Presented at the 2nd International Popular Culture of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) Conference (2011, 29 June – 1 July), Langham Hotel, Auckland, New Zealand.
ABSTRACT (2011)
“’Lolita is back’. In 1996, Hannah J. L. Feldman made this statement in regard to an emerging phenomenon, represented, in art and popular culture, by a ‘triumphant emblem of a newly configured’ feminist model for the young woman, who, unlike Vladimir Nabokov’s (1955) heroine, ‘no longer represent[ed] a young girl’s vulnerability to an older man’s lascivious desires. To be Lolita’, she declared, now ‘means to take control… and to reverse the pejorative connotations’ of male dominance and sexual aggression. Under this banner of ‘Lolita’, a fashion-based subculture has also grown, which, having originated in Japan, continues to gain worldwide appeal.
The face of the Lolita movement is the Gothloli (gosurori), or Gothic Lolita, a young woman whose style, based on little girls’ fashions of the Rococo, Romantic and Victorian periods, is signified by her doll-like or ‘childish’ appearance. As the Gothloli also collects and plays with dolls, her preoccupation is seen as superficial and infantile, and often disregarded as merely another aspect of the Japanese obsession with all things ‘cute’ (kawaii). However, this dismissive attitude overlooks more complex psychological and sociological issues behind this motivation. It also fails to recognise the subculture as a tribal empowerment against the so-called ‘Lolita Complex’, the attraction to young girls by older men.
How, though, does one battle against a paradigm of male dominance and female victimisation from a position that appears to adopt the very construct that is being challenged?
Herein lies the paradox. What is shocking about the Lolita subculture is that, although Gothloli choose to deny any sexual connotations, the adoption of a seemingly submissive, yet sexually provocative, identity, even in the acceptance of the Lolita tag, is controversial and contentious, and thus rebellious.
This paper discusses the notion of the Japanese Lolita subculture as a new form of feminist resistance.”
Reference:
Feldman, H. J. L. (1996). The Lolita Complex, World Art (Australia), (2), 52-57.
Kathryn A. Hardy Bernal 