Shōjo Across Media: Exploring "Girl" Practices in Contemporary Japan

Description

Since the 2000s, the Japanese word shōjo has gained global currency, accompanying the transcultural spread of other popular Japanese media such as manga and anime. The term refers to both a character type specifically, as well as commercial genres marketed to female audiences more generally. Through its diverse chapters this edited collection introduces the two main currents of shōjo research: on the one hand, historical investigations of Japan’s modern girl culture and its representations, informed by Japanese-studies and gender-studies concerns; on the other hand, explorations of the transcultural performativity of shōjo as a crafted concept and affect-prone code, shaped by media studies, genre theory, and fan-culture research. While acknowledging that shōjo has mediated multiple discourses throughout the twentieth century—discourses on Japan and its modernity, consumption and consumerism, non-hegemonic gender, and also technology—this volume shifts the focus to shōjo mediations, stretching from media by and for actual girls, to shōjo as media. As a result, the Japan-derived concept, while still situated, begins to offer possibilities for broader conceptualizations of girlness within the contemporary global digital mediascape. Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Introduction: Shōjo Mediations (Jaqueline Berndt)....Pages 1-21 Front Matter ....Pages 23-23 Romance of the Taishō Schoolgirl in Shōjo Manga: Here Comes Miss Modern (Alisa Freedman)....Pages 25-48 Redefining Shōjo and Shōnen Manga Through Language Patterns (Giancarla Unser-Schutz)....Pages 49-82 Shōjo Manga Beyond Shōjo Manga: The “Female Mode of Address” in Kabukumon (Olga Antononoka)....Pages 83-105 Front Matter ....Pages 107-107 Practicing Shōjo in Japanese New Media and Cyberculture: Analyses of the Cell Phone Novel and Dream Novel (Kazumi Nagaike, Raymond Langley)....Pages 109-132 The Shōjo in the Rōjo: Fumiko Enchi’s Representation of the Shōjo Who Refused to Grow up (Sohyun Chun)....Pages 133-153 Mediating Otome in the Discourse of War Memory: Complexity of Memory-Making Through Postwar Japanese War Films (Kaori Yoshida)....Pages 155-179 Shōjo in Anime: Beyond the Object of Men’s Desire (Akiko Sugawa-Shimada)....Pages 181-206 Front Matter ....Pages 207-207 A Dream Dress for Girls: Milk, Fashion and Shōjo Identity (Masafumi Monden)....Pages 209-231 Sakura ga meijiru—Unlocking the Shōjo Wardrobe: Cosplay, Manga, 2.5D Space (Emerald L. King)....Pages 233-260 Multilayered Performers: The Takarazuka Revue as Media (Sonoko Azuma)....Pages 261-281 Sounds and Sighs: “Voice Porn” for Women (Minori Ishida)....Pages 283-299 Front Matter ....Pages 301-301 From Shōjo to Bangya(ru): Women and Visual Kei (Adrienne Renee Johnson)....Pages 303-329 Shōjo Fantasies of Inhabiting Cool Japan: Reimagining Fukuoka Through Shōjo and Otome Ideals with Cosplay Tourism (Craig Norris)....Pages 331-353 Seeking an Alternative: “Male” Shōjo Fans Since the 1970s (Patrick W. Galbraith)....Pages 355-390 Back Matter ....Pages 391-397