Moving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries

This essay explores human trafficking in noh plays from fifteenth-century Japan. It emphasizes neglected dynamics of gendered trafficking in “madness plays,” a genre that often spotlights a mad mother searching for a son taken by traffickers. I contend that the madwoman’s depiction as an itinerant dancer of the periphery discloses the displacement and exchange of bodies as aesthetically fundamental to madness plays. In so doing, I show how the madwoman’s dance, performed for the return of her child, is itself an embodied exchange that reinforces the transactional logics of trafficking otherwise obscured in these plays. I thus reveal the plays to be aesthetic archives—underrepresented in discourses on human trafficking—that illuminate mechanisms of trade in humans in excess of merely empiricist modes.