Bad girls
06/27/2005 @ 8:00 am
A collection of academic essays, titled “Bad Girls of Japan”, will be published soon by Palgrave MacMillan Press in the UK.
The book will explore the way deviant women who have defied patriarchies have long provoked moral panic in Japan and also examines bad-girl photography, extreme makeup and brand consumption among contemporary Japanese girls and women. “Bad Girls of Japan” will also spotlight the politics of propriety in Japan these days, the boundaries of gender and the delight audiences take in being shocked by the misbehavior of these young postmodern Japanese women, according to the book’s co-editors, Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley.
“Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere.”
June 27th, 2005 at 8:14 amSomehow, I think this book will not be as entertaining as the title promises. “Defying patrtiarchy,” oh my! The “boundries of gender,” shocking!
This is the kind of stuff that could only excite someone with an advanced degree in political correctness. Leave it to them to take the fun out of sex.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:34 amIt turns out, my mistake earlier, this are not short stories written by Japanese women, but academic essays written by women overseas studying this phenomenon of “bad girls” in Japanese culture. Perhaps some of the contributors will chime in here when they read Japundit.com
One question the book tries to answer is:
Are the bad girls of today’s Japan casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers?
Should make for an interesting read.
In a recent email to this poster, Professor Miller added: “Our book will be published in November. The US website lists the contributors and their chapter titles. All the authors are academics, ranging from new PhDs to senior scholars, so all of us did our own translations of course.”
LINKS:
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403969477
Yes, the book is written by academic with PhDs, and it might be a bit dry, and the cost is around US$25 for the paperback and US$75 for the hardback edition, so this might be one of the “publish or perish” academic exercises for the authors involved, but let’s reserve judgement and see.
As soon as I get a copy, I will post the cover art, and maybe we can invite the two co-editors to post some comments here.
Stayed tuned.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:45 amTable of Contents (tentative):
Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake–Rebecca Copeland
Bad Girls Confined: Okuni, Geisha, and the Negotiation of Female Performance Space–Kelly Foreman
* Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl–Melanie Czarnecki
* Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Good Girls– Sarah Frederick
* So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in Postwar Japan–Christine Marran
* Bad Girls Like It Rough: Japanese Women Writing on Masochism–Gretchen Jones
* Branded: Bad Girls Go Shopping–Jan Bardsley and Hiroko Hirakawa
* Bad Girl Photography–Laura Miller
* Blackfaces, Witches, and Racism against Girls–Sharon Kinsella
* Filipina Modern: “Bad” Filipino Women in Japan–Nobue Suzuki
* Sex with Nation: The OK Girls Cabaret–Katherine Mezur
June 27th, 2005 at 11:47 amGirl Terrors (Shojo Tero)
Just when you think you know everything you need to know about Japan’s culture of “cute”, along comes a Berkeley professor with a take on what she calls Japan’s “shojo tero” (girl terrors). Yes, Professor Katherine Mezur recently presented a paper at an academic conference in Chicago, trying to explain how Japan’s “Cute/Pop Culture Has Been Modified for Girl Consumption.”
”The little girls of new media art, comics, and performance terrorize and delight.”
June 27th, 2005 at 4:12 pmA small correction to my original post, above: not all of the authors of this book live “overseas” — in fact, Ms. Suzuki is a professor in Nagasaki, Ms. Copeland is currently in Kyoto where she’s been a visiting professor for the year, and Professor Czarnecki teaches at Sophia University in Tokyo.
All the authors have experience living in Japan for extended periods of time.
Here is a link to an article in the Harvard Asia Quarterly which is an earlier version of one of the chapters in the Bad Girls book.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/200303/0303a003.htm
June 27th, 2005 at 9:34 pmit is cool
November 20th, 2005 at 2:24 pm