“Turning Japanese”: Deconstructive Criticism of White Women, the Western Imagination, and Popular Music

Abstract

Singers Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne are among the most recent White women performers to appropriate Japanese femininity. In Perry's November 2013 performance of “Unconditionally,” she used Orientalist imagery of premodern Japan, and in Lavigne's 2014 single “Hello Kitty,” she used techno‐Orientalist imagery of Harajuku street fashion, kawaii, and Japanese‐as‐cyborg. I argue that like White women performers, who performed Japanese femininity in the turn of the 20th century, Perry and Lavigne caricatured Japanese femininity as a hybrid costume to advance their own subjectivities. Yet, I also show through deconstructive criticism that their spectacular use of juxtaposition and excess creates “obtuse meanings” in which subversive meanings escape and opportunistically challenge the dominant meaning of the texts.

Sugar and spice (and everything nice?): Japan’s ambition behind Lolita’s Kawaii aesthetics

“…This study uses an intersectional, transnational approach to study race and gender, which calls for an awareness of the appropriation of whiteness outside the United States and the changing racial representation in the global media, as the discourse of cultural appropriation has been centered on how the West appropriated the racialized Other within the United States (hooks bell, 2015; Oh, 2017). Moreover, I use Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘juxtapolitical’ cultural practices and Brian McVelgh’s concept of cuteness as a kind of ‘resistance consumption’ to understand the nuanced meanings of ‘postfeminist’ glamor like Lolita fashions, which are consumption-driven but are meaningful for their wearers to subtly rebel patriarchal capitalism.…”

“…Moreover, the issue of cultural appropriation further precludes people in the West from understanding the spirit of the Lolita girls. For example, cultural critics have considered Stefani’s ‘Harajuku Girls’, a team of four Japanese and Japanese American dancers who wore sexy Lolita-styled fashions and crown-like make-up, as cultural appropriation and even a caricature of East Asians, as the Japanese dancers hardly represent the actual agentic, rebellious kawaii girls in the streets of Japan (Mackie, 2010; Oh, 2017; Winge, 2008).…”

“…If the overrepresentation of Caucasian models in Lolita brands does not apply to brands that have extended to the West, how is Lolita marketed in the West? To go beyond the analysis of how the mainstream Western media stigmatized and misrepresented the Lolita phenomenon (Hinton, 2014; Mackie, 2009; Oh, 2017; Winge, 2008), I investigate the fan publication Gothic & Lolita Bible (GLB).…”