SHOW NOTES
The practice of people perceived as men embodying the characters of women in theater, dance and ritual is widespread in South Asia. The term "female impersonation" is used to connote a wide and complex array of such performance cultures. In this conversation with Shilpa Menon, we survey some of these cultures, both historical and contemporary, and explore the dynamics of class, gender, race and class that are at play. We also highlight the biases embedded in the very term "female impersonators", and touch upon the problems of, on the one hand, simply seeing female impersonation as "men replacing women" in performance spaces, and on the other, conflating female impersonation with gender and sexual non-normativity. In the process, we touch upon celebrity female impersonators in the early twentieth century, as well as their present-day counterparts who have been relegated to less mainstream performance cultures.
Shilpa explores emerging mobilizations around non-normative gender and sexuality in Kerala through an ethnographic, queer theoretical framework. Her work seeks to recover alternative genealogies of queer networks and collectivities that are elided by studies that engage with postcolonial and neoliberal paradigms. Currently, she is exploring the emergent category of "transgender" in Kerala's public culture and the ways in which it is shaping, and being shaped by, liberal-democratic politics of recognition.
Her blog on female impersonation in Kerala is available at the Kerala Scholars’ blog, Ala.
references
1. Devika, J. 2007. Engendering individuals: The Language of Reform in Modern Keralam. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
2. Hansen, Kathryn. "Making women visible: Gender and race cross-dressing in the Parsi theatre." Theatre Journal 51, no. 2 (1999): 127-147.
3. Hansen, K. 2001. "Theatrical transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi theatres" (1850–1940), South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 24:s1, 59-73.
4. Krishna, K. K. 2016. "Gender and performance: The reinvention of Mohiniyattam in early twentieth-century Kerala". In Saugata Bhaduri and Indrani Mukherjee (eds), Transcultural negotiations of gender. Springer India.
5. Madhavan, Arya, ed. 2017. Women in Asian performance: aesthetics and politics. Routledge. Sections: Intro and chapter 3 on impersonation in Bengal.
6. Menon, Shilpa. 2018. “To Become a Woman: Popular Cultures of Female Impersonation in Kerala.” Ala–A Kerala Studies Blog. December 14, 2018. http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/4/female-impersonation-in-kerala/.
7. Morcom, Anna. Illicit worlds of Indian dance: Cultures of exclusion. Oxford University Press, 2013.
8. Seizer, Susan. 2005. Stigmas of the Tamil stage: an ethnography of special drama artists in South India. Duke University Press.
9. Teresa, Vinita. 2015. "Gendering mimicry and mimicking gender: A discussion of gender performances in comedy reality shows in Malayalam television channels". Gnosis 1(2), 124-132.