Bad Girls of Japan [Paperback]

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.Introduction; L.Miller & J.Bardsley Mythical Bad Girls: The Corpse, the Crone, and the Snake; R.Copeland Bad Girls Confined: Okuni, Geisha, and the Negotiation of Female Performance Space; K.Foreman Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl; M.Czarnecki Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko's Good Girls; S.Frederick So Bad She's Good: The Masochist's Heroine in Postwar Japan; C.Marran Bad Girls Like It Rough: Japanese Women Writing on Masochism; G.Jones Branded: Bad Girls Go Shopping; J.Bardsley & H.Hirakawa Bad Girl Photography; L.Miller Blackfaces, Witches, and Racism Against Girls; S.Kinsella Filipina Modern: 'Bad' Filipino Women in Japan; N.Suzuki Sex with Nation: The OK Girls Cabaret; K.Mezur Afterword; M.Silverberg

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 rlSÊ