Bad Girls of Japan

by L. Miller, J. Bardsley

Overview

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403969460
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/12/2005
Edition description:	2005
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

REBECCA COPELAND is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA MELANIE CZARNECKI is a Lecturer in the faculty of foreign studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan KELLY FOREMAN is a Lecturer in the departments of anthropology and music at Wayne State University, USA SARAH FREDERICK is an Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at Boston University, USA HIROKO HIRAKAWA is an Assistant Professor of Japanese and intercultural studies at Guilford College in North Carolina, USA GRETCHEN JONES is an Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at the University of Maryland, USA SHARON KINSELLA researches in the areas of men's comics, cuteness and infantilism, otaku, corporate culture and girls' culture in contemporary Japan CHRISTINE MARRAN is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA KATHERINE MEZUR is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, USA MIRIAM SILVERBERG is Professor of History at University College Los Angeles, USA NOBUE SUZUKI is Professor of Anthropology at Nagasaki Wesleyan University, Japan

Table of Contents

Introduction; L.Miller & J.Bardsley Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake; R.Copeland Bad Girls Confined: Okuni, Geisha, and the Negotiation of Female Performance Space; K.Foreman Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl; M.Czarnecki Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko's Good Girls; S.Frederick So Bad She's Good: The Masochist's Heroine in Postwar Japan; C.Marran Bad Girls Like It Rough: Japanese Women Writing on Masochism; G.Jones Branded: Bad Girls Go Shopping; J.Bardsley & H.Hirakawa Bad Girl Photography; L.Miller Blackfaces, Witches, and Racism Against Girls; S.Kinsella Filipina Modern: 'Bad' Filipino Women in Japan; N.Suzuki Sex with Nation: The OK Girls Cabaret; K.Mezur Afterword; M.Silverberg

Editorial Reviews

"Miller and Bardsley have amassed a fascinating collection of bad-girl tales - from geisha to fashionistas, Filipinas to schoolgirls, crones to idols. More importantly, they frame these bad girls of Japan within historical and contemporary complexities of gender, sexuality, race, class, and modernity. Here we find that one era s bad girl becomes another s model of womanhood. Amidst this surfeit of riches, Miller and Bardsley themselves take on the task of bad-girl provocateurs, disrupting commonly held notions with in-your-face, intellectual naughtiness. In their hands, bad is good if it sets tongues wagging to reclaim the territory of you go, girl! deviance." - Christine R. Yano, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Hawaii

"Bad Girls of Japan reminds us how powerful a tool feminist analysis can be for understanding gendered societies, laying bare both the fundamental structure of institutions and attitudes and also the cultural nuances that inflect gender assumptions in different places. In a nutshell, bad girls in Japan are females who are insufficiently ashamed of their own desires. But girls and women have desires, sometimes disturbing but frequently simply to control their own movements, incomes, and lives. This rich and well-written collection of essays shows what happens culturally and historically when they try to satisfy those desires." - Laura Hein, Department of History, Northwestern University

"The book has provided a fascinating insight into the ways in which Japanese women are and have been represented and imagined." - Sarah Smart, London Metropolitan University

From the Publisher