著者

有田 亘 アリタ ワタル Wataru Arita

雑誌

国際研究論叢 : 大阪国際大学紀要 = OIU journal of international studies

巻号頁・発行日

vol.26, no.3, pp.1-20, 2013-03-31

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Many clothing styles of young Japanese women are driven by a desire to make themselves "look cute". However, girls dressed in the Lolita fashion, which is characterized by feverishly pursuing dollish or princess-like girly "cuteness" (kawaii), seldom show any interest in being looked at as "me in a cute dress." These are gestures to block other people’s eyes. And at the same time, they do not hide their great pleasure in seeing "lovely dressed girls" rather than being seen as lovely girls. For them, wearing Lolita fashion seems to have become a means not to "see" lovely things, but to "be seen as lovely". Japanese culture is often classified as a "shame culture," in which an aspect of "see or to be seen as" something is accompanied by cultural and political asymmetry between men and women or an aspect of being too much concerned about people’s eyes, as if suffering from scoptophobia. In these girls’ unique fashion, we might be able to find a possibility of transformational subversion against such conservative attitudes. Using interviews, we would like to examine this phenomenon from the viewpoint of media theory.