| Summary: | The growing interest for gender fluidity in social sciences, and especially in history and anthropology, interrogates the genealogy of gender categories. Therefore, any researcher faces a problem of vocabulary, insofar as certain categories come from recent concepts that do not align with the categories of gender and sexual behavior of the past. However, I suggest here to study gender fluidity through the Japanese case and its category of “cross-dressing”. On the one hand, the widespread popularization of sexual concepts during the 1920s and 1930s had an influence on the constitution of new subjectivities. On the other hand, the emergence of the flapper in Japan certainly prompted the rise of a femininity that challenged the hierarchy between the sexes. But the flapper figure also inspired the constitution of new subjectivities among men who “recognized” themselves in her. With an unseemly attitude that was considered as “masculine”, the flapper probably constituted a new model of cross-dressing that resulted in the creation of a new “transvestite” identity, with a more pronounced agency and power of subversion than “traditional” femininity could offer to men who wanted to pass as women.
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