Chair: Eve Zimmerman, Wellesley College

Throughout the 1980’s and up to the present, critics have read the figure of the shôjo (girl) as a cute, asexual being whose subjectivity was equated to cultural narcissim. and nostalgia and whose libido was channeled through an endless stream of disposable consumer goods. Our panel proposes a broader vision of the shôjo, giving her back her voice, reconnecting her with pressing issues that confronted women writers during a burst of literary activity in the 60’s and 70’s, and sketching out the historical, social, and literary conditions that nourished her in postwar Japan. To women writers, on the one hand, the shôjo is a conflicted but liberating figure, a means to negotiate tangled and perhaps irreconcilable issues of identity, gender, and the biological imperatives that script a woman’s life. In popular culture on the other hand, the shôjo is a repository of greater cultural and social tensions, a means to challenge accepted categories of representation, gender boundaries, and even aesthetic codes. Different media notwithstanding, the girl fascinates. Far from lacking in libido, we suggest that the shôjo maps out desire, configures the terms of agency, and continues to be a vital wellspring in women’s literary and cultural production. As a group we seek to reconnect the shôjo to women’s history, to issues of body and text, and to the shifting territories of media and new technology. A new vision of the shôjo, we believe, broadens the discussion of the category ‘woman’ in postwar Japan, allowing us to re-examine the obstacles that shape her, the acts of resistance that liberate her, and the limitations of our own critical and scholarly frames of reference.

Livia Monnet, University of Montreal

The surfeit of shôjo in contemporary Japanese popular culture has led critics to construe this figure as the very sign of late twentieth-century Japanese postmodernity. This paper argues that the shôjo characters in Oshii Mamoru’s well-known anime Ghost in the Shell (1996) and Nakada Hideo’s cult movie Ring 1 and Ring 2 (1999), are posited as virtual spectral doubles or doppelgangers serving to foreground the process of what David Bolter and Richard Grusin label "remediation" (the refashioning of one medium by another, as well as the simultaneous display and transformation of several media in the new digital technologies), and to resignify notions of the ghost/phantom, gender, body, subjectivity and fantasy both in these movies and in the emerging global digital culture in general.

What is particularly compelling in the works under scrutiny, is the fact that they depict remediation as a process that calls into question and refashions normative concepts, aesthetics and philosophies. Major Kusanagi, in Ghost in the Shell, for example, is a conglomerate of phantasmatic electronic data that can inhabit any manufactured humanoid body, merge with other computer-generated minds, and transform itself into an invisible ghostly presence that easily outdoes powerful male opponents. By positing remediation as the central technological process, Oshii’s brilliant anime and Nakada’s cult movie not only question recent Japanese diagnoses of the shôjo phenomenon, but at the same time redefine and repurpose notions of virtuality and spectrality. Such re-envisioning makes apparent the residual modernist-masculinist, nationalist-particularist understandings of identity and culture in both works.

Mari Kotani, Critic

Miyasato Chizuru, the famous photographer and feminist critic, invented the strong concept of the "cho- shôjo" (hyper-girl) in order to analyze the shonen-ai manga (comics dealing with homosexual love romance between boys) in the 1970’s. This paper aims to discuss the legacy of the hyper-girl and the impact she made on a TV animation series that aired in the mid-1990’s, Shôjo-kakumei UTENA (aired from April 2–December 24, 1997).

The fourteen-year-old girl, Utena, cherishes the vivid memory of a prince, whom she met only once in her childhood. She puts on a gakuran (Japanese school uniform for boys), and fights against many pseudo-princes. I would like to speculate on the reason why the girl becomes a prince herself in this Takarazuka-like animation, and what happened to the concept of the hyper-girl in the 1990’s.

Eve Zimmerman, Wellesley College

The figure of the shôjo (girl) takes center stage in Tsushima Yuko’s Moeru Kaze (Fiery Wind, 1980). Ariko, a troubled ten-year-old, extracts a grim form of justice from the world by terrifying a rival, smothering a toddler, and hastening the destruction of a mentor. A relentless unloveable heroine with a "dirty mouth," Ariko nevertheless flies. She climbs to the top of the school or high rocks by the sea, her arms stretched in imagined flight, her body filling with light, and surveys all that lies below her. At great heights, Ariko forges an impenetrable core of fantasy—a true life—that sustains and nourishes her in the world below.

My paper explores Tsushima’s fascination with the wayward girl, who appears in many of her early works, and suggests an alternative to theories of the shôjo that began to circulate in the 1980’s. Rather than serve as a faceless marker of hyper-consumerism, Tsushima’s shôjo becomes a cipher for the complex matrix of female identity, the woman-becoming-writer who necessarily carves out a certain distance from scripted roles, but who drifts into a backwater of self-hatred and rage. Ariko is that cipher, a creature who spins fantasy into flight, but who is sharply aware of how she looks in others’ eyes. The mesmerizing figure of the shôjo beckons and rebuffs, illuminating the position of the woman writer in the postwar period and leading us to new ground.

Mary Knighton, University of California, Berkeley

In the early 1960s, author Kôno Taeko (b. 1929) wrote Bishôjo ("Beautiful Girl," 1962), a story which relates protagonist Shôko’s masochistic relationships with two very different men. In order to tell this story, however, Kôno interpolates into the narrative a bizarre scene in which Shôko, a woman who "despises little girls," or shôjo, has to take care of three of them for an entire day. The subtle yet shocking intensity of this encounter between Shôko and the shôjo literally effects a split in the narrative focus on two men in Shôko’s life while affording a glimpse into the sexual and cultural construction of Shôko’s own feminine subjectivity. It is only with a recursive tracing of the signifier shôjo, however, that this scene reveals its ties to the psychic operations of Shôko. The echo of the shôjo’s laugh at the end of the story, I submit, may be less a sign of Shôko’s masochistic defeat by the "bishôjo" in their competition for a man than hint at the self-sufficient strength and even cruelty of the irrepressible shôjo foreclosed within Shôko herself.