The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

In 2003, the Japanese Lolita subculture was almost unheard of in the
West. As an academic research area, as far as I can still gather, it was non-
existent. Despite knowing this, I had studied this movement enough to
believe that it was a worthwhile topic to pursue, and having read the existing
literature in relation to the frameworks I have used to construct this thesis, I
understood that it was possible to accomplish this task as a research project;
as such I proposed it as my postgraduate topic in 2004. But the real problem
was not convincing myself; it was convincing others. I could get no one to
support me on it, no one would touch it, and without a potential supervisor
I could not go ahead. Almost all reactions were, “I’ve never heard of it”; and
one comment was, “I don’t believe you can pull this off and, even if you
can, who wants to read it?”. My comeback was that “someone probably
thought the same about Punk, once”. I was not deterred, and even though I
was not formally enrolled as a student, I continued with my research. In the
meantime, I became fully ensconced in the Lolita subculture both as a
researcher and as a participant.
After relocating from Australia to New Zealand in 2006, I came up
against some similarly negative reactions to this topic as an area of research.
Having gained a position in the Fashion department at AUT University,
however, I was encouraged by some of my peers who saw value in the
subject. In the same year I proposed an abstract for a paper based on the
film, Kamikaze Girls, which had just been released with English subtitles, to
the Fashion in Film conference, held at the University of Technology, Sydney,
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