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SLA Prize Winning Graduate Paper 2007 Isaac Gagné YALE UNIVERSITY Urban Princesses: Performance and“Women’s Language” in Japan’sGothic/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 exploreshow the subculture and its practices are characterized by the Japanese media. Particularattention is paid to how subcultural magazines, websites, and Gothic/Lolitas themselvescreate and sustain a “virtual linguistic community” through a specialized lexicon of neolo- gisms and re-appropriated “women’s language,” as well as negative identity practices thatseek to define Gothic/Lolita against other subcultures and fashions such as kosupure[ “Cosplay” i.e., Costume Play]. Additionally, an analysis of representations of Gothic/Lolitaspeech in two television programs reveals how the media constructs ambivalent images viaiconization and erasure through narration and editing. [youth subculture, gender andlanguage, speech community, counterpublic, Japan] T HIS 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] J apanese youth have a long history of engagement with language in non-mainstream forms that express resistance to certain cultural norms.Young womenin particular have been effective manipulators of language conventions, andthe 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. 130 women’s alternative speech patterns and related subcultures. Among these, there isonethatseemstospeakoutagainstnotonly“traditional”mainstreamculturebutalsoother 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 subculturehave also revived and recreated joseigo , or “women’s language,” in order to achievethis idealized role, creating thereby a linguistically distinct community through ametalinguistic and counterpublic discourse in magazines and internet forums. Thenews media usually portrays Gothic/Lolita as they have previous youth cultures: asa social problem and a moral panic that embodies the declining morals of Japaneseyouth. Here, however, the exaggerated politeness of Gothic/Lolitas’ behavior andlanguage use presents these stock criticisms with a conundrum.In this paper I will first describe the contours of young women’s subcultures andcounterpublic discourses and their relationship with “women’s language” in Japan.Then, I will situate Gothic/Lolita within this discourse and examine how magazinesand web forums concerning Gothic/Lolita create a sense of community for girlsthrough a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated “women’s lan-guage.” Next, I will briefly explore the negative identity practices used by Gothic/Lolitas to define themselves recursively against other youth subcultures. Finally, I willend with a brief discussion of how representations of Gothic/Lolita in televisionprograms construct ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narrationand editing. By examining the two interdependent and mutually constitutive levelsof virtual and represented speech community I show the paradoxical mix of youthcounterpublic and re-appropriated norms of (linguistic) femininity in Gothic/Lolitaand the ambivalence it engenders in the news media.The majority of my data for the virtual speech community of Gothic/Lolita comesfrom the growing wealth of magazines and web forums on the subculture. Over thepast ten years Gothic/Lolita-related literature, movies, comics and internet siteshave rapidly increased, but most activity has occurred in the past six years, duringwhich 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-sitesand GLB . For analyzing news media representations I used taped recordings of FujiTelevision’s “Super News” and TBS’s “Hanamaru Market.” I supplement this datawith 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’ subcultureand counterpublic in Japan that circumvents and re-appropriates language for com-munity building and the creation of an alternative social world. 1 Gothic/Lolita is asubculture in the sense used by Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, and Phil Cohen in that itis a group of people with a distinctive style and jargon existing within a largerculture, but on a more discursive level it can also be usefully analyzed as a counter-public. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s (1993) work on the emergence of new aspectsof the public sphere, Miyako Inoue characterizes counterpublics as “constituted by‘particularized individuals’ and their interests and experiences situated in their con-crete material situations” (Inoue 2006:127). Counterpublics thus differ from Haber-mas’ description of the public sphere as including “working-class people . . . andother disenfranchised people, including women and ethnic minorities, and theirsituated interests, needs and experiences” (Inoue 2006:127; see also Habermas 1989).Alternative linguistic practices are a central organizing feature of young women’scounterpublics that give them a shared virtual space and language in which they canexpress their own desires and interests outside of the male-dominated public sphere. Urban Princesses: Performance and “Women’s Language” in Japan’s Gothic/Lolita Subculture 131 In Japan, counterpublic activities were accelerated by the language modernizationmovement following its opening to the West and the Meiji Restoration in the latterhalf of the 1800s. Inoue argues that one of the state’s goals of language reforms duringthis time was the creation of “a new modern Japanese language by which they couldrepresent modern subjectivity” (Inoue 2006:26). She shows that as the state pushed toreform the Japanese language there was the simultaneous development of jogakuseikotoba , or “schoolgirl speech,” among young women attending high school andhigher education in urban Japan. Intellectuals and news media at the time dismissedit as vulgar and low-class (2006:37) and “an aural specter of Japan’s modernity andmodernization . . . that embodied a surplus of Japan’s modernization and modernitythat had to be excluded” (2006:26).As notions of femininity and appropriate language use changed, jogakusei kotoba transformedintoanappropriateandevendesiredwayofspeakingforyoungwomen.By the mid-1920s “the set of speech forms ideologically associated with ‘schoolgirlspeech’ erased from the national and cultural memory its derisive srcin 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’slanguage,” 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 salientcategory 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, “whichinclude[s] a specific set of vocabulary, first-person pronouns . . . final particles . . . anda so-called beautification prefix” (2006:14).Springing up nearly a century later, contemporary forms of speaking linked withyoung women’s counterpublics such as the childlike noripı ¯ go and masculine gyaru speech are treated in a similar manner as the srcinal jogakusei kotoba . Japaneseintellectuals and the media are exceedingly critical of these counterpublics becausethey deviate from the reified notions of “traditional” and “traditionally feminine”speech forms and because of their perceived connection with youth deviance moregenerally. For instance, young girls who used the infantile speech patterns of noripı ¯ go during the 1980s, coined by the idol singer Sakai Noriko (a.k.a. Nori-P) in the imita-tion of a child’s lisp, also used a rounded and childlike way of handwriting. Theyseemed to reject notions of responsibility and adulthood by escaping through lan-guage into a linguistic space of childish fantasy “where young people could beliberated from the filthy world of adult politics” (Aoyagi 2005:142). Gyaru speech, which also developed in the 1980s but is still used today, took theopposite approach. As Laura Miller (2004) compellingly explores in her article onlanguage strategies used by Kogal (an extreme style of gyaru ) to fashion identities,Kogal’s “gender-transgressing identity and language style challenge longstandingnorms of adolescent femininity” (2004:225). Miller writes that Kogal and othernew female identities “challenge prescriptive norms of gendered talk, yet despite thecondemnation of the parent culture, young women continue to create and use exu- berant new forms of expression” (2004:226). The ways in which female subcultureslike gyaru accomplish this is quite different from noripı ¯ go users. Instead of drawingon childish speech patterns, gyaru speech appropriates brash and “masculine” formsof speaking, such as using the masculine first-person pronoun boku instead of themore feminine atashi or gender neutral and polite watashi . In addition, gyaru speechalso 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 srcin in thedecadent decade of the Bubble Economy. Like the period of rapid modernization andrising urbanization at the turn of the 20th century, the 1980s was also a period inwhich 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 132 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology that youth became accustomed to in the 1980s did not disappear overnight, but ratherpersisted in the realms of fashion and youth cultures that have continued to spring upand vanish just as quickly throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Jogakuseikotoba , noripı ¯ go ,and gyaru speechthusrepresentasimilartrendofcounter-publics in 20th-century Japan through which young women are able to articulate andcreate their own notions of community and desired lifestyles. For the young womenwho use noripı ¯ go and gyaru speech this often takes the form of hedonistic anddecadent consumption and play that expresses dissatisfaction with gender ideals andnotions of adulthood and responsibility. The Gothic/Lolita counterpublic developedalong the same lines and shares many similarities, but it is also an ambivalentcounterpublic that occupies a marginal position between generations and genders: itgoes against both the conservative social norms of the male-dominated public sphereand the alternative social norms of contemporary youth cultures and counterpublicdiscourses.As a youth culture, Gothic/Lolita dates back to the latter half of the 1990s. It wasfirst 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 theirattire, but over time most will oscillate between both Goth and Lolita. These two polesthemselves embody the ambivalence of the style as they appear to be paradoxicaldisplays of light and darkness, innocent youth, and jaded womanhood. However,they find common ground in their location outside of both adult male and youngfemale social norms and in their pursuit of princess-like elegance. Figure 1An Amarori and an Elegant Gothic Lolita in Harajuku on a very hot day, 2003. (Photo bythe author) Urban Princesses: Performance and “Women’s Language” in Japan’s Gothic/Lolita Subculture 133
