Takarazuka is often portrayed as a fantastic space. For fantasy to work, it must
provide something outside of the normal. The fans remark that they find it difficult to
“enter” (hairikomu) or suture to the bodies and roles of male stage actors because of
their male sex; as well as into the bodies of feminine female actors because of their
female gender.

BECOMING A FAN: SUTURE AND BUNSHIN
If not through sexual desire, then what is the process by which audience members
enter and engage in fictional works like Takarazuka and identify with otoko-yaku actors? In the Subject of Semiotics, film theoretician Kaja Silverman develops the
concept of “suture… the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer
subjectivity upon their viewers” (1983: 195), or the process by which the viewers
identify (and interpellate themselves into) the position of the subjects on the screen.
That is, Silverman argues that we cannot analyze the process of viewing film as
merely reactive; rather it is inherently an active process, a discourse that can itself be
subject to discourse analysis. Although the film experience differs from being in a
stage audience, we can borrow some of Silverman’s ideas relating to gender relations
on the stage. The process of identification with one of the protagonists is of course an
essential part of the suturing process. The character we identify with becomes our
alter ego, or to use the Japanese term, bunshin.3
The problem, especially for women audience members, is finding the appropriate
protagonist on screen or stage to suture into. In an opaque style driven by Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory, Silverman explains why women cannot participate equally as
audience members with men. She argues that the traditional film structure denies
female viewers full subjectivity because of their inability to fully suture with the male
actors because of female viewers’ lack of a penis. Furthermore, they have a wary
relation to women who represent symbolic insecurity. Male viewers, however, can
fully suture with the male leads who act both as mirrors of their idealized self-image
and of fathers and role models. They can further suture with the female actors who
represent “warmth and nourishment” (i.e., the mother) (ibid.: 234).