"Girls are dancin": shōjo culture and feminism in contemporary Japanese art

Abstract

This thesis identifies a growing trend in the use of the shojo girl motif in contemporary Japanese art and positions it as an emerging new feminist expression inspired by locally determined gender-transgression. Japan’s current output of artists, exhibitions and art publications show that the Japanese girl—the shojo— is a ubiquitous presence. Shojo is an increasingly common point of figurative reference for contemporary Japanese artists, a complex cultural construct, and a wide-spread motif in present-day Japanese culture. The shojo is conveying a strong female youth culture that fosters anti-hegemonic gender subjectivities amid a context of social and moral panic. This thesis departs from Japanese feminine stereotypes to pay particular interest to an emerging wave of figurative contemporary art practices in which the figure of the shojo is utilised for a new generation of feminist critique. Aoshima Chiho, Kunikata Mahomi, Miyashita Maki, Takano Aya, Sawada Tomoko and Yanagi Miwa are contemporary artists whose works feature representations of Japanese girls to negate stereotypes and alternately foreground the female subjectivities found in shojo culture. Through this gesture, the artists propose ways in which the shojo has, and can, transgress the boundaries of gender hegemony within contemporary Japanese society. The theoretical framework for this thesis explores an overlap in the transgressive modes of local Japanese with global culture where it concerns new feminist expression in contemporary art. This expanding theoretical framework for contemporary feminist art finds its context in art practice in the 2007 "Global feminisms" exhibition which included Japanese art. Contemporary art is defined in this thesis as a cultural and conceptual break with Modernism’s Western centric values. While feminist art and its scholarship has been in many respects at the fore of this break from Modernist values, it was not until the past two decades that feminist art found synergy with other identity politics. As a result, newer feminist art has produced new ways of understanding gender politics. In Japan, the figure of the shojo is a vehicle for these new ideas. In working at the intersection of the three themes of shojo, contemporary Japanese art and contemporary feminism, this thesis will argue the importance of this figure to feminist expression in contemporary Japanese art, and global feminism more generally.