Minstrelized girls: male performers of Japan's Lolita complexстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Abstract There may be a useful parallel between the intense male cultural interest in and production of girl (shōjo/gyaru) characters in modern Japan, particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy in the north-eastern states of America in the mid-nineteenth century. Between the 1840s and the 1880s white vaudeville entertainers, including a high proportion of Irish men, blacked up with greasepaint, or burnt cork, and adopted comically outsized ‘Negro’ costumes, in which they performed songs, dances, comic dialogues, japery and narrative skits to white audiences. Staged minstrelsy was accompanied by the circulation of plantation songbooks, minstrel theatrical reviews and classical, abolitionist novels. Critics have suggested that this racial cultural language was integral to the emergence of American popular culture. In Japan, reportage, novels, films, animation, pornography and comics about girls have dominated professional and amateur cultural production and news reportage to such a degree that it is not possible to separate the epochal expansion of the media industries in the 1980s and 1990s from the driving attraction to these cultural caricatures. Most contemporary female impersonation by writers, directors and artists in Japan has been indirect: mediated and reproduced through the press and lens rather than through theatre. This article will use the example of blackface minstrelsy as one means to help us think more about the deeper nature of male cultural production and consumption of girl characters in Japan.
Год издания: 2006
Авторы: Sharon Kinsella
Издательство: Routledge
Источник: Japan Forum
Ключевые слова: Japanese History and Culture, Asian Culture and Media Studies, Media, Gender, and Advertising
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 18
Выпуск: 1
Страницы: 65–87