Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Theatre and Performance

Advisor

Peter Eckersall

Committee Members

Richard Calichman

Kandice Chuh

Miseong Woo

Subject Categories

Theatre and Performance Studies

Keywords

Terayama Shūji, Kishida Rio, Angura Theatre, Korean Experimental Art, Korean Musical, Gyeongseong

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how portrayals of erotic and grotesque bodies in post-WWII Japanese and Korean theatre responded to each nation’s image of the ideal body. Those ideal bodily images were the product of haunting modernity as well as of the following historical circumstances after Japan’s loss in WWII—the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the U.S. and Japan and the attendant protests (Japan) as well as the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule, the Korean war, and Korea’s military dictatorships. Instead of uncovering the historical legacy of the early 20th-century cultural trend Ero Guro Nansensu (Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense) during these postwar periods, this dissertation aims to adopt ero guro as a theoretical framework to understand the process by which nonnormative bodies were jettisoned from the limits of the ideal national body to create the very boundary that would ensure the population’s complicity in socio-economic progress, i.e., modernization.

Instead of ero guro as a fixed, static, and temporary trend to be consumed in nostalgia, this dissertation posits the concept of performing ero guro to explore how artists invite erotic and grotesque bodies in postwar theatrical performances to navigate their positions, interests, fears, concerns, and identities within the dominant systems of power to which they belong. In other words, by recreating their own vision of ero guro bodies on and off stage, these artists redefine eroticism and grotesqueness—which the ero guro system of their time stigmatized and marginalized—and project the transgressive values upon those bodies in their work. In this sense, this dissertation argues that, by adopting the tactics behind the ero guro system, these artists recontextualize the ero guro body for their own political purposes, inviting the audience into a complicated conversation regarding the matrix of normativity that captures the nation’s bodies in a binary system for its delusional promise—the linear progress of the nation.

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