His Master’s Voice, Her Jokes: Voice and Gender Politics in the Performance of Rakugo

Abstract

This article explores the role of voice and voicing as a gendered construct in the performance of rakugo in Japan. Rakugo is a traditional genre of comedic storytelling, performed by a single actor. The genre sets a nostalgic tone for the simplicity of life in preindustrial Tokyo, through portrayals of foolishness and mockery of various human situations. A great majority of the rakugo performers are men. Despite the fact that rakugo is characterized with a technique of cross gender vocalization, rakugo performers state that the female voice is considered unsuitable for vocalizing the protagonists in rakugo stories. On the basis of ethnographic data gained from participant observation, and my own apprenticeship under a prominent rakugo master, I investigate the role of female voice as a “speaker” in the Bakhtinian “double-voiced discourse” of rakugo. The female voice is considered unsuitable to perform rakugo well, because women are denied the agency to reciprocate the androcentric ideology that views the genre as exclusively male authored.