The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

Authors of two other academic articles also separate the Lolita
movement from sexual connotations while exploring its migration into
cultures outside Japan: Masafumi Monden examines the globalisation of
Lolita and views the fashion in a worldwide context as a hybridisation of
Western and Japanese sympathies in “Transcultural Flow… Examining
Cultural Globalisation through Gothic & Lolita Fashion” (2008); and
Osmud Rahman, Liu Wing-sun, Elita Lam and Chan Mong-tai observe the
outgrowth of the subculture in Hong Kong in “Lolita: The Imaginative Self”
(2011).
Several books on Japanese street and subcultural fashions, in general,
emerged in 2007, including Tiffany Godoy’s Style, Deficit Disorder; Philomena
Keet’s Tokyo Look Book; and Macias and Evers’ Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno; each
providing sections on the Lolita subculture, although none are substantial. A
magazine article titled “Turning Japanese” by Ella Mudie, published in New
Zealand by Pulp magazine (2008), cites Godoy’s research as well; and Sheila
Burgel’s “Dark and Lovely” in Bust (2007) highlights common perceptions
and misperceptions about the movement.
Terminology connected with the title of “Lolita” and the label’s sexual
evocations are investigated in Hannah J. Feldman’s “The ‘Lolita Complex’”
(1992). Another useful source for understanding, historically, the syndrome
known as the “Lolita Complex” is Stephanie Lovett Stoffel’s biography of
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Lewis Carroll and Alice (1997).
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