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This article discusses gender transformations in the Takarazuka Revue, focusing on two small-theatre Shakespeare adaptations set in kabuki milieus: Epiphany (based on Twelfth Night) and Fuyu monogatari (based on The Winter’s Tale).1 The Takarazuka Revue is a 111-year-old Japanese music-theatre company best known for its all-female casts and otokoyaku (male-role specialists). Shakespeare used boy actors for female roles, including comic cross-dressing roles where heroines appear in male disguise for large portions of the plot. Kabuki, in its current high-cultural manifestation as a traditional Japanese theatre form, employs all-male casts due to a historic ban on female performers. Epiphany and Fuyu monogatari both involve the otokoyaku star crossing back and forth between male and female double roles, and in the case of Epiphany, the “triple drag” role of a female in male disguise. I argue that the Takarazuka Revue queers or rather kabukus Shakespeare by drawing on and meta-theatrically alluding to the Japanese performance tradition of which they are an important part.

The Takarazuka Revue is an all-female music theatre company founded over a century ago. It is an important institution in Japanese culture and has garnered quite a lot of scholarly attention, but only rarely from a Theatre Studies perspective. This article draws on Azuma Sonoko’s model for analyzing how onstage and offstage levels overlap and interact in the Takarazuka Revue. I challenge Azuma’s emphasis on female homosociality as the most important appeal for fans with discussions of a number of musicals and revue scenes portraying male homoeroticism. I argue that female homoeroticism between performers is deliberately invoked through male homoerotic themes, as part of fan service. The article offers rare close readings of original works and discusses the styles of several in-house writer-directors and choreographers. It also traces a shift over time towards more explicit and frequent portrayals of male homoeroticism on the Takarazuka Revue stage.

Although the Takarazuka Revue is technically a musical company, its founder's ambition was to create a uniquely Japanese form of opera or operetta, merging elements from Western and Japanese forms. Like opera, and unlike musicals in general, trouser roles play a central part in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, and are typically cited as its main appeal. Research from a Japanese-studies perspective tends to discuss the Takarazuka Revue trouser roles, otokoyaku, as a gender-reversal of all-male kabuki, or put them in the context of androgynous or cross-dressing Japanese idols. This article addresses their connection to trouser roles in non-Japanese music theatre, specifically opera. It does so through three lenses: first, the Takarazuka Revue's opera loans and adaptations; second, the shared aesthetic appeal of trouser roles in these two theatre forms; and finally, the singing styles employed in the Takarazuka Revue, including their change over time and relation to classical singing.

This article considers doll games not as an exercise for reproductive heterosexuality but as a laboratory of queer sexuality. My main source is the literary hypertext The Doll Games by Shelley and Pamela Jackson. In this work, the unsexed doll body is described as the ‘sexless baton’ at the core of sex and penises are compared to dolls played with in the doll games of sex. The term dolldonics indicates a Deleuzian understanding of such objects used to prosthetically extend bodies and make desiring connections. They are not to be understood as fetishes in the psychoanalytic sense, inevitably pointing back to the phallus.

There is a tradition of surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer taking an interest in the recombinant possibilities of doll bodies. However, in the work of male artists, the queer potential of such polymorphous prosthetics has often been restricted by an erotisation of the doll as stand-in for the little girl, with whom it is so closely associated. In doll work by female artists with experience of being girls and playing with dolls, such erotisation of the girl-as-doll and doll-as-girl is less likely to occur, or at least occurs in different and more complex ways. The erotisation of doll bodies is based less on it standing in for the forbidden sexual object of the little girl, and more of the tactility of holding, manipulating, dismembering, dressing and undressing them. In doll games, the conventional distinction between desire and identification is undone, which confuses categorisations such as gender and sexual identity, and further subject/object, animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman.

In this article, I treat a literary text as a form of somatechnics making an intervention in fat embodiment. I read contemporary American author Shelley Jackson's short story ‘Fat’ from The Melancholy of Anatomy through what Elizabeth Wilson terms ‘gut feminism’, a feminism accounting for the dynamism of the biological body and acknowledging ‘organic thought’ as an alternative to the mind/body split. Wilson's ‘gut feminism’ is related to theories drawing on Deleuze's concept the ‘Body without Organs’ such as hypertheorist N. Katherine Hayles’ argument for the ‘Text as Assemblage’. I show how the seemingly surreal narrative of ‘Fat’ provides crucial insights about fat, understood as an assemblage of images, affects and matter and as a liminal substance questioning the integrity of the subject. Fat is associated with the feminine in a reclamation of the early modern rhetorical term ‘dilation’, which figures the swelling text as a fat, fertile woman with voracious orifices. I describe how Jackson's ‘aesthetics of fat’ works through dilation, disgust and ‘bad taste’ to draw the reader into an experience of fat embodiment. I characterise fat as a ‘sticky sign’ in Sara Ahmed's sense, one that will not stay confined to the page but sticks to the reader and elicit gut reactions. In conclusion, I argue for a non-derogatory model of reading as incorporation.

This monograph on the œuvre of contemporary American author and multimedia artist Shelley Jackson addresses the question of how literary works employ language to evoke sense impressions. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of aesthetic percepts is drawn on to develop a theory of literary phantom sensations which is then tested on the work of Jackson and related authors.  Although imperceptible as such, it is argued that percepts are made perceptible in art in sense-specific forms as phantom sensations. “Phantom” is not meant to indicate a pale shadow of real sensations but the intensely perceived realness of phantom limb phenomena, in accordance with Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual as real but not actual. For the sake of clarity, literary phantom sensations are divided into phantom smells, tastes, touches, sights and sounds, with a chapter devoted to each in turn. It is found that different phantom sensations serve different functions in Jackson’s work, correlated to the cultural history of the senses as outlined by recent sensory scholarship.  Phantom smells are associated with Deleuze’s concept of becoming due to their liminality. Phantom tastes contribute to an aesthetics of distaste in which shades of disgust are cultivated and drawn upon for literary effect. Phantom touch creates conceptual intimacy and invites the reader to handle words like toys in a game. Phantom sight is turned back upon itself in an anatomy of the eye. Phantom hearing is associated with forms of ventriloquism in which it is unclear who is speaking through whom and in which language itself throws its voice. However, it is also found that all phantom sensations similarly serve to create a material and affective connection between the body of the reader and the body of the text. Throughout the dissertation, Jackson’s work is read against and alongside that of other writers such as Djuna Barnes, Neil Bartlett, Brigid Brophy and Leonora Carrington. Together these form a trajectory termed minor writing for queers to come, which is meant to indicate that aesthetic and sexual-political  radicalism go hand in hand.  Furthermore, Jackson’s work is described as a form of body writing informed by feminist body art and écriture féminine. Specifically, Jackson takes her cue from early modern anatomical blazons and describes living bodies in pieces.  Her work is also described as object writing: a literary equivalent to surrealist object art.  A central method for making words more like things is to arrange her texts spatially rather than temporally, as exemplified by her electronic hypertexts.

This article is a close reading of Eva-Marie Liffner’s 2006 novel Drömmaren och sorgen (The Dreamer and the Sorrow). Drawing on theories of queer and lesbian literature and on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, I argue for a queer aesthetics of sensual excess. Liffner’s novel is a mystery without a solution, a beautiful enigma resisting reader expectations of plot and closure. Its labyrinthine or kaleidoscopic structure connects and reconnects a large amount of vivid, concrete figures. I read the novel through five of its key figures: the castle, the sea, the heart, the song and the knight. The castle is the architectural principle of the novel, which features gothic elements such as the trapdoor and the secret passage. The sea lends atmosphere to the novel and is best understood as an element in the humoural sense, permeating landscapes and characters alike. The heart exemplifies Liffner’s use of intensely sensual figures and connects to the genre of anatomical blazons. The song points to an alternative, musical organisation of the novel and works to transcend barriers of sex and species. The knight, finally, is identified as the androgynous hero(ine) of queer literary history riding through works such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood before showing up in Liffner’s novel.

Perfume critique is an underdeveloped academic field and this includes considerations of perfume as a theme within other art forms such as literature. In this article, Angela Carter’s Wise Children and Monika Fagerholm’s Wonderful Women by the Sea are read alongside perfume blogs in order to analyze the significance of perfume references in the novels. It is demonstrated that the authors’ choice of perfumes for their characters plays a crucial part in their characterization, especially in relation to the theme of identity change. Using Alfred Gell’s analysis of perfume use as bound up with “the transcendence of the sweet life,” it is argued that female characters use perfume to become someone else, sometimes a past self. Furthermore, the use of perfume as a literary device in these novels is shown serve as the vehicle for a feminist critique of the division between “masculine” “high” and “feminine” “low” culture.