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Just as Evens doesn t see the experience of video games in terms of how they represent the external world, he does not see the problem of game violence as one of inciting violence in gamers beyond the game. Instead he provocatively suggests that violence in the game may become acerbated in an effort to remind viewers that there is a world out there. In other words, Evens challenges us to address the possibility of the elimination of the user enhanced through user interaction itself.
The result is pure extension, a world without time, and a quasi-autistic self. And it is a similar relation between world and self that Miyadai Shinji parses in his overview of his work on subcultures in Japan. Tracking shifts in subculture from the early s to the present, Miyadai strives to delineate the transformations that have led to a formation in which the end of the world the destruction of reality becomes a precondition for, or a corollary to, the stabilization of the self.
As a result, he argues, not only has the distinction between fiction and reality become obsolete but also the stabilization of the self flips easily into scenarios of a war of all against all. Such essays sound a note of warning, namely, that user-enhanced commodity-worlds can function to eliminate any sense of disjuncture and thus any engagement with social unevenness. And therein lies the challenge of the volume as a whole, as it poses a new question to the user enhanced: In this context, Wendy Goldberg joined us as submissions editor, and in appreciation, we d like to say that her contribution has not only added to the value of these two volumes but also made her belong to them and they to her.
She has emerged from manga: She has spawned a cornucopia of fan practices spilling over national boundaries and across the world. Or, when acknowledged, it is usually disregarded as childish, creepy, or trivial by the standards of mainstream culture. This proliferation of commodities is so pervasive, so uniquely adaptable to global cultures and subjects, that it has saturated global markets. Yet her meaning remains elusive. Her appeal in all her multitudinous manifestations is instant, her form and visage ubiquitous, and her recognition immediate; and yet there is an uncanny sense of absence in her presence, a lack of a center to this constellation, an uneasy sense of a ghostly presence lurking behind the mask of her frivolous ubiquity and cloying innocence.
As her constellation expands to Internet girly sites that are multiplying daily, she spreads her revolutionary aesthetic of cute beyond mere aesthetics to lifestyles and subjectivities. Those of us who know the power of her centrifugal expansion, then, feel the need to counter it, pirouetting to face inward, to confront historic formations, social constructs, and the problem of her abject position the central mysteries of her construction in the hope that under those ruffles and ribbons we might catch a glimpse of her mysterious center.
The immense eyes signal it, with pupils that glisten with moisture, reflections of incomprehensible sights, black spikes of eyelash, and bubbles of light. They remain strangely inert, like giant lamps illuminating an uncanny past with their glassy present. The characters develop as if from the eyes outward, unfolding into costumes that adorn a mannequin body of long, impossibly slender limbs and an indeterminate yet graceful torso.
Although costumes can echo the clothing of readers, it is not unusual for costumes to present an overly articulated, childlike version of a never-realized historic style. The bows and flowers and details that proliferate on these costumes add a sort of narrative subtext, adding layers that further invest the 4 frenchy lunning.
These characters emerge upon an ever-changing abstract background, sometimes called wallpaper, that surrounds and suspends them in a cloying miasma of roses of symbolic love, flower petals for happiness, and puffs of delicate feelings. These wallpapers act as an emotional chorus, overcoding the narrative with an effusion of emotion and signification. Taniguchi Tomoko, Miss Me? Courtesy of Central Park Media. It becomes apparent, however, that the subjects of these manga are girls, both lesbian and straight, or at the very least feminized males.
Heterosexual males perform deeds of valor for the benefit of girls who behave in the predictable ways of modern narratives. The stories progress across panels that are logically positioned for meaning, providing the sets and costumes adequate to the received fictions of contemporary everyday life. Characters are suddenly afloat in an abstraction of time and place, specific only to their own emotional states. Drama occurs not primarily through deeds of valor but through intense interpersonal conflict and resolution by girl groups, families, and partners in both heterosexual and homosexual love and sex.
And suddenly it becomes clear: In its most basic meaning, abjection indicates a position of extreme wretchedness, a low-to-the-ground profile and groveling misery, which, in the case of the feminine, has pushed itself inward and sideways, encouraging a denial of its presence and an impulse to hide the offending aspect from view. Julia Kristeva has characterized this movement of abjection as a thrusting aside of otherness not the otherness of the object but the otherness of the subject or I.
Abjection entails a denial of an aspect of self, a denial that appears desirable within a regime that expects it. Abjection generates a phantom, an ever-present shadow dogging the subject s every move and disturbing its identity, system, and order, without respect 6 frenchy lunning. It is before language, before under patriarchy, women are reduced to images of their singular and necessary function of reproduction: In Kristeva s formation, the mother, the defining subject position for females, is necessarily thrust aside, leaving the emerging female subject in a rather sticky spot, especially under patriarchal conditions.
For under patriarchy, women are reduced to images of their singular and necessary function of reproduction: As such, women are abjected and degraded as subjects, and so is any linkage with the maternal and the feminine. The coded trappings of the feminine, and especially extreme manifestations of the feminine, are thus regarded as cloying, obnoxious, and disgusting. She is perhaps the most cloying and obnoxious of all feminine subjects, but here we begin to see the contradictions inscribed in her powerful yet paradoxical position.
As we approach her through her most obvious manifestation, she reveals her abject state through the visual morphology of her representations. Her morphology is extracted from the body of manga and anime, and from the bodies represented in manga and anime. These bodies are in no way stabilized and in no way actual. To the extent that gender becomes a fictive notion in favor of a magical state of shape-shifting, they swivel and switch dangerously, as if announcing the absence of an original gender state.
She wears her cultural abjection on the surface. As the most vulnerable and undervalued of feminine subjects, she is easily lured, easily convinced of the illusion of romance, easily transformed into other genders and beings that appear inconsequential to mainstream cultural meanings and agendas. Ultimately, however, both come down to the same thing: Abjection is evidenced in the fear of seepage between the inner psychic states and the outer body. As the threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, menstrual blood represents within the heterosexual matrix the cultural onset of the heavy responsibilities of sexual maturity and maternity for females, which results in the threat of being ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.
Identity is, in a sense, a label that is inscribed on the body: Yet, even as heroines imply power and agency, little girls are notoriously considered the weakest human subjects. This seeming contradiction is answered in Anne McClintock s explanation of sadomaschochism as a historical subculture that draws its symbolic logic from the changing social contradictions.
McClintock also quotes G. The desire for submission represents a peculiar transposition of the desire for recognition. As McClintock comments, power through being the 8 frenchy lunning. It allows one to internalize the gaze constraints, the mangaka of the voyeur and participate in the vicarious artist has cloaked the enjoyment of their power.
But not just any childhood. Adopting the morphology of the abject state through Loli cosplay, the body is supplanted by an imaginary identity and body form through the application of a costume and character from one of the Loli genres, a process which also serves to elide the founding condition of the abject body. In Loli cosplay, these obsessions also proliferate around the form and fabric details of Victorian fashions and subject positions, which in contemporary culture are understood as decidedly fetishistic.
In practice, however, cosplay has also generated myriad creative nonhistorical subsets and categories reprising aspects of Victorian and Rococo fashions. Neither contemporary Japanese nor American cultures share the cultural structures of the Victorian or Rococo eras, and yet the popularity of those fashions, both actual and fictionalized as 10 frenchy lunning. The selection of these eras, then, is not arbitrary.
It suggests the perception of a mirrored reality. British Victorians developed a dual aspect to their culture: A characteristic feature of the Victorian middle class was its peculiarly intense preoccupation with rigid boundaries The association of delight-filled narcissism these with bodily fluids and excrement for the abject gender to spurred a cultural fetishizing of vestments that provided not only protection create an abject community.
The image of the Victorian bourgeois woman was fully pictured by the end of the eighteenth century: Robbed of her productive labor, the middle-class woman became fitted There drooping prettily in the faded perfume of watercolors and light embroidery, she lived only to adorn the worldly ambition of her husband.
The costumes for this drama bristled with specific details. Women s clothes were heavily layered with undergarments, corsets and bustles, gloves, skirts, and a collection of small accessories. All were obsessively detailed: Undergarments were white or the natural muslin color as a boundary of cleanliness protecting against the female body: For women and especially for little girls, the flurry of skirts and petticoats, flowers and ribbons became, then as now, a closeted culture of hyperfemininity and a space of imagined safety and delightfilled narcissism for the abject gender to create an abject community.
The artifacts of this feminine culture were structured through the eccentricities of the male gaze, under the overrationalized and instrumental patriarchy of the time. Then as now, whether the designers were male or female, the effect and form were dictated by popular images of the ideal woman. The highly eroticized hourglass figure, made possible by the ingenious and complex construction of the corset, was likened at the time to bees or wasps, with the insect queen the very model of the hypermaternal female.
Like Queen Victoria herself, who reveled in and celebrated the role of the maternal as the ideal female, this image overemphasized a generous bust, a tiny waist, and a protuberant behind, accentuating and situating ideal femininity in the reproductive mode. Yet, in a subversive turn, women may have appropriated the corset not as a punitive restriction but as a source of individual desire.
Art historian David Kunzle suggests that far from being oppressed by their corsets, nineteenth century tight-lacers were sexually liberated female fetishists who found physical pleasure in the embrace of the corset. The premenstrual little girl fig4 figure 4. A photograph showing two young girls in costume: This postcardbacked photograph, dated , is a bit after the Victorian era but well within its profound influence, particularly since in the practice of playing dressup, children tended to use old clothes.
Studio portrait by J. Hunt, Nottingham, England; from the collection of Sarah Norris. Even more girl and at the same time the highly erotic and sexually than her adult form, the Victorian suggestive adult woman. Her puffed sleeves stand in for a large bust, her waist made smaller through the wide dimensions of her petticoats and puffed sleeves. The erogenous zone of her legs is exposed yet encased in white stockings that purify and amplify the insinuation of sexual presence. She sports hats, gloves, and other adult accessories, but in a miniaturized and consequently fetishized version of the adult model.
As McClintock suggests, Staging gender ambiguity under controlled circumstances [such as convention cosplay and masquerade] allows [the subject] to master the ambiguities. Kate Greenaway s illustrations of the lives of girls in the late nineteenth century became wildly popular fashions for children. She is generally credited with the invention of clothing specifically for children, especially for girls.
As popular cultural artifact, the character presents feminine identity as a classification: As an imagined gender pastiche, the Loli deploys the overcoded Victorian feminine costume as a constructed feminine identity that, in being a child, paradoxically becomes seductive as a subversively sexual subject, while being socially situated as asexual or under the ruffles These two possibilities oscillate ruffles, within the swirl in a very satisfying way for the subject: The character, we find a dark morphology of representation thus segues space of paradox, into a morphology of power.
The Loli is but one of the images of the feminine produced during the long history of patriarchy. Her proliferation as character and costume has swept into other Victorian-influenced styles such as steampunk, Gothic Lolita, and Aristocrat. A diverse series of other objects are also entangled with the family figure 6.
Photograph by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. For example, the Kewpie doll often dressed in cosplay can appear on keitai phone charms and in other miscellaneous toylike objects. The Kewpie reinforces the shojo s kawaii power through the proliferation of objects, through her flexible and adaptable singularity, and through her ubiquitous image. These images or signs proliferate with such abandon that the space under the ruffles becomes cluttered with an abundance of regulatory and seductive objects.
If we look deep under the ruffles, within the swirl of constellated objects and the myriad signs of this hyperbolic feminine character, we find a dark space of paradox, ambiguity, and loss. She is the sign where the deconstruction of signification ceases, yet paradoxically, she is also the origin of the feverish proliferation and manic repetition of objects. She is at once a singular image of the little girl and a complex of concepts, conditions, and commodities. Although she may be denigrated as childish and cloyingly feminine, she also wields significant power in her capacity as a truly transnational, transgendered cultural symbol and aesthetic commodity.
She is significant at an even more subversive and consequent level. Having expunged the feminine from its hegemonic structures, the patriarchal culture attempts to naturalize the illusions of the masculinist regime as the Real. Yet and here is the true center under the ruffles she is missed.
The profile of a sweet, endearing, but utterly disposable commodity form allows for a denial of value and meaning, at the same time it allows her to monopolize commercial constructions and advertising. She is a Trojan horse: We are ensorcelled, and we have let her in. She is now ubiquitous, transnationally exchanged, and she has begun to inject the feminine into culture.
Although still reviled as valueless in patriarchal culture, the denials have become less shrill, the acceptance grudging but evident. She has put her dainty foot in the door, and as she passes through into the culture, she signifies her presence with the rustling sarasara of ruffles slipping through the gates!
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Ibid. Routledge, , Ibid. Otaku culture has brought this practice into mainstream culture in the form of fashion design, merchandise, toys, games, and other practices wherein the origin of these 18 frenchy lunning. According to the New York Times, the vision of steampunk, [is] a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives First appearing in the late s and early 90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.
To some, steampunk is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. To me, it s essentially the intersection of technology and romance, said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop In aggregate, steampunk is a trend that is rapidly outgrowing niche status. McClintock, Imperial Leather, Ibid.
An Introduction New York: Vintage Books, , Valerie Steele, Fetish: Something is encountered a person, an image, a song, an outfit that throws into relief the protagonist s unique sensibility. This apparent uniqueness is felt as a dislocation in era, the consequence of an existence carried out crosswise to history and society.
The object of fascination shimmers in the protagonist s imagination, catalyzing a reorganization of priorities, compelling acts commensurate with the intensity of the emotions it evokes.
This is a desire that communicates solely through the language of extremity, the center of a sensibility that disdains the ordinary for being ordinary, that values only the extraordinary. The protagonist becomes extraordinary through criminal acts, acts that prove the protagonist to be worthy of the fascinating object, worthy of the nearly religious ecstasy of fascination itself.
This is less about possession than proximity, a pilgrimage toward an indifferent idol, an escalating series of demonstrations of the intensity of the protagonist s fascination that inevitably explodes, shattering the narrative at its climax: But however it ends, the narrative always runs along a line of flight, describing an ecstatic escape that doubles as a kind of self-immolating revenge against society as norm, history as progress.
Frequently called a Lolita Superstar Roriita Karisuma , he is an author who has positioned himself as both a spokesman for and embodiment of a subculture most visible as a fashion choice but which has also been instantiated in a variety of ways: He is perhaps most well known for writing the novel Kamikaze Girls , Shimotsuma monogatari , a comic story of the unlikely friendship between a devotee of Lolita fashion and a tough female Yankee, or motorcycle gang member, which was subsequently adapted into a popular movie, then a manga, of the same name.
These stories made me cry. Was it because of the writing s unparalleled skillfulness? Or because it evoked the inexpressible feelings I had at that age? No, it was more than just that. It was the very fact that the immaculate nobility displayed by the characters in the book could exist in an age as degraded as this that brought me to tears. Novala-chan, you re the best! This early endorsement of Takemoto and its use in promotional materials for his work thus implies a positioning of this work within a genealogy of girls literature that aspires to a similar cultural prominence.
He describes these fashions in breathless detail in his novels, the names of real-life clothing designers and brands like Vivienne Westwood, MILK, Jane Marple, and Baby, the Stars Shine Bright decorating nearly every page. This article reads Takemoto s otomegaku as a theory of fandom and girlhood that emerges from his fiction and other writings.
In particular, I wish to highlight how he phrases this fandom and girlhood as a mode of subversive embodiment. On the surface, his project involves a negotiation with various parts of a genealogy of Japanese girl culture and literature: These editions include annotations that translate some of the more obscure references and turns of phrase into the updated yet still frequently anachronistic slang favored by the young heroines of his own novels.
Takemoto s otomegaku brings out the subversive, even antisocial or criminal aspects of girlhood that Yoshiya s work exemplifies only obliquely. Specifically, I want to trace Takemoto s debt to the literary counterculture of s Japan, especially the fascination with French literature, existentialist thought, and experimental narrative forms that authors like Mishima Yukio, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, and Kurahashi Yumiko displayed during that time. The commonalities between Kurahashi s work and Takemoto s thus map a space within which to imagine Lolita fandom as a kind of existentially conceived antisocial criminality, which may have larger implications for the theorization of gendered subcultures in contemporary Japan.
One answer may be found in the title story of his fictional debut, Mishin, published in The story is told in the first person by a young girl who feels misunderstood by everyone around her and is fascinated by artifacts from the past, a fascination that leads her to conclude that she was born in the wrong era. As she puts it, As I read this collection, I vowed to live my life as if living within these Flower Tales.
For to live within these stories was to live as an otome. And then, just as now, a girl s desire at some point began to bloom, sometimes even taking over her whole life. These schoolgirls had only other girls to use as objects for these desires. Younger students fell in love with more mature upperclasswomen, while these upperclasswomen would make eyes at their cute young counterparts. And of course, sometimes schoolgirls the same age would fall in love. The love such girls shared is called S. If I were to use contemporary language, I guess I d have to call them lesbians. But I think there s a big difference between S feelings and lesbianism.
S couples do other things to demonstrate their feelings, like write joint diaries or carry matching handkerchiefs. I ve found I can t fantasize about boys. But that doesn t mean that I want to kiss or hug members of my own sex either. I want to share something platonic with them instead. I simply want to write joint diaries with them, carry matching handkerchiefs or exchange notebooks.
Though she claims to be completely uninterested in popular culture, the 24 brian bergstrom. The protagonist watches Mishin being interviewed, fascinated by him and declaring that he is the otome of all otome. The interview consists of Mishin professing an indifference to his popularity, his fans, even the content of his music, claiming to enjoy only the energy and sound of punk bands like The Clash, not their message.
The song closes with the declaration I am Lolita, destroy! Skimming music magazines, she discovers the secret behind his wonderful clothing: Becoming more and more obsessed, the protagonist starts a routine of daily dual pilgrimages, one to a shrine where she prays that she and Mishin will someday enter into an S relationship, and one to the MILK boutique in Harajuku. The MILK boutique is just as religious a space as the shrine, if not more so, as it allows the protagonist to satisfy her desire for quiet, enraptured contemplation of Mishin even amid the hateful crowds of Tokyo s most fashionable district.
Correspondingly, the clothing and the store act as metonymic substitutes for the missing rock star just as the architecture and objects of the shrine substitute for the transcendent, absent god or kami. She soon spends her entire savings on these expensive clothes, but still she goes at least three times a week to bask in the beauty of the store and hear the clerks eager tales of Mishin s visits to the shop. She informs the reader that folklorists like Yanagita Kunio have written that because women have been girliness next to godliness The protagonist uses a tape purchased consumer subculture from a group of street musicians as her demo of Lolita fandom.
The management is understandably enraged when her incompetence and deception are exposed during the audition, but Mishin himself is entranced by those very things, declaring that she will be his new guitarist. After the interview, Mishin leans over and whispers to her, I love the sheer absurdity [detaramesa] of you making it this far without being able to play the guitar at all. But this happiness proves unsustainable. It s true we shared a bed, but all we did was hold hands as we slept. I ll do it. Even if your survival instinct kicks in as I start to hit you and you try to run away, even if you tell me you didn t mean it, tell me to stop, tell me not to kill you, I ll keep my word.
I will beat you to death with my Hello Kitty guitar. I ll keep hitting you in front of all those people without a second thought, until your skull is in pieces, until I m bathed in your blood. With these hands, I ll make you eternal. His protagonists encounter a fascinating, willful, and ambiguously gendered person and then embark on a usually chaste but intense relationship with him or her, founded on a shared dislike of the contemporary world ameliorated by the consumption of specific brand-name designer clothing.
The encounters are usually doubled and frequently intertwined: But the question remains: Or, put more succinctly, why does the purity and beauty of the object of fascination necessitate its destruction as its ultimate expression? This fascination then becomes aligned with independence and even freedom, the extent of one s devotion paradoxically becoming the measure of one s ability to think for oneself. As Kurahashi herself puts it in a typically idiosyncratic yet evocative description of her own novel: In this novel, I have attempted to sanctify as chosen love the impossible love of incest.
The two youths who appear in the novel are like a cancer that is both produced by reality and consumes it, evil and holiness locked in a Siamese embrace. I wanted to deliver a novel that was like a mollusk melting into a bad summer, like the view from the far side of a looking glass. We will become enemies of the world, she declares ecstatically in the novel s closing lines. Much of Kurahashi s novel consists of passages from the salacious diary of her female protagonist, Miki.
A male character named K is reading the diary as figure 1. Miki recovers from a car accident that killed her mother and apparently rendered her an amnesiac. The diary tells of Miki s scandalous 28 brian bergstrom. K, outdated verb forms, and for his part, confesses at one point to committing incest with his own sister, L, when cloyingly hyperfeminine mannerisms of the Lolita he was young, which resulted in her running subculture function as a away from home. As K reveals more and more way to reimagine the very about his own checkered past, which also includes an armed robbery and gang rape, it aspects of girlishness that render them a becomes clear that he feels drawn to Miki crime against sociality because of the criminality of her diary, especially her description of incest.
But at the end and productivity. The last scene in the novel is a telephone conversation in which K tells Miki that he wants to marry her, while Miki explains that she is checking herself into a mental institution. K insists that marriage would be a better option, to which Miki replies: I wouldn t mind offering you my body. I wouldn t mind even if you devoured it whole. But remember that my body gained its shape from the bony lattice of my spirit, so once that s gone, all that ll be left is a lump of sour meat.
Meat that rots so easily even vultures and hyenas hesitate to taste it. I want to shed this flesh, leave it behind and fly away somewhere like a bird made of transparent bones. In particular, the idea that true freedom resides in libertinism and criminality resonated not only with the newly translated and celebrated works of the Marquis de Sade but also with the works of Jean Genet and Sartre. A mirror is a consciousness in reverse. To the right-thinking man, it reveals only the appearance it offers to others.
Sure of possessing the truth, concerned only with being reflected in his undertaking, he gives the mirror only girliness next to godliness But for the woman and for the criminal, for all relative beings, this carcass is what is essential. He has always assumed that the carcass in the mirror could not contain the whole truth of his being, and therefore his being is not relative in the sense that Miki s is by virtue of her femininity. But just as in a Genet novel, the beloved, unreflecting criminal hero in the end must always be betrayed by the guilty criminal who loves him; this destruction of what she desires is what transforms her abject criminality into sainthood.
K falls slowly from grace as Miki performs the ultimate betrayal, which is also the ultimate crime, the one that K himself is unable to perform: This is the final, perverse exercise of her agency, one that annihilates her true being while leaving her carcass behind, thereby martyring and sanctifying her.
While not as explicitly philosophical as Kurahashi s work, Takemoto s novels nonetheless engage similar issues relating to the exercise of agency in relation to corporeal being. His works do not simply cling to the trappings of girlhood as a sentimental refusal to take on adult responsibilities; rather, his characters embrace rejection from a social world that they find coded into their very being. These perverse decisions are made in the name of an elusive but compelling purity that resides precisely in their antisociality.
The elaborate costuming, ostentatious use of outdated verb forms, and cloyingly hyperfeminine mannerisms of the Lolita subculture function as a way to reimagine the very aspects of girlishness that render them a crime against sociality and productivity. The implication is that these are strategies whereby the disciplinary machine of normative embodiment is preempted through covering the body in exaggerated signs of its inability ever to be anything but what girlhood has made of it. Unlike Kurahashi, though, Takemoto habitually ends his narratives in the moment of impossible bliss that occurs just before the collapse of this paradoxical agency predicated on the hyperembodiment of these social codes.
These moments are unsustainable and therefore pure like the Sartrean sacred or saintly aspects of Kurahashi s criminal girl protagonist. Such a narrative structure is highly conducive to portraying a self performed through fashion, a performance dramatized as a decision to 30 brian bergstrom. Fashion allows this decision to be performed in the ecstatic instant one goes out in the world and is seen wearing the Lolita look, or even just in the moment one looks in the mirror and catches sight of oneself gazing out at the world from its far side.
OTOME VERSUS SHOJO Positioning himself as a spokesman for the rarefied sensibility embodied by Lolita fashion and fandom, Takemoto at first glance certainly seems to be rather cynically appropriating the voice of young girlhood, using essays and fiction to promote his writings and the clothing brands he cites in his texts some of which have employed him as model and spokesman.
These suspicions deepen when one considers the complex gender identification of Takemoto s public persona, a heterosexual male Lolita Superstar decked out in the skirts and ruffles of the brands he celebrates. While I have focused on the young characters and narrators in Takemoto s fiction, it is impossible to ignore the frequent appearance of older men, characters seemingly modeled on the image Takemoto has cultivated for himself.
Many of his narratives contain pretentious Socratic dialogues in which a bashful young woman is educated by an older, alluringly girly and fashionable man, who gives her an appreciation for high fashion, esoteric art, obscure French pop music, and the like. Pygmalion-like, these encounters unlock the girl s hidden capacity for self-realization through consumption, a change that conveniently coincides with the girl s growing fascination with her wearily worldly interlocutor.
On top of this, while the chastity of the S model as exemplified in Mishin is paradigmatic in his work, many stories actually include explicit portrayals of genital sexuality. For example, there is the brother sister incest already mentioned that occurs at the end of Uroko-hime. Further, the semiautobiographical novel Roriita , Lolita includes frequent mentions of the Takemoto-esque hero s promiscuity, which not only establishes his unassailable heterosexuality but also provides a foil for the chastity of the central girliness next to godliness The critical edge of the otome ideal for Takemoto thus resides not in chastity s alignment with girly innocence and subservience but in its rejection of normativity.
The devotion to an abstract conception of desire is predicated on its impossibility and antisociality it is not of this world, which means it exists entirely in the mind of the willful girly subject and is therefore hers or his alone. This translates into a frequent rejection of genital sexual practices as being much too worldly, conventional, or revolting to represent anything but the offensiveness of the banal.
But as the above examples demonstrate, certain kinds of genital contact can be woven into this fantasy of world-rejecting transcendence. What is primary is not the rejection of sexuality per se, but the sacred space of criminality this rejection frequently, but not always, signifies. Takemoto s work is thus situated in a larger cultural field of power within which representations of gender, capitalist agendas, and genital sexuality are negotiated both textually and metatextually.
Gendered identification, both his and his characters, provides characters and readers with a particular understanding of their own alienation and how to deal with it through consumption, often of products that Takemoto has a direct or indirect stake in selling. Along with this, though, comes the demonization of normative genital sexuality in favor of intense but chaste modes of devotion frequently to girly men who resemble Takemoto s own public persona or expressions of genital sexuality that are impossible, taboo, or illegitimate.
The Japanese are no longer producers. Our existence consists solely of the distribution and consumption of things brought to us from elsewhere, things with which we play. Nor are these things actually tangible, but are instead only signs without direct utility in life. None of what we typically purchase would, were we deprived of it, be a matter of life or death.
These things are continually converted into signs without substance, signs such as information, stocks, or land. What name are we to give this life of ours today? Takemoto s heroines choose to experience their girlishness and its relation to consumer society as agency, through a fandom conceived as implicit critique and explicit criminality.
At first glance, Takemoto seems to be just another example of what Sharalyn Orbaugh calls cognitive transvestitism, which she defines as a cross-gender identification or disguise for the purpose of exemplifying or thinking through a social conundrum.
The sign is not precisely choose girliness as a empty, though; it is more like a sign of strategy for preserving a emptiness, a way to imagine the free play meaningful sense of self. Takemoto s work attempts to reclaim this space of symbolic lack as one representing a choice on the part of those who take on its hyperbolic signifiers as a strategy for escape. Takemoto s otome, by contrast, make choices that reject a numbingly dull sexualized world in favor of an intellectualized, subversive life in which the hyperfeminine is a strategy for control.
Refusal is one method of control, but not the only one: The gendered nature of being an otome is denaturalized but never forgotten or assumed, which means that it can be embodied by individual biological men and women, young and old, but it cannot be laminated a priori onto any of them, nor onto all of Japanese society. Otome are girly not because they are girls, and not because the conditions of postmodernity have transformed everyone into girls, but because they choose girliness as a strategy for preserving a meaningful sense of self.
Near the end of the novel Shimotsuma monogatari, the Lolita narrator, Momoko, a skillful sewer and designer, has been offered a job at the fashion house she favors most, Baby, the Stars Shine Bright. She reflects on her decision thus: I love doing embroidery, and I learned how rewarding it is to do embroidery for others, but I get the feeling that if I m on the side that makes the Lolita clothing I love so much, instead of the side that buys it, the thrill I get when I encounter new clothes will fade.
It is therefore important for Takemoto to portray Momoko s relation to capitalism as specifically perverse, of a piece with her earlier method of making money to feed her addiction to expensive Lolita clothes: Takemoto s otome literature thus phrases the assumption of girliness as a revelation followed by a reappropriation.
As the title character in her novel Tsugumi puts it, talking about her dog, Pooch: I want to be the type of person who, if a famine came and there was nothing to eat, could kill and eat Pooch without a second thought. And of course I don t mean I want to be some half-hearted twit who afterward would shed quiet tears and murmur, On behalf of everyone, thank you, and I m sorry, as I set up his tombstone and make one of his bone fragments into a pendant to wear around my neck; I want to be someone who could, without a hint of regret or compunction, just calmly say, Boy, that Pooch sure was tasty!
And in light of Yoshimoto s endorsement of Takemoto s ability to evok[e] the inexpressible feelings I had at that age, it should girliness next to godliness The evil of her nature seikaku no warusa makes any other interpretation unthinkable. Like Kurahashi s birds made of transparent bones, Takemoto s otome experience this agency as a kind of deep, invisible structure that might allow them to fly away, escape this world entirely, and make a new one on the far side of the looking glass.
Notes I would like to acknowledge my great debt to those who provided their generous feedback as I presented this paper in various forms in a variety of forums: I would also like to thank Christopher Bolton for his astute and thoroughgoing editorial help as I prepared it for publication. Research for this article was financed in part by a grant from the Japan Foundation. I am choosing in this article to use the idiosyncratic romanization Takemoto himself favors for writing his name, rather than the more standard Nobara. In either case, this pen name means wild rose, which may allude to Yoshiya Nobuko s Hana monogatari Flower tales , cited below.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Japanese are my own. This and all subsequent translations of passages from Mishin are my own; for an English version of the complete text, see Anne Ishii s translation, Missin San Francisco: I am Lolita is repeated in the first syllable of the transliterated English word destroy desutoroi. Palgrave, ; Gregory M. Pflugfelder, S Is for Sister: Stanford University Press, Quoted from the novel s jacket. Takemoto Novala, Uroko-hime Princess of scales Tokyo: Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman ; New York: University of Hawai i Press, For a good example of Yoshimoto Banana s work being used explicitly to theorize transformations in Japanese literature and culture along these lines, see Mitsui Takayuki and Washida Koyata, Yoshimoto Banana shinwa The Yoshimoto Banana myth Tokyo: Yoshimoto makes these comments in the afterword to Tsugumi, He was adorable and I watched him endlessly zutto mite imashita.
I bought a Tama-chan nightie and sleep with him now! I love you, Tama-chan. An exploration of the animal fan can lead us beyond the room of the sequestered train man out into a world of politics and nature, beyond the fetishized human subject of the otaku to the environmental and zoological. What does the zoological mean to fans and the fans to the zoological?
This essay takes up the challenge of this volume of Mechademia to There are two kinds of animal fans those who exhibit a domesticating animal love that essentially replicates anthropocentric culture and power structures involving humans and animals, and those who do not. The latter instance of fandom would be an embrace of the animal other that gives expression to the desire for a different way of being in this world for the human through, and with, the animal.
On August 7, , a bearded seal, soon christened Tama-chan, was discovered in the Tama River the Tamagawa. For reasons unknown, it had left its cold sea home to swim up the temperate and murky Tamagawa and other rivers in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. A crowd gradually formed and within a few days the onlookers reached into the hundreds. Newspaper reporters, television crews, and local merchants selling food and wares flooded the area.
The bearded seal had become a media sweetheart. Tama disappeared in , but he remained a ghostly presence. After Tama s final disappearance, blog writer Miyazaki Shinpei visited the riversides where Tama had sunbathed and asked local residents to speak about their Tama-chan experience. Commenting on his interview with a resident at Tsurumigawa who knew that the river was too dirty to support wildlife but hoped and imagined that one day it would be possible, Miyazaki wrote: But I want to support this imagination.
The ability to imagine takes us one step closer to the 40 christine l. So I decided to emulate this lady and dream of such a river. People of all ages contributed art, essays, and poetry after Tama s disappearance in Some were simple drawings by elementary school children, others woodblock prints, and others were poignant thoughts on Tama-chan s appearance in the rivers. Contributor Kawakami Etsuko wrote the following essay for this Memory Gallery: In the summer of Tama-chan, I followed television and newspapers and studied the relationship All of Japan was surprised, laughed, between humans and animals and the problem of and then was cured protecting plants and animals.
During that time, my iyasareta. The culprit was deer. So my mother-in-law stretched out a net, hung a clapper, and planned to borrow the big dog next door [to keep the deer away]. When she did this, I grew indignant at the Japan that exterminates deer who lay waste to farm fields, and felt that my own home standing before my very eyes should not exist. How to protect our human lifestyle while living together and cooperating with the plants and animals is a big subject.
As I pray that my beloved Tama-chan survives each day, I also want to consider this big question. I am grateful to Tama-chan who created the occasion to make good relations between animals and humans. On the Tama memory gallery and elsewhere, Tama-chan has been credited with healing people suffering from hikikomori a condition of sequestering oneself at home and considered a growing social problem in Japan by unwittingly drawing them out of their rooms.
A year after Tama-chan s disappearance, contributor to the gallery Hayashi Akiko confessed that she still talks to Tama-chan every day. One line of a poem on the appearance of Tamachan by another contributor to the memory gallery, Nishiwaki Matsuko, beyond domesticating animal love All of Japan was surprised, laughed, and then was cured iyasareta. It suggests not that she is freshly socialized or rehabilitated but only out of her room seeking some other kind of therapeutic transformation in postindustrial Japan.
Even if the hikikomori emerges from her room, she does so only to gaze upon the river and wait for a glimpse of the slick-headed angel. If Japan was temporarily cured of its ills, it was because the acknowledgment of Tama s presence put a brake on business as usual. And it literally did. Construction near Tama s whereabouts stopped.
Children left their indoor video screens for the river. The seminal figure that incited this new, if temporary, human behavior was a sympathetic seal whose appearance produced a new fandom around animal celebrity. And curiously, this intrinsically anthropocentric fandom often enjoys imagining that it somehow challenges the premises of the very actions it performs. That is, the fan will imagine that his loving an animal, doting on an animal, or watching an animal is a biocentric act an act of putting the nonhuman biological entity at the center of thinking rather than peripheral to human interests, as in anthropocentrism.
However, we know that there is a long practice of loving creatures that requires no essential critique of human culture and power structures as they exist. This I would like to call a domesticating animal love. A majority of Tama-chan fans believed that Tama should be put in a zoo. The conventional zoo, however, is a classic example of an institutional structure that denies biocentric pleasure for anthropocentric pleasure.
Perhaps the marine zoo visitor may care for seals and love beluga whales. Perhaps a portion of his entrance fee goes toward saving animals in the wild. Perhaps he learns about animals in the zoo and, through learning about them, cares more for them. Perhaps this caring and loving will lead to a lesser degree of non-environmental behavior. This is how the zoo goer is often articulated as a contributor to ecology.
But it is a performative contradiction. In the name of loving nature, fans of animals can engage in an anthropocentric ritual that refuses to recognize its limitations for imagining animal human relationships. This public love of the larger vertebrates means two years earlier to visit an adorable kawaii!
There that ugly or small species may go unnoticed and unloved. It is this kind of domesticating love that disables a biocentric imaginary because the animal is interpellated into the familiar way of seeing the animal as spectacle or show. Sea worlds are particularly susceptible to treating animals as performing acts. If Tama had been introduced as a new member of a sea zoo, he would have been introduced through familiar anthropocentric rituals that limit the imagining of a creature to that dictated by performance.
While Tama was not inducted into a zoo, domesticating animal love took the form of Tama being awarded citizenship by the Yokohama city government. Capitalizing on Tama-chan s popularity, the Nishi ward office of Yokohama city officially registered Tama as citizen Nishi Tamao after he had appeared in various Kanagawa rivers. In this farcical act of giving national citizenship, a particular animal is domesticated by being brought into a human political and consumptive system. Attention is diverted from the seal s plight to treating the seal as recipient of a state gift.
The seal comes to represent not his own kind but humankind. The seal is made a theorem, something seen and not seeing. This is a domesticating love that sees the seal as something onto which anthropomorphizing notions can be projected and through which social standards are maintained. Another ramification of domesticating animal love is that animals that do not fit so easily into such personhood-based categories are simply excluded outright from being imagined in any form.
The increasingly commonplace use of the acronym CMFs charismatic megafauna or megavertebrate points to precisely this problem. Large vertebrates that are cute, beautiful, or beyond domesticating animal love This public love of the larger vertebrates means that ugly or small species may go unnoticed and unloved. Larger creatures that appear more humanlike can easily be treated as subjects with personhood. This enables a new kind of speciesism under which particular animals may be deemed less worthy while others are considered more interesting and therefore valuable to the degree that they can be anthropomorphized.
Instead, becominganimal suggests an overcoming of models of identification and desire that are based on an assumption of shared modes of reason, language, and subjectivity by the human subject. It is often offered as a conceptual way of thinking of ourselves beyond the seemingly impassable division between humans and animals.
Through becoming, the human is said to join with the animal in a zone of proximity that dissolves the identities and the boundaries set up between them. This process is considered to disturb and disrupt our usual ontological categories. In becoming-animal, new ways of relating to one another proliferate and these creations are the possession of neither entity participating in the becoming; they are created by the shared event of becoming itself.
The novel lines of flight that are formed in this zone have the power to transform humans in that they invite entering into an alliance with another entity: We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are.
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What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. These metamophoses are fueled by a desire for proximity and sharing, to engage with the other, to be copresent with an other in a zone of closeness. Becoming-animal as a concept may free humans from dichotomous 44 christine l. The concept suggests a desire or a readiness to be guided toward a different mode of being. The lone seal who has left his sea or the hikikomori who does not sustain the practices of his human pack is exemplar of the autonomous subject who flees predictable living.
Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari speak of wolfing and not wolf. The yellow eyes of the cat. The sharp teeth of the rat. Metamorphosis into a beetle-like creature. The examples for becoming-animal are frightening, tough, grotesque, masculine. Animal life is imaginatively addressed but with an attendant sense of dread. Becoming-animal is not sustainable but fleeting. As Steve Baker has reminded us, the implication in A Thousand Plateaus is that the artist s responsibility may be to work fearlessly to prolong such instants.
This kind of fandom would articulate a desire to enter into a relationship that displaces the human as common denominator and admit the ontology of other organisms we call by that awkwardly generic term animal. The fan mode expressed in love for an animal is then also a desire to imagine differently one s place of being in the world, which may lament displacement but is not dependent on agonizing metamorphosis. The art and writing by some fans of Tama-chan suggest that there is a way of caring about the animal that also is critical of current modes of expressing desire for and consumption of animal beings.
Biocentric fandom might even be necessary to the maintaining of ecological life because it jettisons restrictive categories of human and animal to attend to the animal health and welfare. Japanese popular culture abounds with narratives that introduce animal love as a way toward environmental practice. Yet others still treat animals in fairly anthropocentric ways. Tezuka Osamu s character Kirihito, for example, is a dog-faced man in the eponymous manga. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them.
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