What makes a "bad girl" bad? -- that is the question posed in this book. "The answer is that badness is attributed to such females by a sexist and male-dominated society that attempts to define, limit and control women.
Women who defy patriarchies, such as Japan, always provoke an intense concern, a serious censure, and a very public debate. A subversive potential is posited when out-of-line women become such a public focus. Censure becomes necessary because negative labeling then fortifies the patriarchal system.
This perceived subversion is of serious concern to dominant males who often read female independence as a threat. For, as Maxime Hong Kingston put it: "Isn't being a bad girl almost like being a boy?"
Male manipulation is obvious, but correcting the situation in a world where it is the men who have the power is not easy. Further, it is usually men who are telling the story -- writing the histories, the religious doctrines, framing the laws.
More and more, however, women are speaking out and this collection of essays on the positing of bad girls is one of the most outspoken. It came about through several scholarly conferences, one sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and the other by the Association for Asian Studies. Publication of a collection of papers became possible and this book is the result.
In it the various forms of badness to which women are said to be prone are examined and assessed. The editors write that this "cast of transgressive women comprises a continuum of 'bad girls' all of whom have deliberately disrupted Japanese society in some fashion, whether or not they intended their actions to be read as bad."
One of the earliest in this very large cast is the corrupt Izanami, the primordial goddess who gave birth to the islands of Japan and their deities. Here Rebecca Copeland asks: "Why must the female be corrupt? Why not the male? The male form, with its seemingly uncontrollable erections and ejaculations, ought to be as easily represented as mysterious and monstrous."
The line is followed to the most recent manifestation of Izanami, the fashion of several years back for the yamanba mountain-hag look with its darkened visage. Here Sharon Kinsella indicates that the "monstrous" has its uses. She sees that "a complex antiphony has evolved between the proscriptions of virginal, obedient, gentle and maternal-ideal Japanese girls, emanating entirely from the male camp, and what might be called the 'anti-Japanese' tendency of girls' culture."
Along the way are more examples of ways in which Japanese women have reacted against male restriction. Melanie Czarnecki writes about "degenerate" schoolgirls taking up arms against the Education Ministry's assertion that higher schools exist merely for "the nourishment of good wives and wise mothers." Kelly Foreman redefines the geisha, really "a versatile performing artist who derives her identity within a context that the public casts in a bad light."
Jan Bardsley and Hiroko Hirakawa write on "Shopping Queen" Usagi Nakamura and her famous assertion that it is not the worth or longevity of the desired item. Rather it is the power implied. "We buy brand goods because they are brand goods!"
Christine Marran writes on super-bad-girl Abe Sada -- "so bad she's good"; Gretchen Jones writes on "ladies' comics," and Laura Miller writes on the photographs that bad girls take, and decorate, and deface. "By inserting their private, ugly or 'sexy' personae into the public sphere, girls are defying the cultural rule that women should display restraint, modesty, and self-effacement in public."
There is much more in this highly interesting and long-needed volume -- 11 scholars write and there is a luminous afterword by the late Miriam Silverberg -- but this will give an idea of the range and relevance of this collection.
Though the mountain-hag look has receded into the labyrinth of history there are many other indications that there is a war on.
Even the formula for "cute" carries a gun. As Laura Miller writes: "Girls have seized creative control of the commodified female image . . . they have taken a familiar form of gender commodification and used it for their own purposes." Upwards and onward, Hello Kitty!
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