Bad Girls of Japan

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Laura Miller, Jan Bardsley

   Pages 1-14

3. Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake

   • Rebecca Copeland

   Pages 15-32

4. Bad Girls Confined: Okuni, Geisha, and the Negotiation of Female Performance Space

   • Kelly Foreman

   Pages 33-48

5. Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl

   • Melanie Czarnecki

   Pages 49-64

6. Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Good Girls

   • Sarah Frederick

   Pages 65-80

7. So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in Postwar Japan, Abe Sada

   • Christine Marran

   Pages 81-96

8. Bad Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies’ Comics

   • Gretchen I. Jones

   Pages 97-110

9. Branded: Bad Girls Go Shopping

   • Jan Bardsley, Hiroko Hirakawa

   Pages 111-126

10. Bad Girl Photography

    • Laura Miller

    Pages 127-142

11. Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls

    • Sharon Kinsella

    Pages 143-158

12. Filipina Modern: “Bad” Filipino Women in Japan

    • Nobue Suzuki

    Pages 159-173

13. Sex with Nation: The OK (Bad) Girls Cabaret

    • Katherine Mezur

    Pages 175-189

14. Afterword: AND some NOT SO BAD

    • Miriam Silverberg

    Pages 191-196

15. Back Matter

    Pages 197-222

    PDF

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

• gender
• politics
• women

"Miller and Bardsley have amassed a fascinating collection of bad-girl tales - from geisha to fashionistas, Filipinas to schoolgirls, crones to idols. More importantly, they frame these bad girls of Japan within historical and contemporary complexities of gender, sexuality, race, class, and modernity. Here we find that one era s bad girl becomes another s model of womanhood. Amidst this surfeit of riches, Miller and Bardsley themselves take on the task of bad-girl provocateurs, disrupting commonly held notions with in-your-face, intellectual naughtiness. In their hands, bad is good if it sets tongues wagging to reclaim the territory of you go, girl! deviance." - Christine R. Yano, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Hawaii

"Bad Girls of Japan reminds us how powerful a tool feminist analysis can be for understanding gendered societies, laying bare both the fundamental structure of institutions and attitudes and also the cultural nuances that inflect gender assumptions in different places. In a nutshell, bad girls in Japan are females who are insufficiently ashamed of their own desires. But girls and women have desires, sometimes disturbing but frequently simply to control their own movements, incomes, and lives. This rich and well-written collection of essays shows what happens culturally and historically when they try to satisfy those desires." - Laura Hein, Department of History, Northwestern University

"The book has provided a fascinating insight into the ways in which Japanese women are and have been represented and imagined." - Sarah Smart, London Metropolitan University

REBECCA COPELAND is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA MELANIE CZARNECKI is a Lecturer in the faculty of foreign studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan KELLY FOREMAN is a Lecturer in the departments of anthropology and music at Wayne State University, USA SARAH FREDERICK is an Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at Boston University, USA HIROKO HIRAKAWA is an Assistant Professor of Japanese and intercultural studies at Guilford College in North Carolina, USA GRETCHEN JONES is an Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at the University of Maryland, USA SHARON KINSELLA researches in the areas of men's comics, cuteness and infantilism, otaku, corporate culture and girls' culture in contemporary Japan CHRISTINE MARRAN is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA KATHERINE MEZUR is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, USA MIRIAM SILVERBERG is Professor of History at University College Los Angeles, USA NOBUE SUZUKI is Professor of Anthropology at Nagasaki Wesleyan University, Japan

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