When erotic meets cute: Erokawa and the public expression of female sexuality in contemporary Japan

Abstract

This article addresses a conspicuous phenomenon within the burgeoning cute cultures of contemporary Japannamely, pre-adult women adopting a fashion style that is simultaneously cute and hyper-sexy. While both cuteness and hyper-sexuality stand in contradiction to the norms of Japan's patriarchal gender system, public amalgamations of these two elements constitute a trend initiated by and for some contemporary young Japanese women. Through a series of ethnographic observations and theoretical reflections, the authors aim to uncover how the initially subcultural cute fashion phenomenon was brought to public attention by incorporating hyper-sexy elements into a 'sexy' facade that publicly signalled these young women taking control of their own sexuality. Such a transformation not only works to reclaim these practitioners' sexual identities as women, but may also destabilize prevailing perceptions of acceptable (or desirable) feminine behaviour through the very instruments of sexuality that are readily produced and made available in the heterosexual consumer market.

Neo-ethnic Self-Styling among Young Indigenous People of Brazil: Re-Appropriating Ethnicity through Cultural Hybridity

“…The cultural space of hybridization is thus expanded and diversified beyond Bhabha's intra-state situatedness, and locates itself in a more "universal" cultural space. This observation is similar to Aoyagi and Yuen's (2016) finding in reference to the case of erokawa fashion, a phenomenon in contemporary urban Japan where women adopt erotic-cute styles as a way of empowering themselves in the public domain through hyperbolic self-styling (2016: 99). The Indigenous youth of Brazil similarly empower themselves through public transformations from passive objects of colonialism to neoethnically self-empowered actors, which we may call neo-ethnic protagonism.…”