Female Cross-Dressing in Early Modern and Modern Japan, 1750's-1940's

The FCDEMMJ project aims at investigating the urban culture of female cross-dressing, i.e. the social movement that revolved around the custom for women to wear the clothes and use the body language and the linguistic characteristics the contemporaneous culture reserved to men, that existed in Japan from the 1750's to the 1940's and of the control strategies Japanese governments and police promoted from the 1830's to the 1940's to forbid the practice.The project is interesting as it proposes the first systematical gender historiographical study of the urban culture of female cross-dressing and the opposing control strategies.

The project fills an important gap in the state of the art as the available scientific researches have analysed the phenomenon's gender dimension only in in relation to a very restricted number of highly contextualised case studies, thus producing results whose validity is limited to said case studies.

The project aims at filling this gap by exploring the gender dimension of the phenomenon in its entirety.The project has a strong expected scientific impact as it will allow to open a new line of research dedicated to the study of the gender dimension of cross-dressing in Japanese history.

The project has also a strong expected societal impact as L.G.T.B. rights organisations will be able to use the research results as an historical analogy to criticise and oppose current policies which restrict the gender expression of women and gender non-conforming individuals.

Furthermore, the project will produce a great benefit for my career development as it will help me obtain a tenure-track position and create a chair in Japanese Sexuality and Gender History.