Abstract: The prevalence of the Lolita lifestyle by female youth in Japan has transformed a niche fashion into the emblem of a national sub-identity supported by capitalist establishments and open communities of enthusiasts. What distinguishes Lolita from other subcultures founded on a shared interest, is its membership as a means for escapism. The niche national identity of Lolita liberates female youth from the educational, social, and sexual expectations imposed upon them, on their own terms. This paper argues that individual agency on when and how to sport Lolita fashion and mannerism suggests Lolita is not merely a foundation to an alter ego—but that it is a means of protesting against female youth standards in Japan, without losing a “regular” identity as a student or employee.
Keywords: Japanese youth, Lolita, youth protest, female norms
Japan has faced myriad political and social upheavals, including the transition from monarchy to modern democracy. With the rise of democratic institutions followed new consensuses on societal norms and public values. The norms established during Japan’s imperialist past reverberate to the modern day. For example, the beauty standards of the Meiji empire are reflected in the silhouettes of modern Japanese fashion,[1] and current norms of loyalty and deference to authorities were standardized by the preceding Tokugawa state.[2] Such notions remain relevant in the capitalist development of a nation that appears to lack a cohesive national identity untethered from the praise of capitalism. Japanese youth that literally and figuratively represent the future of the workforce are imbued with myriad expectations to fulfill their telos as productive members of society that can secure Japan’s capitalist, and subsequently identitarian, success. Gendered norms regarding economic production, sexuality, and social behaviour have prompted female youth to abandon a society that has failed to legitimize their liberties in choice. In the place of massive social protest against the state, new national identities with deviant norms and practices are accommodating Japanese youth in search for community and freedom of self-expression. The prevalence of the Lolita lifestyle among female youth in Japan has transformed a niche fashion into the emblem of a national sub-identity supported by capitalist establishments and open communities of enthusiasts. What distinguishes Lolita from other subcultures founded on a shared interest is that its membership serves as a means of escapism. The niche national identity of Lolita liberates female youth from the educational, social, and sexual expectations imposed upon them, on their own terms. The choice over when and how to sport frilly Lolita dresses and mannerism suggests that Lolita is not merely a foundation to an alter ego, but that it is also a means of protest for female youth against the standards they are held to, without abandoning their regular lives as students or employees.
Education among Japanese youth is not limited to the acquisition of knowledge; it extends to behaviours and ideology. Though a university education is not typically expected of females, education in high schools and in workplaces are deemed essential to direct their development into norm-abiding adults.[3] The purported telos of a young Japanese woman being that of a housewife manifests in home economics courses offered during secondary education and in workplace training reform. An early example of the paternal notion of protecting young women from corruption and deviance from the expected path to womanhood is found in the consequences of Japan’s Factory Law in 1929.[4] The abolition of night work that the law demanded inspired factory managers to enforce draconian house arrests to bar women from meeting men in the city, inspiring the idea that romantic and sexual exploration poses an impediment to the moral character and wellbeing of young women.[5] Historian Elyssa Faison writes that factory women were thought to “fall into sexual depravity,” and that managers feared their factories’ “close proximity to the decadent influences of an outside world marked urban, male, and predatory” necessitated strict control and the implementation of educational programs during women’s free time.[6] This education on desexualizing the intent of women is not forthrightly rejected in the adoption of Lolita dress, whose frilled skirts and doll-like shoes dismiss a mature woman’s sexuality and instead adopt child-like attire inspired by British Victorian dress.[7]
The denial of sex appeal is at the same time the achievement of the goals of women’s education and the greatest fear for many Japanese men. As non-sexualized Lolita dress is usually worn by adult women, the practice of Lolita is attributed to the refusal to grow up from childhood: a period in which sexual exploration is morally impermissible. As such, Lolita can be a product of young women’s embrace of the prohibitionist narrative promoted in educational programs and discussions surrounding sex at a young age. However, the extension of abstinence is also counterintuitive for the ultimate goal of Japanese society, which is to use education as a means of preparing women to be high-performing housewives. In Japanese textile factories, magazines showing cosmopolitan female life were prohibited while dances imitating broom-sweeping and courses on discerning good prices from bad were promoted.[8] The choice to be a housewife or to be a Lolita girl are mutually exclusive. From an ideological standpoint, the Lolita lifestyle does not appeal to the male gaze nor does it bear any semblance to maternal desires. The Lolita aesthetic is selfish, commanding the purchase of expensive clothing to serve the fulfillment of a persona and a particular public appearance. Cheap workmanship and Halloween costumes are shunned in the Lolita community, where attire is purchased from expensive boutiques like Baby and Mary Magdalene in Japan.[9]
Though the prejudice directed toward Lolita girls makes searching for romantic partners difficult, many eventually succumb to the pressures of conforming to “Japanese housewife” standards after marriage.”[10] To do so, women dispose of the Lolita aesthetic to fall back in line with the expectations they temporarily shunned in their youth. Without the Lolita persona, female youth become agents of promoting the gendered education they once rebelled against. Teresa Younker mentions that Japanese “mothers are discouraged from social life and increasingly expected to devote themselves to supporting their children’s trajectory through the education system,” foreshadowing the rise of free-spirited girls collecting in Lolita boutiques to discuss their fashion.[11]
At odds with the nationalist identity of capitalist consumption, the thriftiness taught to Japanese youth is also rejected by Lolita girls by the nature of their spending. Younker writes that the quintessential practice of “[spending] hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of Japanese yen on creating an identity far removed from reality” demonstrates comprehension of and allegiance to Lolita’s needs.[12] Though conventional schooling does not teach such behavior, the rules of dress and decorum are learned from witnessing Lolita girls in stores and on streets. The administration of this education is unique in its removal from governing actors with a stake in how female youth think and behave.
Though some textile factory managers’ paternalism may have been benevolent, Faison mentions how many perceived educational programs as a means of maintaining the obedience and productivity of impressionable girls as if they were commodities.[13] Louis Althusser notes a trend of preserving labour power by means of education, saying that the “wage earner [is] indispensable for raising and educating the children in whom the proletarian reproduces himself.”[14] Education, according to Althusser, is an ideological state apparatus (ISA) administered by the state to subject citizens to the ruling state ideology.[15] The lack of state sponsorship in the facilitation of Lolita norms is replaced by corporate actors who manage such rules by marketing Lolita fashion. Though this version of education touches a relatively small demographic, it implicitly teaches the nationalist norm of consumption in a post-imperial Japan. While this education is untethered to the state, it still serves as an ISA by persuading female youth that they are dependent on the labour output of the state.
The cohesiveness of the state depends on the upholding of social norms conducive to its political and economic activities. The social norms for female youth in Japan oblige them to be obedient rather than curious and to expect and prepare for a life as a housewife rather than to pursue a career typically reserved for males—such as a doctor or a lawyer.[16] To be a housewife is to fulfill the social norm of caring for future generations while surrendering to the head of the household and oppressing selfish desires. Being a professional, on the other hand, fulfills the expectation of males to support the economic engine of society while earning the wages necessary for their family to consume and to live well. Overall, the social norms for both genders are to obey, to defer to authorities, and to exercise necessary sacrifice – an ideological doctrine borne from the Tokugawa era.[17] Lolita’s celebration of self-indulgence through the act of imitating a Victorian-styled child is effectively the “egoistic individualism” denounced by successive Meiji leaders for its deviance from the ethos of self-sacrifice in serving greater society.[18] The self-serving nature inherent in practicing a manufactured personality with no desire to produce or maintain society’s economic and social order is the appeal of Lolita. Most controversially, Lolita is a lifestyle mimicking the regression in age and maturity, which strictly counteracts the social norm of preparing to enter either the workforce or motherhood.
The norm of motherhood benefits the majority of the Japanese state, which consists of members conceived and cared for by their mothers. Thus, the establishment of motherhood as the norm for Japanese women is necessary to preserve the interest of this majority. Antonio Gramsci argues it is the state that serves as the organ to preserve the size and to encourage the expansion of this said majority – all while oppressing minorities with deviant expectations, like those of Lolita.[19] He illustrates norms as mechanisms by which the dominance of the majority prevails, without disruptively encroaching upon the interests of minorities.[20] This is the relationship between Lolita and greater society; though the practice of imitating a child is not banned, it is not promoted nor accepted by the majority. The majority supports the norm of self-development into maturity: a trait that is necessitated by the economically productive ethos characteristic Japanese identity during the peak of Lolita in the 1990s.[21]
Lolita’s allure is founded in its outright rejection of patriotic and widely accepted values such as self-discipline, responsibility, self-sacrifice, and hard work. Younker believes that practicing the Lolita lifestyle, which is characterized by the sporting of childish fashion adorned with excessive lace and accessories, is akin to saying, “I’m a spoiled, immature little brat and I like it that way!”[22] Instead of addressing the need for social change and resisting the commercialization that dismisses personal liberty in favor of economic productivity, Lolita allows women to engage in the act of childishness as an outlet for this disaffection.[23] To exercise the liberty to behave against social norms but without overstepping legal constraints is to depart from the social norm of containing one’s intellectualism, in Gramscian terms. Gramsci states that although “all men are intellectuals […] not all men in society have the function of intellectuals,” for the reason that social relations induce men into positions of labour that do not allow intellectual exploration.[24] Lolita girls, untethered by social expectations and the identities of labourers (mothers, office assistants, among other quintessentially female careers), are free to exist as intellectuals. They exercise self-expression that is not for the express purpose of economic production. By removing themselves from the need to please society and abide by its norms, Lolita members can reinforce the importance of childish roleplay among the in-group without having to oppress or convince another dominant group of their ideological superiority, a process that Gramsci deems necessary for intellectuals to be acknowledged in an ideologically diverse society.[25] In this sense, Lolita is a means for intellectual liberation that is necessitated by the dismissal of common Japanese norms.
Although social norms celebrate a drive for economic production and an allegiance to the state, sexual norms for young females are instead joined to the desires of the male gaze. Amidst mounting materialism and commercialism in the 1990s, widespread celebration of sexual appeal in popular culture led to moral panic. The panic was a knee-jerk reaction to the flagrant displays of sexualized female youth that were not complementary to the moral order and goodness extended from Japan’s imperialist past, but instead to the promiscuous desires of male consumers.[26] The sexual appeal of female youth was normalized through deviant practices whose legitimacy was reinforced by depictions in the media. An early example of this is the Yokohama School’s reports on how parents out of touch with their daughters would suddenly cow school administrators into releasing the girls – only for them to be sold to brothels.[27] The allure of young educated females can be summarized by the shojo brand, first cultivated in the Meiji era then commercialized in the post-war period, which represents a school-aged girl whose purity embodies freedom and potential.[28] Shunning the school uniform for a maximally consumerist fashion that serves no utility other than to impersonate children, Lolita girls both exercise freedom and prove their economic potential without appealing to a male gaze.
The lack of sexual salience in Lolita fashion is evidenced by a 1994 poll by SPA! Magazine, which ranked Lolita first in the most reprehensible youth fashion trend, above low-riding pants and man skirts.[29] Younker writes that the outright rejection of Lolita fashion by most men, including the fathers of Lolita girls, encouraged members to embrace their childish personalities in retaliation against the visual expectations imposed upon them.[30] Conversely, the strong approval of Lolita dress within the community bolstered the appeal of the lifestyle, which meritocratically praises choices in dress and demeanor as opposed to the beauty of the individual herself. This appeal to beauty is removed from the lust of males in society and is instead curated to earn the respect of other Lolita girls.
Removed from the female norm of sexuality, Lolita taps into a more innocent value among both Japanese men and women: cuteness. Prizing roundness and child-like features, cuteness does not necessitate the sensuous curves and long legs commanded by Western ideals during the Meiji era.[31] As Lolita styles can “hide the body shape underneath layers of slips, petticoats, and panniers and look just as appropriate on larger builds as on slim ones,” the community is inclusive of body types that would be rejected by groups adhering to Japanese norms of female sexuality.[32] In this way, the choice-based beauty that Lolita commands replaces regular norms of sexuality through its role of affirming young women of their aesthetic value. The difference lies in how Lolita liberates members from the pressure of over-revealing oneself to accommodate the male gaze.
By redefining the gaze that young Japanese women serve and by removing the expectation of sex from the female body, Lolita is a culture that serves institutional goals. The success of preserving the idea that child-like cuteness is of paramount beauty and that Lolita is for female youth lies in Lolita’s success in controlling female bodies according to its rules. This makes the subculture akin to a school or a factory; it is an institution that demands not only conformity in behavior but also control over thought and sexuality.[33] Younker observed praise among Lolita boutique employees when a female shopper entered with a goth boyfriend.[34] She writes that commercial spaces where Lolita girls are seen proudly with these ideal romantic partners lead to Lolita girls becoming “more content to worship a vision of their ideal man than actually settle down with a real one.”[35] Though the lifestyle does not command surveillance and control over thought as extensively as prison systems and factories do, the obsessive world of Lolita shares parallels with Foucauldian institutions in their necessitation of drawing economic power from consumers. While the hospital institutions Michel Foucault writes about employ fee-paying systems for treatment, Lolita boutiques sell clothes and accessories for consumers to gain access to the Lolita lifestyle.[36] Though sexuality denotes the revelation and commodification of the body, the norms of Lolita commands the covering up of the body with capitalist commodities.
By exercising the ideological power characteristic of an institution, Lolita has allowed its followers to adopt a sub-national identity grounded in their allegiance to Lolita fashion and demeanor. In Japan, Lolita is significant in its ability to liberate female youth from the educational, social, and sexual expectations imposed upon them – even if access to this identity will expire with age and entrance into motherhood. Lolita is a gentle and playful outlet for female youth to protest against the expectations imposed upon them by agents who do not consider their innermost desires. To escape to the childish reverie of innocence and freedom is a choice made possible by the continuous consumption and promotion of capitalist fashion. In this way, Lolita supports the Japanese national identity of economic prowess while allowing female youth a means to rebel without inflicting tremendous consequences upon the social order. Lolita is an accessible outlet for female youth to express their independence in thought before they eventually succumb to the responsibilities expected of adult Japanese women.
Cheryl Cheung is a third year double majoring in political science and American studies. She is currently on Fulbright at American University as a Killam Fellow. As well, Cheryl is undertaking research on partisanship in political ad text as an undergraduate research fellow at the Northrop Frye Centre. In her spare time, she enjoys baking bread, skiing, and paddle boarding.
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[1] Teresa Younker, “Japanese Lolita: Dreaming, Despairing, Defying,” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 11, no. 1 (May 2012): 104.
[2] Katsuya Hirano, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 199, https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226060736.
[3] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 104.
[4] Elyssa Faison, “Keeping ‘Idle Youngsters’ Out of Trouble: Japan’s 1929 Abolition of Night Work and the Problem of Free Time,” Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan, (2007): 27, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520934184-005.
[5] Faison, “Keeping,” 38.
[6] Faison, “Keeping,” 38-39.
[7] Zi Young Kang and Cassidy Tracy, “Lolita Fashion: A Trans-global Subculture,” Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 2, no. 3 (2015): 4.
[8] Faison, “Keeping,” 47.
[9] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 97.
[10] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 110.
[11] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 100.
[12] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 108.
[13] Faison, “Keeping,” 45.
[14] Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso, 2014), 131.
[15] Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 133.
[16] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 102.
[17] Hirano, The Politics, 202.
[18] Hirano, The Politics, 202.
[19] Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 76.
[20] Gramsci, “Selections,” 76.
[21] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 101.
[22] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 101.
[23] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 101.
[24] Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Selections, 77.
[25] Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Selections, 78.
[26] Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 197.
[27] Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 115.
[28] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 106.
[29] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 101.
[30] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 101.
[31] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 104.
[32] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 105.
[33] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Social Identities 2, no. 3 (1996): 82.
[34] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 108.
[35] Younker, “Japanese Lolita,” 108.
[36] Foucault, “Truth,” 83.