The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

The Literature
As the Lolita subculture, specifically, is a relatively recent research area,
published academic material is quite scarce. The Lolita movement, however,
has been thriving since the time I began my research and as such the
phenomenon is often discussed in mass print media (newspapers and
magazines) worldwide. My reading around the movement largely
concentrates, therefore, on journalistic sources. I have filtered these
examples according to quality by choosing to concentrate on reports that
consult anthropologists, psychologists and academics on youth and gender
issues in Japan and or countries that the Lolita phenomenon has penetrated.
In regard to academic writings, only several have appeared in recent
years. Yuniya Kawamura, for example, mentions the Lolita movement in
two essays that discuss the overall topic of Japanese street fashions in
context with the effects of Japan’s socio-economic environment on youth in
recent decades: “Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion” (2006); and
“Japanese Street Fashion: The Urge to be Seen and to be Heard” (2007).
The most useful text in terms of the movement’s ideologies is Isaac Gagné’s
“Urban Princesses” (2008), which discusses the “little-girl” paradigm in
Japan, and the affected and performative nature of Japanese women who
represent themselves as little girls. Gagné also discusses the reputation of
the Japanese Lolita in terms of class, elevating her status and differentiating
her from the more sexualised Japanese Maid.
Page | 30