Research Abstract

The main focus of all my work has been on the ways that literature and theater attempt to symbolically resolve certain cultural problematics. In doing so I pay close attention to both thematic and performative aspects of the texts, and how those aspects may be symptomatic of their historical context. As a feminist scholar I am particularly interested in identifying the blind spots and limitations of contemporary Western theory when confronted with texts from differing temporal and cultural contexts. I began my scholarly career examining the political and social context for the emergence in the early 1960s of the postmodern dance form Ankoku Butoh; I then turned my research focus back in time to medieval Japan and Noh theater. I am working on a two-volume research project. The first volume, which was published in 2003 (Allegories of Desire) examines the development of group of secret esoteric commentaries on Ise monogatari and the Kokinshu which were written during the Kamakura period. The second volume, which is currently in progress, will be on the use of those commentaries by Muromachi playwrights to create Noh plays which function as complex religious allegories. In the future I hope to return to a project (which I began working on in 1989) on changing constructions of gender and subjectivity in Japanese literature and theater, with special attention to the historical development of ghosts and other supernatural creatures. I will be using the Dojoji narrative (a woman who changes into a fire-breathing serpent and kills her lover) as a locus for analysis.

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