BAD GIRLS OF JAPAN; ED. BY LAURA MILLER

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction....Pages 1-14 Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake....Pages 15-32 Bad Girls Confined: Okuni, Geisha, and the Negotiation of Female Performance Space....Pages 33-48 Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl....Pages 49-64 Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Good Girls....Pages 65-80 So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in Postwar Japan, Abe Sada....Pages 81-96 Bad Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies’ Comics....Pages 97-110 Branded: Bad Girls Go Shopping....Pages 111-126 Bad Girl Photography....Pages 127-142 Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls....Pages 143-158 Filipina Modern: “Bad” Filipino Women in Japan....Pages 159-173 Sex with Nation: The OK (Bad) Girls Cabaret....Pages 175-189 Afterword: AND some NOT SO BAD....Pages 191-196 Back Matter....Pages 197-222

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? By tracing the concept of the bad girl in Japan 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. The essays explore deviancy in richly diverse media. Mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls, and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

Proposing shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing ways to understand them through the case of Japan, this book maps roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender and explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild