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The male star of a Burmese theatrical troupe is called a “prince” (min-tha) and in certain portions of such troupes’ night-long performances he takes on the dress and demeanor of an idealized Burmese male aristocrat. But it is difficult for an American observer, and I suspect this would be true for most Westerners, to look at images of a Burmese theater troupe’s star in his princely mode without drawing certain inferences about his sexual orientation. To put it bluntly, a Burmese theater prince looks to us like a drag queen. And drag queens, most Westerners assume, are men who have sex with men. These inferences about Burmese troupes’ stars are for the most part beside the point— and probably for the most part wrong.1 Yet the question of how gender roles, appearances, and performing arts mesh in Burma’s all-night popular theater (zat-pwe) performances is not beside the point at all. On the contrary, it is very much at the heart of these performances, and, too, at the heart of why performance practices have developed in the ways they have over the past forty to fifty years. If outsiders jump to the conclusion that min-tha are “gay,”2 it is not simply due to the yards and yards of brightly colored fabrics, multiple necklaces, diamond stud earrings, and brilliant red lipstick and nail polish that they wear—although all of these elements of the princely costume would likely help plant the notion in some people’s minds. There is in addition the matter of style: hand gestures (delicate, mannered) and even facial expressions (fey and dreamy) that in the princely mode take on what might be seen as an effeminate cast. But that this reading of the princely style is something of a red her206 –10– “But Princes Jump!” Performing Masculinity in Mandalay Ward Keeler ring was brought home to me when I spoke with a group of Burmese friends about the matter of style and gender in a prince’s performance. When I commented that, as an American, I had trouble not seeing a certain effeminacy in the princely style, they looked surprised and said, “But they jump!” Indeed, princes do jump: a prince’s dances always include at least a few athletic leaps, whereas a princess would never jump.3 In addition, my friends pointed out, a prince’s costume is obviously very different from a princess’s costume. The princes’ garments imitate—embellish, yes, but still imitate—the aristocratic dress of Burma’s male erstwhile royalty. No one familiar with those styles would confuse a prince’s attire with that of a princess. So to confuse the princely style with an American drag queen’s is a particularly piquant illustration of an anthropological truism: that people tend to misread other people’s behavior in light of their own cultural conditioning. Yet the underlying question, and the more interesting one, is how people conceive of masculine style, or styles, in contemporary Burma, and why, in performances at least, they are so preoccupied with that issue—while feminine styles seem to matter much less. The short answer as to why Burmese theater princes dress and carry themselves in the way that they do is that they thereby enact not a transvestite impulse but rather a specifically masculine refinement. Derived from aristocratic traditions, this style still enjoys some prestige in Burma, despite the disappearance of the aristocracy since the British takeover of Upper Burma in the late nineteenth century. But what I wish to show in what follows is how other constructions of masculinity have come to supplement, or largely supplant, that particular idealized conception of masculine behavior. My evidence stems primarily from all-night popular theater (zat-pwe) performances I saw in Mandalay in the rainy season of 2002, along with conversations I had with performers and other friends in Mandalay at that time. Performing Gender Performances are particularly fruitful places to look to in order to see how people think about gender because, as Judith Butler (1990) has argued, gender is always a performance. Butler means by this that there is no given, absolute “femaleness” or “maleness.” Male and female, and so masculinity and femininity, can be defined only relationally. How that contrast gets set up and modified varies culturally and through time. But the contrast, or, really, sets of contrasts—however unconsciously acquired, assumed, and acted upon—exist and persist only by virtue of the...

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