The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

Just what kind of power is gained through manufacturing a sexuality based on
vulnerability and childlike frailty? One would think that infantalizing women’s
bodies and eroticizing girls… would endanger the power of both. What happened
to the battle that has been waged… in the effort to have women called “women”
instead of girls? The question remains, then, why women would want to rename
themselves as Lolitas [sic]. 176
Feldman raised these questions not in relation to the Japanese Lolita
movement, specifically, but in the context of Fine Art, whereby she
identified, at her time of writing in the 1990s, a newfound obsession with
the sexualised “little girl” as subject matter within the arts industry. This
period, as I have discussed, was also concurrent with the rise of the Lolita in
Japan. However, in recognising these issues, Feldman also argued that
Lolita, “the sexualised child” of Nabokovian tradition, is not back “per se”. 177
Feldman claimed that Lolita, “as a name, a category, which designates,
laments or applauds young girls’ sexual desirability, lost its specificity long
ago…. Lolita has become divorced from the narrative specifics of her
story”. 178 The new Lolita is “now being celebrated by women as a positive
symbol that they are anxious to claim as their own and assert”. 179 Lolita has
become “an object of desire… for women and young girls”. 180 In my
opinion, these statements describe, aptly and exactly, my own sentiments in
regard to an analysis of the Japanese Lolita.
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