William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

From the standpoint of the other who sees her, is a woman simply someone who looks or acts in a certain way? If so, her defining expressions may indeed, as an unsympathetic French psychoanalyst insists, uphold “sexual stereotypes, with a view to maintaining women in the conventional, subordinate role from which they were on the point of freeing themselves. Transsexuals’ image of women is wholly conformist…” After all, how far the onnagata or the transgender woman can go toward “passing” depends substantially, as we have seen, on femininity’s performance aspect, and to be recognized as feminine that performance must express ritualism or at least familiarity: Touch one’s hair, face and jewelry often. (In the manga comics, and in the coffee shops of my own country, ones so often sees the hands of heroines fluttering inward together against their breasts and throats.) When walking, especially in high heels, place one’s weight on the back foot, keeping the front foot free to tap down, then click lightly forward in one’s high heels, swinging arms from the elbows and brushing the thighs together. Roll back hips and shoulders. Navigate stairs at a constant diagonal, and sit the same way, on the edge of the chair, with the knees together, and the feet behind them. “Bright colors on the eye look feminine,” says a makeup artist (who this season recommends peacock blue and tangerine). But the aspect of body makeup remains. That blonde in the black metallic miniskirt I see in the fashion magazine, how many men who wanted to be her double actually could? And how many women? After all, Keisei sends us the following monitory pearl in A Companion in Solitude ( ca. 1222): “A woman’s nature is such that whether of high rank or low birth, she pins her hopes on all sorts of things, but in the end is unable to realize her expectations.”

The following description of what can only be called failed femininity comes from an American novel published in 1934. Can a born member of a given gender express that gender deficiently? Can a person who was born with a vagina and considers herself female be somehow less female than other vagina-bearers? The omniscient narrator thinks so:

Watching her, Cynthia ached with sympathy. Amelia was so tall and gaunt and flat-chested. She was not really a woman at all. She did not have a woman’s body, with a woman’s breasts and full shoulders, a woman’s firm round arms and legs. The lines of her mouth were tight, as a man’s sometimes is. Except for this there was nothing masculine about her — nothing strong, nothing alive. This was neither a woman’s body nor a man’s, but something in between and less than either — something gray which women become when desire dies out in them, for lack of cherishing, when no child takes shape within them.

Well, in my time Amelia could have donned breast forms, makeup, a mask! Why not select one’s heart’s desire from the varying plumpnesses of girl-masks’ white cheeks? Even round arms would have come to her, had she only stopped being anorexic. What about her tight mouth? — Use concealer over the lip line you were born with if you wish to reshape it. Then apply lip pencil and lip brush; blot and repeat the lip brush. — But then she might not have been Amelia. Who was she and who should she have been? Was anything wrong with her aside from loneliness? When Danyu-san said of her career, “they make it so that the child realizes she cannot do anything else,” did that touch upon some wider and perhaps even inescapable assertion about gender which condemned her to some sort of deficiency? Do gender roles, like capitalism, require there to be winners and losers? Very likely, Katy’s performance of womanhood would have been as depressing to Sei Shonagon as seeing in the third or fourth month the red plum-blossom dress appropriate to the eleventh or twelfth month; and in 2009 in California I found myself sharing my usual bus stop with a ghetto prostitute on her way home from the weekly visit to her parole officer; she hated the police, who were “packing heat and offing people,” but across the street three police officers stood like a helpful audience around a young man with a shaved head for whom the prostitute had no sympathy because “he’s a faggot! Just look at how he moves them arms! Oh, it makes me sick ! I wanna see them hit ’im in the face.”

In a novel by the novelist Heinrich Böll, whose Nobel Prize was in my opinion otherwise deserved, one encounters the rather Lamarckian assertion that one’s sexual behavior actually alters one’s appearance , so that a heterosexual male can be literally unmanned by a homosexual act whether or not it happened of his own volition, and another man can recognize his gender-corruption on extremely short acquaintance.

Now all at once he realized what the repulsive aura was which emanated from this man who at one time, when his eyes were still clear, must have been handsome, fair and slender with well-bred hands. So that’s it, thought Andreas. “Yes,” said the blond fellow very quietly, “that’s it…”

A sergeant major had “seduced” him more or less at gunpoint. Now he bears the mark of Cain. He can never pass again.

Moreover, we are not infrequently instructed that somebody’s attempt to pass as a member of the opposite sex comprises a general social or religious pollution, a contagion. “No doubt you have heard,” writes Cicero to Atticus in 61 B.C., “that when the sacrifice was taking place in Caesar’s house, a man in woman’s clothes got in”; and that after the Vestal Virgins had performed the sacrifice afresh, the matter was mentioned in no less august a place than the Roman Senate. The Vestals and the priests decided that a sacrilege had been committed, and the matter had to go to trial. As that prostitute said to me: “Oh, it makes me sick !”

What would the young man have needed to do to make her pity his arrest? Simply refrain from moving his arms like that. Or instead he could have passed .

(The noses of tsuki style Noh masks are canted slightly leftward. If a right-leaning yuki mask were employed by a brash actor whose colleagues would have used the tsuki for that part, would he fail to pass ? Would the audience ever know? If they did, what would they say?)

From the year 1232, we meet the understated anguish of a young woman whose soul has been inhabited (and constructed) by a male poet aged seventy. Knowing full well that any rendezvous is but separation, she gives herself to the man, “unconscious of approaching dawn.” But after all, this empathy with the feminine which the translators marvel at is no more than the expression of what any lover male or female might experience. Should we then say that Teika passed?

Vanesa Lorena Ledesma, born Miguel Angel Ledesma, aged forty-seven at death (by police torture, evidently), lies with her head slumped down. Her face is gaunt. Her eyelids are dark. Her lips are full. Her cheeks are drawn in. She appears to be a poor woman in late middle age. A white cloth, perhaps the shroud, frames her black, black hair.

Mattilda, also known as Matt Bernstein Sycamore, wrote: “If we eliminate the pressure to pass, what delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation might we create?” Perhaps there might come into being a world in which Amelia’s “in between” was no longer considered a deficit, like some Kabuki drama involving a retainer arrayed in armor, riding a prancing black horse which has four human legs. I look at a collection of mid-twentieth-century snapshots taken in and around a house in upstate New York whose hostess entertained many guests over the years, guests in dresses, some of them more womanly-looking than others; on occasion they might sit at the kitchen table smoking the odd cigarette, or show off their legs and red shoes; they might smile sweetly with their white gloves on, with their handbags in their lap, or they could squint their mascara’d eyes when they blew out birthday candles. Often their jawlines were square and their brows projected; sometimes (and this would not have surprised Yukiko) their skins were coarse. But they looked happy. It did not seem to matter that some could not have passed.