The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

women should be providing a “safe haven” at home, 206 appears to have still
held authority in Japan and elsewhere.
The Japanese Lolita movement flies in the face of this historical
hegemony in that the forum for the subculture is the street. It can thus be
read as a “triumphant emblem of a newly configured” feminist model,
especially in its associations with “play”, “display”, and “parade”. In dressing
up and taking herself and her dolls out to congregate and promenade with
friends on the street, the Gothloli transfers the notion of private play to
public exhibition. She therefore transgresses the rule that women’s place is
in the home and trespasses the male domain. A true measurement that the
Lolita subculture is indeed radical, even subversive I believe, is that it
transcends this age-old patriarchal order in that the Gothloli has reclaimed
her right to play in the streets like the boys, without shame. *
* In reference to Benedict’s comment that as children girls traditionally “played in the streets with
the boys” knowing “no shame” (see page 193 of this thesis); Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1967; repr., London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1977), p. 192.
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