This thesis analyzes the relations between representations of gender, the visual rhetoric of written waka poetry, and the political symbolism of various ritual practices at the Heian court as they parallel one another in a group of texts produced by the poet, theorist, and writer Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946) around the turn of the tenth century CE. Throughout Japan's long history, this period has been seen as a renaissance of indigenous Japanese culture in the form of architectural, calligraphic, painterly, poetic, and "literary" styles of cultural expression at the Heian court.

My thesis will argue that these supposedly "Japanese," "feminine," "private," and "aesthetic" achievements were in fact ritual technologies of writing and reading waka which paralleled certain monarchical rites involving the acts of "seeing," and "consuming" the realm. Each chapter attempts to place a specific poetic genre or text by Tsurayuki in its cultural and historical context as gleaned from premodern Japanese and Chinese texts which saw writing, gender, history, and ritual as being intimately interwoven in the cosmological patterns through which the Heian court laid claim to the world.

This dissertation will argue that the insistent manner in which gender, writing, and ritual are variously intertwined in all of Tsurayuki's writings does so in a manner designed to make space for this lowly male courtier within a court which simultaneously excluded his person from the predominant rites through which he could imagine himself belonging to a ritual male community at court, while at the same time requesting his services on paper in the creation of that same community.