yet dramatically understudied drag community of Japan, for instance, presents an interesting case in which not only are models and notions imported from abroad remodeled and adapted, but new ones, better suiting the needs and identity-building processes of the performers, are devised.

Presenting the results of an eleven-month fieldwork at the oldest and longest-running drag show in Japan, this study investigates the tension between the queens’ attempts to overcome preconceived notions of identity, the creation of new ways of identifying, and the impact of these new ways of self-positioning, especially on their gender experience. Based on interviews with the performers and participant observation, this presentation first reframes the figure of the drag queen as more than a simple female impersonator, envisioning her as an ambiguous, monstrous entity blurring the boundaries between the sexes, as well as between the human and the non-human. The drag queen thus simultaneously complicates and challenges both current and traditional notions of femininity. Second, as the performers’ self-perception as monsters and drag queens ‘bleeds through’ and makes up the core of their identity beyond the stage, this study examines how this ambiguous status impacts the life of the artists in relation to gender identity and gender roles, showing how it offers them, particularly Assigned-Female-At-Birth ones, ways to challenge gender norms, and create and embody alternative models. In doing so, this presentation unveils new ways of identifying beyond pre-conceived, ‘imported’ terms and categories, thus revealing the inadequacy of ‘Western’ notions to fully frame the participants to this study.

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Paper short abstract

An ethnographic and auto-ethnographic study hailing from two years of fieldwork and six years of working within Tokyo’s drag scene, exploring how the drag queens of Japan form and articulate their identities and divide into subgroups based on age, micro-culture, and ethnic/linguistic background.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the development of Japan’s drag queen communities and the identities of the performers therein. In particular, it examines the intergenerational divisions and tensions among the drag communities, and how multiple ‘waves’ of drag have formed under the influence of indigenous queer entertainment, imported pop and queer cultural movements of the so-called West, and the global drag boom of the last decade. As the interest in Japan’s queer cultures and drag performance art grows, so too does the tension between older counter-cultural waves of drag queens and the newer, seemingly mainstream waves. This research shows the future of Japan’s drag identity will balance these different factions.

This research includes a literature review of the history of queer counter culture and cross-dressing from the Meiji Era of Japan onwards, including key subcultures such as the danshō (1950s), gei bōi (1960s to 1980s), and the eventual recognition of modern day terms and identities such as new half (a problematic, but still widely used term) and drag queen. The paper also draw on the presenter’s fieldwork and participant observation as both a journalist and active drag queen in Shinjuku Nichōme, looking at drag shows, viewing parties, drag gogo dancing, and some amount of hostessing, as well as the drag community’s problematic relationship with Japan’s blossoming ballroom scene. This presentation also relies on in-depth interviews with nine drag queens and drag-adjacent performers from different generational waves, ethnic and regional backgrounds, and sub-genres of drag.

This study shows that Japan’s drag is divided deeply along lines of generational waves and creative ideologies (the ‘indie’/counter-culture versus mainstream/drag boom). At the same time, it is also united by a universal awareness of the importance of queer art and shared pride in contributing to the wider drag community. Concurrently, this work documents the changes in the communities analysed, with drag queens of different sub-genres increasingly mixing in spaces such as hostess clubs and special event festivals (such as New Year’s parties). How these factions balance their commonalities and differences will be a task for the queens who will shape the coming era of Japan’s drag.

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Paper short abstract

This study explores Miwa Akihiro’s career through queer, social and gender history, highlighting his anti-militarist revival of prewar erotic–grotesque cross-dressing. His performances reveal strategies of visibility and resistance that resonate with, but are not limited to, broader Drag traditions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Miwa Akihiro’s career within the context of queer, social and gender history, considering how his performances navigated postwar cultural shifts and the legacies of wartime repression. Miwa’s work engages with prewar traditions of cross-dressing and the erotic–grotesque (ero guro), which had been largely suppressed during militarization, and reflects a fierce critique of gender norms and militarist values. Rather than emphasizing direct points of contact or rigid comparisons between Western drag culture and Japanese josō bunka, the study highlights how Miwa’s performances can be read as a form of cultural revival and social commentary. His public persona — spanning chanson, theater, film, and television — combined theatrical exaggeration and fluidity, creating spaces in which gender and bodily expression could be explored and made visible. These strategies resonate with wider traditions of Drag performance in various contexts, though they remain rooted in Japanese historical and social frameworks, showing both convergences and particularities without suggesting a linear relationship.

A key aspect of Miwa’s approach was his interest in restoring practices interrupted by the war, using humor, excess, and grotesque aesthetics to reclaim forms of expression that had once been socially tolerated or celebrated. His work illustrates how performance can serve as a subtle form of resistance, offering both personal and collective negotiation of identity, sexuality, and social expectation. By focusing on Miwa Akihiro as a case study, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of Queer history in Japan, foregrounding the interplay of memory, aesthetics, and social critique. It suggests that cross-dressing and gender-variant performance can operate simultaneously as revival, artistic expression, and social commentary, revealing how Miwa navigated complex postwar cultural landscapes.