source: http://pdf.jpf-sydney.org/newvoices/5/chapter6.pdf
"Found throughout the practices of many young Japanese artists, the shōjo motif is key to understanding some of Japan’s best recent contributions to contemporary feminist art. . . . The Japanese term “shōjo” is particularly useful to gender discussions of the Japanese girl. It is a way of referring to someone as feminine, but with a distinct suggestion of youth. Kotani Mari defines shōjo as the ‘juvenile existence....prior to the adoption of adult femininity’.7 The shōjo is ‘free and arrogant, unlike meek and dutiful musume [daughter] or pure and innocent otome [maiden]’.8 “Daughter” and “maiden” both suggest the presence of a male authority in determining the girl’s identity, while the concept of shōjo has neither of these connections."(p. 130-131.)
"Writers such as the widely quoted Japanese sociologist Ôtsuka Eiji have shaped stereotypes by discussing the shōjo as representing ‘an exotic and longed-for world of individual fulfillment, decadence, consumption and play’.10 It is only in the closed world of shōjo culture that girls negate these wide-held stereotypes.
The exclusivity of shōjo culture is one reason why a shōjo’s gender transgressions are typically not a politically didactic public statement. The intriguing, even paradoxical politics evident in young Japanese women’s lives are a potent source of artistic critique. They are a generation who are described by feminist curator Kasahara Michiko as having little awareness or contact with women’s rights campaigns in comparison to their awareness of its very public backlash in the media.11 While “feminist” per se is not a widespread political allegiance for Japanese youth, some characteristics of shōjo culture share in common tactics found in contemporary - or what is called “third-wave” - feminism.
[...]
The shōjo motif is a distinct, recurring graphic figure found in many contemporary Japanese artists’ works within the last two decades. The artists chosen for mention in this article are far from the only current Japanese artists interested in the shōjo motif, but what differentiates them from others is their use of the shōjo motif in reference to the gender-transgressive expressions found in shōjo culture. A celebration of femininity and girlishness is one theme that overlaps in third-wave feminist thought and shōjo culture. By assembling arguments about the gender-transgressive nature of shōjo culture along with the prevalence of the shōjo motif in contemporary Japanese art, it is possible to contextualise the shōjo motif in the world stage of contemporary feminist art"(132)
...
shōjo 이미지를 폭력적으로 성적 대상화하는 두 인물: Aida Makoto, Araki
...
그리곤 지지할 만한 6인의 아티스트 소개. 이 아티스트는 그가 보기에 이 작가들은 아라키나 아이다 마코토완 다르게 접근함: "‘approaches to female gender and identity that have little in common with such objectifying and otherwise predominant tropes.'" 그리고 소녀(순정?) 이미지를 "the fantastic, girlish aesthetics or gender-transgressive concepts found in shōjo culture"--이런 방식으로 창조적으로 사용.
"Sandra Buckley declares “aaa, kawaiiiiii!” as the ‘rallying cry of the shôjo’. Although not exclusive to shōjo culture, kawaii (cute) finds a special place with youth and especially girls. When defining the phenomenon of kawaii and its role in contemporary Japanese art, Vartanian focuses on how it is not necessarily shallow because ‘cuteness, though ostensibly devoid of irony, does not negate darkness, and can in fact be a means to accessing darkness, as characters become loci of emotion and identification’."(134; 강조 인용자)
1. Aoshima Chiho
"Aoshima Chiho, in a sense, illustrates Vartanian’s speculations. Through a cute aesthetic (which can double as a shōjo aesthetic), including girls with big doe-eyes and small faces, she makes the shōjo’s body cute as well as ugly, abject, scary, funny or epic. . . . The physical transgressions and abject presentations challenge what is cute and beautiful about the objectified shōjo, and Aoshima makes this point via a flowery, cute shōjo aesthetic."(134-135)
2. Kunikata Mahomi
"[쿠니카타는] ... …expresses the fantasies of the adolescent feminine unconscious but gives them violent forms….Kunikata adopts their sadomasochism but intensifies the nightmarish atmosphere by placing her adolescent characters in violent situations that involve murder, beheadings, cannibalism, and disintegration. Her works evoke both the horror of losing one’s identity and the erotic pleasure of such submission."
"Aida Makoto, introduced before, is an artist troubled by questions about sex and exploitation,26 but instead of seeking a visual language outside of dominant patriarchal culture, his art exaggerates and sensationalises his own powerful position as a man. Similarly, Kunikata’s shōjo are often bleeding, in pain, or dying, but this is where their commonalities stop. In contrast, Kunikata foregrounds the shōjo’s psychological state, and her personal anxieties. Kunikata makes critique by expressing her own seemingly powerless position as shōjo."
3. Takano Aya
"Takano Aya’s paintings and drawings refer to the girl-only spaces imagined in shōjo culture combined with her inspiration from science fiction. As a Micropop artist, and a self-confessed science-fiction fan, Takano’s art is described by Matsui as works made by an ‘“adolescent” mind’.28 Placed in science-fiction backgrounds, Takano’s kawaii shōjo become like aliens. The artist often has her shōjo as ‘interstellar immigrants’,29 transiting through environments such as space, the sky, or underwater. . . . Contrasting the soft, thin bodies of the shōjo against the hyper-urban background shows the vulnerability and shock of these figures. There is a shape in the sky, perhaps a spaceship, which further suggests that they are fantastical aliens in this environment. . . . Takano visually refers to a fantasy (specifically, science-fiction) convention often found in shōjo manga and fictions. In Matsui’s words, Takano is a creator of ‘subversively feminine visions of Utopia’."
4. Sawada Tomoko
"Sawada Tomoko works with female identity in all its variable forms, including exploring the various signifiers for shōjo. She pushes definitions of what it is to be a selfportraitist through multiple acts of costume or role-play. At first glance, works such as School Days / A may look like an entire class of school-age shōjo and their teacher, but on closer inspection the faces, despite their different hair-cuts and expressions, have a certain sameness that suggests the masquerade that is actually happening: all figures are played by the artist. The School Days series brings up the essential role of schools to the formation of early shōjo culture and the hidden world of girls discussed by Kotani and Honda. . . . Sawada’s transformations are domestic in their scope—her focus is exclusively on the human, and more specifically, on her many, many variations of the feminine. In her Costume series, this transformation is achieved by changing her attire in each photograph to suit different jobs."
5. Yanagi Miwa
등등...
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다음은 포스트/뉴페미니즘에 관한 설명. 여기서 전-여성적 단계로서의 소녀스러움이 굉장히 중요한 듯...
"While its definition is often contested, third-wave feminism has come to shape contemporary feminism and feminist art through its emphasis on concepts such as intersection, contradiction and self-conscious politics. Third-wave feminism is historicised by Carisa Showden as a discourse informed by various notions of “new feminisms”, or so-called postfeminism, neo-feminism, etc., that began emerging in the 1980s and found momentum at the start of the 1990s.43 The 1990s was a time when feminism’s interest in sexual and gender difference between men and women made way for ‘an emphasis on the differences among women’,44 shown by the popularity of referring to feminism as a plural, and best articulated with the terms second-wave versus thirdwave feminism. By the beginning of the 1990s many theorists and artists were revising how feminist discourses relate to and align with other social and cultural revolutions such as queer studies, anti-racism and the post-colonial movement. Showden describes third-wave politics as:
…a committed focus on intersectional identities and multilayered discrimination. While intersectionality is not itself a “politics”, it is an attempt to shift the epistemological standpoint of feminism, providing a new subject position from which feminist critique is articulated.45
In Showden’s analysis of the politics behind the new feminisms, she focuses on postfeminism’s popularist role as the forerunner for so-called “girlie” or girl power feminism (the catch-cry for iconic 1990s pop group The Spice Girls). It is a movement described as ‘the best known and largest group of third wavers’.46 Girls, as opposed to women, have been embraced as a youth category as well as a state of mind in thirdwave feminism. The following is third-wave feminists Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ definition of girlhood: ‘those grown women on Sex in [sic] the City who in their independence, their bonds with female friends, and their love of feminine fashion invoke a sense of eternal girlhood’.47 In a key third-wave text, Manifesta, girlie feminism is defined as consisting of feminist principles ‘based on a reclaiming of girl culture (or feminine accoutrements that were tossed out with sexism during the Second Wave), be it Barbie, housekeeping, or girl talk’.48 Jennifer Eisenhauer notes how, for a long time, the figure of the girl has been a ‘repeatedly othered subject within feminisms’,49 but in third-wave feminism girls are often positioned as the “daughters” of second-wave feminism. While reference to daughters (in English or Japanese) can imply the seniority of a father over his child, in the third-wave context she comes from a matriarchal lineage. Therefore, as well as being a critique of racial hegemony and Western bias, third-wave ‘came to be specifically associated with a “young” feminist generation’50 of self-described girls. Third-wave feminism is ideally positioned as the discourse for shōjo."(강조는 인용자)
결론: 포스트페미니즘은 '순정' 담론에 잘 맞다.
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