[Gagne 2008 ] Week 6 Women\'s language in Gothic Lolita subculture PDF

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SLA Prize Winning Graduate Paper 2007 Isaac Gagné

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YALE UNIVERSITY

Urban Princesses: Performance and “Women’s Language” in Japan’s Gothic/Lolita Subculture This paper investigates the linguistic strategies used in the counterpublic discourse of Gothic/ Lolita, a young Japanese women’s subculture of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and explores how the subculture and its practices are characterized by the Japanese media. Particular attention is paid to how subcultural magazines, websites, and Gothic/Lolitas themselves create and sustain a “virtual linguistic community” through a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated “women’s language,” as well as negative identity practices that seek to define Gothic/Lolita against other subcultures and fashions such as kosupure [“Cosplay” i.e., Costume Play]. Additionally, an analysis of representations of Gothic/Lolita speech in two television programs reveals how the media constructs ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narration and editing. [youth subculture, gender and language, speech community, counterpublic, Japan] THIS IS A WEB-ENHANCED ARTICLE (URL)

[“What are you, an alien?” Having an ignorant mother who doesn’t want to acknowledge Lolita and calls it “Cosplay” is really tiring . . . so I think to myself.] [Blog entry, Night Moon 2006]

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apanese youth have a long history of engagement with language in nonmainstream forms that express resistance to certain cultural norms. Young women in particular have been effective manipulators of language conventions, and the past century and a half has been a prolific period in the rise and fall of young Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 130–150, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00006.x.

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women’s alternative speech patterns and related subcultures. Among these, there is one that seems to speak out against not only “traditional” mainstream culture but also other contemporary subcultures. This is “Gothic & Lolita.” Gothic & Lolita (hereafter, Gothic/Lolita) is a fashion-oriented subculture of young females who wear elaborate, antiquated dresses and aspire toward looking, acting, and speaking like “princesses.” Participants and producers of this subculture have also revived and recreated joseigo, or “women’s language,” in order to achieve this idealized role, creating thereby a linguistically distinct community through a metalinguistic and counterpublic discourse in magazines and internet forums. The news media usually portrays Gothic/Lolita as they have previous youth cultures: as a social problem and a moral panic that embodies the declining morals of Japanese youth. Here, however, the exaggerated politeness of Gothic/Lolitas’ behavior and language use presents these stock criticisms with a conundrum. In this paper I will first describe the contours of young women’s subcultures and counterpublic discourses and their relationship with “women’s language” in Japan. Then, I will situate Gothic/Lolita within this discourse and examine how magazines and web forums concerning Gothic/Lolita create a sense of community for girls through a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated “women’s language.” Next, I will briefly explore the negative identity practices used by Gothic/ Lolitas to define themselves recursively against other youth subcultures. Finally, I will end with a brief discussion of how representations of Gothic/Lolita in television programs construct ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narration and editing. By examining the two interdependent and mutually constitutive levels of virtual and represented speech community I show the paradoxical mix of youth counterpublic and re-appropriated norms of (linguistic) femininity in Gothic/Lolita and the ambivalence it engenders in the news media. The majority of my data for the virtual speech community of Gothic/Lolita comes from the growing wealth of magazines and web forums on the subculture. Over the past ten years Gothic/Lolita-related literature, movies, comics and internet sites have rapidly increased, but most activity has occurred in the past six years, during which two hit Gothic/Lolita-oriented magazines went on sale: Gosurori (the Japanese abbreviation for Gothic & Lolita) and The Gothic & Lolita Bible (hereafter, GLB). For the purposes of this paper I focus on web forums, Gothic/Lolita wiki-sites and GLB. For analyzing news media representations I used taped recordings of Fuji Television’s “Super News” and TBS’s “Hanamaru Market.” I supplement this data with my own fieldwork conducted in the spring of 2003 and the summer of 2007.

“Women’s Language” and Young Women’s Counterpublics in Japan Gothic/Lolita is one of the most intriguing examples of a young women’s’ subculture and counterpublic in Japan that circumvents and re-appropriates language for community building and the creation of an alternative social world.1 Gothic/Lolita is a subculture in the sense used by Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, and Phil Cohen in that it is a group of people with a distinctive style and jargon existing within a larger culture, but on a more discursive level it can also be usefully analyzed as a counterpublic. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s (1993) work on the emergence of new aspects of the public sphere, Miyako Inoue characterizes counterpublics as “constituted by ‘particularized individuals’ and their interests and experiences situated in their concrete material situations” (Inoue 2006:127). Counterpublics thus differ from Habermas’ description of the public sphere as including “working-class people . . . and other disenfranchised people, including women and ethnic minorities, and their situated interests, needs and experiences” (Inoue 2006:127; see also Habermas 1989). Alternative linguistic practices are a central organizing feature of young women’s counterpublics that give them a shared virtual space and language in which they can express their own desires and interests outside of the male-dominated public sphere.

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In Japan, counterpublic activities were accelerated by the language modernization movement following its opening to the West and the Meiji Restoration in the latter half of the 1800s. Inoue argues that one of the state’s goals of language reforms during this time was the creation of “a new modern Japanese language by which they could represent modern subjectivity” (Inoue 2006:26). She shows that as the state pushed to reform the Japanese language there was the simultaneous development of jogakusei kotoba, or “schoolgirl speech,” among young women attending high school and higher education in urban Japan. Intellectuals and news media at the time dismissed it as vulgar and low-class (2006:37) and “an aural specter of Japan’s modernity and modernization . . . that embodied a surplus of Japan’s modernization and modernity that had to be excluded” (2006:26). As notions of femininity and appropriate language use changed, jogakusei kotoba transformed into an appropriate and even desired way of speaking for young women. By the mid-1920s “the set of speech forms ideologically associated with ‘schoolgirl speech’ erased from the national and cultural memory its derisive origin in ‘vulgarity’ and its geographical and class-specificity, and inaugurated itself as the universal ‘Japanese women’s language’ ” (Inoue 2006:147). This universal “Japanese women’s language,” or joseigo, is “a set of linguistic beliefs about forms and functions of language used by and associated with (Japanese) women . . . it is a culturally salient category and knowledge about “how women speak,” how they “usually speak” or “should speak” (2006:13). Inoue notes that joseigo is actually an idealized notion of language use that sociolinguistic studies have attempted to ascribe to women, “which include[s] a specific set of vocabulary, first-person pronouns . . . final particles . . . and a so-called beautification prefix” (2006:14). Springing up nearly a century later, contemporary forms of speaking linked with ¯go and masculine gyaru young women’s counterpublics such as the childlike noripı speech are treated in a similar manner as the original jogakusei kotoba . Japanese intellectuals and the media are exceedingly critical of these counterpublics because they deviate from the reified notions of “traditional” and “traditionally feminine” speech forms and because of their perceived connection with youth deviance more ¯go generally. For instance, young girls who used the infantile speech patterns of noripı during the 1980s, coined by the idol singer Sakai Noriko (a.k.a. Nori-P) in the imitation of a child’s lisp, also used a rounded and childlike way of handwriting. They seemed to reject notions of responsibility and adulthood by escaping through language into a linguistic space of childish fantasy “where young people could be liberated from the filthy world of adult politics” (Aoyagi 2005:142). Gyaru speech, which also developed in the 1980s but is still used today, took the opposite approach. As Laura Miller (2004) compellingly explores in her article on language strategies used by Kogal (an extreme style of gyaru) to fashion identities, Kogal’s “gender-transgressing identity and language style challenge longstanding norms of adolescent femininity” (2004:225). Miller writes that Kogal and other new female identities “challenge prescriptive norms of gendered talk, yet despite the condemnation of the parent culture, young women continue to create and use exuberant new forms of expression” (2004:226). The ways in which female subcultures like gyaru accomplish this is quite different from noripı¯go users. Instead of drawing on childish speech patterns, gyaru speech appropriates brash and “masculine” forms of speaking, such as using the masculine first-person pronoun boku instead of the more feminine atashi or gender neutral and polite watashi. In addition, gyaru speech also uses extremely casual forms of speaking considered vulgar in public contexts, and thus the use of gyaru speech is often linked to “deviant” and “un-feminine” behavior. It is significant that both of the latter two styles of speech have their origin in the decadent decade of the Bubble Economy. Like the period of rapid modernization and rising urbanization at the turn of the 20th century, the 1980s was also a period in which there was a “surplus of modernity” in the form of unprecedented affluence. Even following the burst of the Bubble Economy in 1989, the affluence and decadence

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that youth became accustomed to in the 1980s did not disappear overnight, but rather persisted in the realms of fashion and youth cultures that have continued to spring up and vanish just as quickly throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Jogakusei kotoba, noripı¯go, and gyaru speech thus represent a similar trend of counterpublics in 20th-century Japan through which young women are able to articulate and create their own notions of community and desired lifestyles. For the young women who use noripı¯go and gyaru speech this often takes the form of hedonistic and decadent consumption and play that expresses dissatisfaction with gender ideals and notions of adulthood and responsibility. The Gothic/Lolita counterpublic developed along the same lines and shares many similarities, but it is also an ambivalent counterpublic that occupies a marginal position between generations and genders: it goes against both the conservative social norms of the male-dominated public sphere and the alternative social norms of contemporary youth cultures and counterpublic discourses. As a youth culture, Gothic/Lolita dates back to the latter half of the 1990s. It was first inspired by devotees to Mana, the cross-dressing guitarist for the Japanese rock band Malice Mizer.2 The name indicates its distinctive hybrid style: it combines gosu, a Japanized version of Western “Goth” fashion, music, and hobbies with Victorian/ Edwardian-inspired doll-like clothes and fairy-tale motifs called rorı¯ta, or “Lolita” (see Figure 1). At any moment, most girls will stress one pole or the other in their attire, but over time most will oscillate between both Goth and Lolita. These two poles themselves embody the ambivalence of the style as they appear to be paradoxical displays of light and darkness, innocent youth, and jaded womanhood. However, they find common ground in their location outside of both adult male and young female social norms and in their pursuit of princess-like elegance.

Figure 1 An Amarori and an Elegant Gothic Lolita in Harajuku on a very hot day, 2003. (Photo by the author)

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The most recognizable markers of the Gothic/Lolita counterpublic are precisely these sartorial conventions: long one-piece dresses with bustles and panniers, corsets, bonnets, parasols, and Mary Janes and other (imagined) elements of Rococo and Baroque fashion. The tone suggests antiquated aristocracy in shades of halcyon pastels and decadent blacks and reds, and the girls themselves insist that the meaning of the fashion is to become a “princess,” though the meaning of the word in the imaginations of Japanese youth and popular media is different from that of EuroAmerican conceptions. To many Gothic/Lolitas, being a princess means participation in a wide range of hobbies and interests vaguely connected with aristocratic themes ¯jo manga including European fairy tales and dolls, Gothic vampire movies, girls’ sho comic book stories like The Rose of Versailles or Ribon Kishi, and the Japanese metal genre of visual rock. Moreover, Gothic/Lolitas’ efforts at princess-like behavior are most noticeable in the distinctive style of speech used by the more ardent adherents in magazines, web forums, and on the street. The Gothic/Lolita style of speaking differs from those used by other young women’s counterpublics both past and present in its use of the honorific language and feminized word construction idealized in contemporary media as joseigo. In postwar Japan, joseigo connotes educated upper-class femininity. Gothic/Lolita borrows this connotation by recasting joseigo as shukujo no kotoba or “lady’s speech,” and using it as a way to affect the image of a “princess.” This is particularly notable in that Gothic/Lolita has appeared at a time when popular media and (male) intellectual discourse is lamenting the “death of women’s language” and the corruption of youth, as exemplified by noripı¯go and gyaru speech (see Inoue 2006). Gothic/Lolita thus creates a virtual speech community through magazines and web forums both in opposition to other (vulgar) contemporary women’s counterpublics and as a re-inscription of conventional(ized) linguistic ideals, embodied in the image of a modern, urban princess.

Talking Like a Princess: Virtual Speech Community in Gothic/Lolita Magazines Magazine producers in particular have had a strong influence in the creation of the Gothic/Lolita counterpublic, specifically the publisher Kera, which is known for its focus on non-mainstream fashions and produces both GLB and Gosurori. These magazines present a catalogue of Gothic/Lolita clothing and related products as well as interviews with celebrities. They also employ fascinating language styles and include sections for letters from readers and for candid photographs of Gothic/Lolitas on the street, complete with handwritten messages from those photographed. In this way, the Gothic/Lolita magazines create what Inoue calls “a sense—a well-calculated effect sought by the producers of the magazines—that the community [is] autonomous and self-governed by the girls” (2006:102n33). What is most fascinating about women’s magazines in Japan is what Inoue calls the “unified virtual speech community” that they create, where readers from all over Japan who speak various dialects are able to communicate together in “the speech style of modern Japanese women” (2006:102n33). Similarly, Shigeko Okamoto, writing on contemporary fashion magazines, concludes that “the community constructed in the discourse of fashion magazines for young people is an imaginary interactive community. Constructing magazine communities creates a set of membership identities, a process that transforms the information in the magazines into resources for constructing those identities” (2004:141). This mirrors Anderson’s, 1983 notion of an “imagined community” that is constructed through the shared use of a standardized language and nationalist discourse, creating the image of being a member of a wider group of individuals whom one may never meet. Part of the process of community construction is the creation of a specialized lexicon accessible only to members of the community. Okamoto writes that

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New expressions and novel uses of existing words also increase the sense of shared knowledge. For instance, the ideas expressed by the compound nouns iro-shatsu (colored T-shirt) . . . and hayamimi kyara (rapid-ear character) . . . are usually expressed by relative clause + noun constructions, such as iro no tuita T-shatsu (T-shirt that has color) or dare mo mitsukete inai kyara (an animation character nobody has found). By being expressed in compound nouns without explanation, the ideas are presented as presupposed categories. [Okamoto and Smith 2004:141]

Gothic/Lolita magazines have an abundance of such specialized words that both unite readers in their shared knowledge of them and also reify specific substyles. Examples of new expressions include the very name of the community (and also a specific substyle), gosurori, which is a combination of the two English words Goth and Lolita. Other neologisms include the names for numerous substyles created by contracting and combining Japanese and English morphemes, such as kurorori (black Lolita), shirorori (white Lolita), amarori (literally “sweet” Lolita), itarori (literally “painful” Lolita) and many others. In the case of these compound Japanese-English neologisms, the new terms are a combination of adjectives and nouns in which the conjugating ending –i of the adjective is dropped. In standard Japanese usage, terms like kurorori, shirorori, and amarori would be written as kuroi rori, shiroi rori, and amai rori, respectively. Even grammatically correct, these terms would be mystifying to non-Gothic/Lolitas, as the word rori (short for Lolita) itself possesses a different meaning among those unfamiliar with the counterpublic. The use of such Japanese-English neologisms to create differentiated knowledge value among consumers is a common feature of postwar Japanese advertising in general, as Miller documents in the use of such words in the discourse of beauty products and beauty salons (esute): “within the world of beauty, English and other foreign-derived linguistic materials are part of a domestically created semiotic system with its own webs of nuance” (Miller 2006:177). In addition to neologisms, Gothic/Lolitas and producers of Gothic/Lolita culture are adept at manipulating the three syllabaries used in Japanese in surprising ways, specifically contractions like those above which are written in a combination of kanji and katakana. Kanji are ideograms that were imported from Chinese and became a permanent part of the writing system for Japanese, and katakana is the phonetic syllabary used for foreign loanwords like (skirt) and (soup). One intriguing example of using katakana to set the language of the community ¯ta. It is unclear when apart from standard Japanese is in the spelling of the word rorı the word was first used in Japanese. It came into common English use with the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, and was probably imported to Japan with the translation of the novel. I...