Butch Bodies, Big Drums

The chapter contends that performances by the all-women’s taiko group Jodaiko highlight the intersectional nature of identity for the queer Asian, Asian American, and Asian Canadian women who make up the group. Jodaiko performs annually at two events in Vancouver, BC: the Powell Street Festival and a queer performance series connected to LGBTQ Pride. This chapter argues that Jodaiko queers North American taiko and demonstrates this in three ways: through an exploration of group members’ everyday gender performances of female masculinity; by analyzing the group’s “homo-geneity,” or uniformly Asian American queerness in a performance of Tiffany Tamaribuchi’s song “Kokorozashi,”; and through a close performance analysis of Tamaribuchi’s queer re-working of traditional Japanese masculinity in her solo performances on the o-daiko. Such readings are enabled by the erotic valences of taiko, which spectators experience kinesthetically when they watch live taiko performances.