The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

In reference to the Japanese movement, Deborah Cameron has
suggested this notion, maintaining that “for women in Japan” Lolita is a
positive feminist force simply “because it is not about men. Nor is it about
housekeeping, children, mothers-in-law, dead-end part-time work or the
national obsession with raising the birth rate”. 181
women.
How may this shift have come about? Let us diverge, for a moment,
away from the subculture, to a history of the notion of Lolita as a universal
motif but from a particular viewpoint that she is the victim of voyeurism, a
vulnerable and potentially corruptible child (rather than one who is
essentially already corrupted),
*
Lolita is about and for
beginning with a nineteenth-century
movement known as the Cult of the Little Girl, or the Cult of the Child.
* In reference to the dualistic reading of Nabokov’s Lolita (depending on one’s take on it) and its
influence on the reputation of “Lolita” as a term for either a sexually corrupted but promiscuous
child or simply a victim of rape.
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