A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings (1600–1868) by Joshua S. Mostow and Asato Ikeda (review)

Edo-period erotic prints, or shunga (literally "spring pictures"), have experienced a revival in the museum world. In 2013–14, the British Museum's exhibition, "Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art," received a great deal of critical acclaim and was one of the museum's most visited shows. In 2015, a smaller exhibition in Japan at Mejirodai's Eisei Bunko Museum (that required proof of age to enter) became the first Japanese museum to showcase shunga in recent history. The controversial exhibition was declined by ten other institutions before the museum elected to show it—much to the glee of the record 200,000 visitors who saw the show during its three-month run.

Most recently, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, has exhibited "A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings (1600–1868)," a show largely based on the museum's own collection. Within the first four months of the exhibit, ticket sales had already quadrupled the expectations of the museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue cowritten by Joshua S. Mostow and Asato Ikeda, with assistance from Ryoko Matsuba. The catalogue includes woodblock prints and illustrated books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced by Okumura Masanobu, Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, and Utagawa Kunisada, and also includes lesser-known artists such as Shigemasa, Eishi, and Eiri. Unlike the above-mentioned exhibitions that take shunga as a whole as their subject, the show and catalogue focus more specifically on representations of wakashu, or male youths, who, as the catalogue describes, constituted a "third gender" due to their androgynous appearance and variable sexuality. It is the first exhibition and catalogue produced on this topic in North America. Given the current social and political interest in alternative gender identities, A Third Gender is a useful reminder that the "traditional" binary limitation of gender to men and women alone is a modern construction.

Yet, rather than supporting a nostalgic longing for a time when sex was "liberated," Mostow and Ikeda are attentive to the many complexities of gender in the Edo period, revealing that gender identity was always in flux, discursively related to class, and playfully and performatively constructed. As is the case today, "normative" sexuality was hardly stable. They also note how Edo-period sexuality was best described as "phallocratic pansexuality," rather than one where egalitarian values always prevailed. Ikeda writes:

In short, Edo Japan was not a democratic society in which one could proclaim sexual orientation as the basis for identity. … Edo-period gender relations involving wakashu, furthermore, challenge the generally held beliefs and morality of people in contemporary North America; that is, that youth should not be sexualized.

(p. 12)

Due to the museum's concern over the graphic nature of the artworks and in accordance with Canadian child pornography laws, the curators opted to exclude explicitly sexual images of wakashu from the exhibition. The catalogue, however, includes such images, as the book is intended for a scholarly audience.

Wakashu were as fascinating to Edo-period people as they are to today's viewers, and the catalogue ensures the reader is aware of the subtle sartorial codes through which gender was performed. For example, Mostow writes:

The discourse of nanshoku ("male colours," that is, male-male eroticism) insisted that the beauty of a wakashu was more transient than that of a young woman. However, in fact both were marked by impermanence: a young woman, upon marriage, would give up long-sleeved gowns (furisode, a style of dress also adopted by some wakashu, especially among the warrior class), would start blackening her teeth and, after the birth of her first child, shave off her eyebrows—the visible changes, then, were every bit as conspicuous as in the case of males losing their forelocks.

(pp. 19–20)

The exhibition catalogue's full-color...