“Artistic” Femininity: Republican <i>Nandan</i> and the Discourse of <i>Xiqu</i> “Aestheticism”

In her influential 1988 essay “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” American performance theorist Peggy Phelan documented her “most disturbingly interesting” exposure to what she calls “Eastern dance forms” at an international gathering of scholars, performers, and the like. 1 The conference is said not only to have fostered strenuous discussions of the female role in such traditions as Balinese dance-drama, Indian kathakali , Japanese kabuki , and “Chinese opera,” but also to have featured the performance of a youthful male performer of female roles in the Indian odissi tradition. Astonished, if not disappointed, by the conference’s disengagement with the politics of representing female roles, Phelan asserts that “[s]uch classical female roles played by men or women do not, by definition and design, penetrate the ‘identity’ of any female; they are surface representations whose appeal exists precisely as surface.” 2 And this “surface femininity” is said to hinge upon “immediate recognition of the comic artifice and reverent idealization of the form,” which “reminds the spectator of the absence of the female (the lack) rather than of her presence.” 3