The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

Yuniya Kawamura highlights Dick Hebdige’s observation that “girls
have [in the past] been relegated to a position of secondary interest within
both sociological accounts of subculture and photographic studies of urban
youth and [that] masculine bias [has existed]… in the subcultures
themselves”. 203 What is different about the Japanese Lolita movement is that
it is essentially a girls’ subculture. 204 This alone makes it revolutionary.
In the 1970s, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber also discussed the
anomaly in subcultures in regard to the invisibility of girls. According to
Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane Kehily, they:
speculate[d] that the relative absence of girls in subcultures may hinge around
issues of gender and space, [with] girls being more centrally involved in the
“private” domestic sphere of home and family life rather than the “public” world
of the street where most subcultural activities occur. 205
This observation illuminates the fact that historically – even within the realm
of subculture, which by term alone carries with it an emphasis on
underground or alternative behaviour, and is usually thus associated with
rebellion and disestablishmentarianism against mainstream ideologies – the
twentieth-century, until the emergence of the Japanese Lolita in the 1980s,
had achieved little in its progression from the nineteenth-century model of
women’s place in society. The Victorian culture of “separate spheres”,
which professed that the public space was to be reserved for men while
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