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Paper short abstract

Compares Kabuki onnagata gait shaped by geta-based footwear with Jingju qiaogong (raised footwear simulating women’s bound-feet movement). Examines femininity as trained locomotion and contrasts the technique’s afterlives: continuity in Kabuki versus rupture and re-authorization in post-1949 China.

Paper long abstract

Kabuki onnagata and Jingju female impersonation both render femininity persuasive through disciplined lower-body training, yet scholarship often treats their “female-likeness” chiefly as a matter of visual style or gender ideology. Taking the feet as its point of departure, this paper examines how footwear-mediated footwork and gait function as micro-techniques of gendering across two performance systems. In Kabuki, onnagata movement is shaped by wooden clogs (geta) and their role-specific variants; femininity is articulated through step size, weight transfer, and the disciplined management of posture in motion. These techniques are intensified in pleasure-quarter role types, where courtesan pageant conventions choreograph erotic status through elevated footwear, patterned walking, and deliberate pauses and poses.

By contrast, I analyze qiaogong (the “qiao” technique) in Jingju as a footwear-based platform that is both narrowly defined and broadly generative. Qiaogong employs raised footwear (“qiao”) that simulates women’s bound-feet movement, yet it underwrites an entire movement ecology: it governs ordinary walking and swaying, structures circular stage steps, and can extend into acrobatic or combative sequences. Performers may also deliberately display the footwear as part of the character’s legibility. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, qiaogong’s visibility and legitimacy diminished sharply. Because it evokes late-imperial gender norms, it became implicated in the post-1949 repudiation of “feudal” bodily practices. Its recent reappearance has been accompanied by a framing that valorizes virtuosity and heritage, with publicity and reception materials foregrounding qiaogong as a demanding technique and a legible index of historical femininity.

Placed side by side, Kabuki and Jingju show how cross-gender technique acquires distinct afterlives under different institutional conditions: continuity stabilizes footwear-conditioned gait as routine craft in Kabuki, while rupture and later re-authorization render qiaogong a recovered and revalued technique in modern China. This comparison reframes debates on onnagata and the Chinese female-impersonator (nandan) tradition as a concrete question of embodied knowledge: how do performers learn to persuade audiences through the feet, and how do institutions decide which gendered techniques are ordinary, controversial, or “treasured”?