SLA Prize Winning Graduate Paper 2007

Isaac Gagn
YALE UNIVERSITY

Urban Princesses: Performance and Womens Language in Japans Gothic/Lolita Subculture

This paper investigates the linguistic strategies used in the counterpublic discourse of Gothic/ Lolita, a young Japanese womens subculture of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and explores how the subculture and its practices are characterized by the Japanese media. Particular attention is paid to how subcultural magazines, websites, and Gothic/Lolitas themselves create and sustain a virtual linguistic community through a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated womens language, as well as negative identity practices that seek to dene Gothic/Lolita against other subcultures and fashions such as kosupure [Cosplay i.e., Costume Play]. Additionally, an analysis of representations of Gothic/Lolita speech in two television programs reveals how the media constructs ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narration and editing. [youth subculture, gender and language, speech community, counterpublic, Japan]
THIS IS A WEB-ENHANCED ARTICLE (URL)

[What are you, an alien? Having an ignorant mother who doesnt want to acknowledge Lolita and calls it Cosplay is really tiring . . . so I think to myself.] [Blog entry, Night Moon 2006]

apanese youth have a long history of engagement with language in nonmainstream forms that express resistance to certain cultural norms. Young women in particular have been effective manipulators of language conventions, and the past century and a half has been a prolic period in the rise and fall of young
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 130150, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00006.x.

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womens alternative speech patterns and related subcultures. Among these, there is one that seems to speak out against not only traditional mainstream culture but also other contemporary subcultures. This is Gothic & Lolita. Gothic & Lolita (hereafter, Gothic/Lolita) is a fashion-oriented subculture of young females who wear elaborate, antiquated dresses and aspire toward looking, acting, and speaking like princesses. Participants and producers of this subculture have also revived and recreated joseigo, or womens language, in order to achieve this idealized role, creating thereby a linguistically distinct community through a metalinguistic and counterpublic discourse in magazines and internet forums. The news media usually portrays Gothic/Lolita as they have previous youth cultures: as a social problem and a moral panic that embodies the declining morals of Japanese youth. Here, however, the exaggerated politeness of Gothic/Lolitas behavior and language use presents these stock criticisms with a conundrum. In this paper I will rst describe the contours of young womens subcultures and counterpublic discourses and their relationship with womens language in Japan. Then, I will situate Gothic/Lolita within this discourse and examine how magazines and web forums concerning Gothic/Lolita create a sense of community for girls through a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated womens language. Next, I will briey explore the negative identity practices used by Gothic/ Lolitas to dene themselves recursively against other youth subcultures. Finally, I will end with a brief discussion of how representations of Gothic/Lolita in television programs construct ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narration and editing. By examining the two interdependent and mutually constitutive levels of virtual and represented speech community I show the paradoxical mix of youth counterpublic and re-appropriated norms of (linguistic) femininity in Gothic/Lolita and the ambivalence it engenders in the news media. The majority of my data for the virtual speech community of Gothic/Lolita comes from the growing wealth of magazines and web forums on the subculture. Over the past ten years Gothic/Lolita-related literature, movies, comics and internet sites have rapidly increased, but most activity has occurred in the past six years, during which two hit Gothic/Lolita-oriented magazines went on sale: Gosurori (the Japanese abbreviation for Gothic & Lolita) and The Gothic & Lolita Bible (hereafter, GLB). For the purposes of this paper I focus on web forums, Gothic/Lolita wiki-sites and GLB. For analyzing news media representations I used taped recordings of Fuji Televisions Super News and TBSs Hanamaru Market. I supplement this data with my own eldwork conducted in the spring of 2003 and the summer of 2007.

Womens Language and Young Womens Counterpublics in Japan Gothic/Lolita is one of the most intriguing examples of a young womens subculture and counterpublic in Japan that circumvents and re-appropriates language for community building and the creation of an alternative social world.1 Gothic/Lolita is a subculture in the sense used by Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, and Phil Cohen in that it is a group of people with a distinctive style and jargon existing within a larger culture, but on a more discursive level it can also be usefully analyzed as a counterpublic. Drawing on Miriam Hansens (1993) work on the emergence of new aspects of the public sphere, Miyako Inoue characterizes counterpublics as constituted by particularized individuals and their interests and experiences situated in their concrete material situations (Inoue 2006:127). Counterpublics thus differ from Habermas description of the public sphere as including working-class people . . . and other disenfranchised people, including women and ethnic minorities, and their situated interests, needs and experiences (Inoue 2006:127; see also Habermas 1989). Alternative linguistic practices are a central organizing feature of young womens counterpublics that give them a shared virtual space and language in which they can express their own desires and interests outside of the male-dominated public sphere.

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In Japan, counterpublic activities were accelerated by the language modernization movement following its opening to the West and the Meiji Restoration in the latter half of the 1800s. Inoue argues that one of the states goals of language reforms during this time was the creation of a new modern Japanese language by which they could represent modern subjectivity (Inoue 2006:26). She shows that as the state pushed to reform the Japanese language there was the simultaneous development of jogakusei kotoba, or schoolgirl speech, among young women attending high school and higher education in urban Japan. Intellectuals and news media at the time dismissed it as vulgar and low-class (2006:37) and an aural specter of Japans modernity and modernization . . . that embodied a surplus of Japans modernization and modernity that had to be excluded (2006:26). As notions of femininity and appropriate language use changed, jogakusei kotoba transformed into an appropriate and even desired way of speaking for young women. By the mid-1920s the set of speech forms ideologically associated with schoolgirl speech erased from the national and cultural memory its derisive origin in vulgarity and its geographical and class-specicity, and inaugurated itself as the universal Japanese womens language (Inoue 2006:147). This universal Japanese womens language, or joseigo, is a set of linguistic beliefs about forms and functions of language used by and associated with (Japanese) women . . . it is a culturally salient category and knowledge about how women speak, how they usually speak or should speak (2006:13). Inoue notes that joseigo is actually an idealized notion of language use that sociolinguistic studies have attempted to ascribe to women, which include[s] a specic set of vocabulary, rst-person pronouns . . . nal particles . . . and a so-called beautication prex (2006:14). Springing up nearly a century later, contemporary forms of speaking linked with young womens counterpublics such as the childlike noripgo and masculine gyaru speech are treated in a similar manner as the original jogakusei kotoba. Japanese intellectuals and the media are exceedingly critical of these counterpublics because they deviate from the reied notions of traditional and traditionally feminine speech forms and because of their perceived connection with youth deviance more generally. For instance, young girls who used the infantile speech patterns of noripgo during the 1980s, coined by the idol singer Sakai Noriko (a.k.a. Nori-P) in the imitation of a childs lisp, also used a rounded and childlike way of handwriting. They seemed to reject notions of responsibility and adulthood by escaping through language into a linguistic space of childish fantasy where young people could be liberated from the lthy world of adult politics (Aoyagi 2005:142). Gyaru speech, which also developed in the 1980s but is still used today, took the opposite approach. As Laura Miller (2004) compellingly explores in her article on language strategies used by Kogal (an extreme style of gyaru) to fashion identities, Kogals gender-transgressing identity and language style challenge longstanding norms of adolescent femininity (2004:225). Miller writes that Kogal and other new female identities challenge prescriptive norms of gendered talk, yet despite the condemnation of the parent culture, young women continue to create and use exuberant new forms of expression (2004:226). The ways in which female subcultures like gyaru accomplish this is quite different from noripgo users. Instead of drawing on childish speech patterns, gyaru speech appropriates brash and masculine forms of speaking, such as using the masculine rst-person pronoun boku instead of the more feminine atashi or gender neutral and polite watashi. In addition, gyaru speech also uses extremely casual forms of speaking considered vulgar in public contexts, and thus the use of gyaru speech is often linked to deviant and un-feminine behavior. It is signicant that both of the latter two styles of speech have their origin in the decadent decade of the Bubble Economy. Like the period of rapid modernization and rising urbanization at the turn of the 20th century, the 1980s was also a period in which there was a surplus of modernity in the form of unprecedented afuence. Even following the burst of the Bubble Economy in 1989, the afuence and decadence

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that youth became accustomed to in the 1980s did not disappear overnight, but rather persisted in the realms of fashion and youth cultures that have continued to spring up and vanish just as quickly throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Jogakusei kotoba, noripgo, and gyaru speech thus represent a similar trend of counterpublics in 20th-century Japan through which young women are able to articulate and create their own notions of community and desired lifestyles. For the young women who use noripgo and gyaru speech this often takes the form of hedonistic and decadent consumption and play that expresses dissatisfaction with gender ideals and notions of adulthood and responsibility. The Gothic/Lolita counterpublic developed along the same lines and shares many similarities, but it is also an ambivalent counterpublic that occupies a marginal position between generations and genders: it goes against both the conservative social norms of the male-dominated public sphere and the alternative social norms of contemporary youth cultures and counterpublic discourses. As a youth culture, Gothic/Lolita dates back to the latter half of the 1990s. It was rst inspired by devotees to Mana, the cross-dressing guitarist for the Japanese rock band Malice Mizer.2 The name indicates its distinctive hybrid style: it combines gosu, a Japanized version of Western Goth fashion, music, and hobbies with Victorian/ Edwardian-inspired doll-like clothes and fairy-tale motifs called rorta, or Lolita (see Figure 1). At any moment, most girls will stress one pole or the other in their attire, but over time most will oscillate between both Goth and Lolita. These two poles themselves embody the ambivalence of the style as they appear to be paradoxical displays of light and darkness, innocent youth, and jaded womanhood. However, they nd common ground in their location outside of both adult male and young female social norms and in their pursuit of princess-like elegance.

Figure 1 An Amarori and an Elegant Gothic Lolita in Harajuku on a very hot day, 2003. (Photo by the author)

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The most recognizable markers of the Gothic/Lolita counterpublic are precisely these sartorial conventions: long one-piece dresses with bustles and panniers, corsets, bonnets, parasols, and Mary Janes and other (imagined) elements of Rococo and Baroque fashion. The tone suggests antiquated aristocracy in shades of halcyon pastels and decadent blacks and reds, and the girls themselves insist that the meaning of the fashion is to become a princess, though the meaning of the word in the imaginations of Japanese youth and popular media is different from that of EuroAmerican conceptions. To many Gothic/Lolitas, being a princess means participation in a wide range of hobbies and interests vaguely connected with aristocratic themes including European fairy tales and dolls, Gothic vampire movies, girls shojo manga comic book stories like The Rose of Versailles or Ribon Kishi, and the Japanese metal genre of visual rock. Moreover, Gothic/Lolitas efforts at princess-like behavior are most noticeable in the distinctive style of speech used by the more ardent adherents in magazines, web forums, and on the street. The Gothic/Lolita style of speaking differs from those used by other young womens counterpublics both past and present in its use of the honoric language and feminized word construction idealized in contemporary media as joseigo. In postwar Japan, joseigo connotes educated upper-class femininity. Gothic/Lolita borrows this connotation by recasting joseigo as shukujo no kotoba or ladys speech, and using it as a way to affect the image of a princess. This is particularly notable in that Gothic/Lolita has appeared at a time when popular media and (male) intellectual discourse is lamenting the death of womens language and the corruption of youth, as exemplied by noripgo and gyaru speech (see Inoue 2006). Gothic/Lolita thus creates a virtual speech community through magazines and web forums both in opposition to other (vulgar) contemporary womens counterpublics and as a re-inscription of conventional(ized) linguistic ideals, embodied in the image of a modern, urban princess.

Talking Like a Princess: Virtual Speech Community in Gothic/Lolita Magazines Magazine producers in particular have had a strong inuence in the creation of the Gothic/Lolita counterpublic, specically the publisher Kera, which is known for its focus on non-mainstream fashions and produces both GLB and Gosurori. These magazines present a catalogue of Gothic/Lolita clothing and related products as well as interviews with celebrities. They also employ fascinating language styles and include sections for letters from readers and for candid photographs of Gothic/Lolitas on the street, complete with handwritten messages from those photographed. In this way, the Gothic/Lolita magazines create what Inoue calls a sensea well-calculated effect sought by the producers of the magazinesthat the community [is] autonomous and self-governed by the girls (2006:102n33). What is most fascinating about womens magazines in Japan is what Inoue calls the unied virtual speech community that they create, where readers from all over Japan who speak various dialects are able to communicate together in the speech style of modern Japanese women (2006:102n33). Similarly, Shigeko Okamoto, writing on contemporary fashion magazines, concludes that the community constructed in the discourse of fashion magazines for young people is an imaginary interactive community. Constructing magazine communities creates a set of membership identities, a process that transforms the information in the magazines into resources for constructing those identities (2004:141). This mirrors Andersons, 1983 notion of an imagined community that is constructed through the shared use of a standardized language and nationalist discourse, creating the image of being a member of a wider group of individuals whom one may never meet. Part of the process of community construction is the creation of a specialized lexicon accessible only to members of the community. Okamoto writes that

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New expressions and novel uses of existing words also increase the sense of shared knowledge. For instance, the ideas expressed by the compound nouns iro-shatsu (colored T-shirt) . . . and hayamimi kyara (rapid-ear character) . . . are usually expressed by relative clause + noun constructions, such as iro no tuita T-shatsu (T-shirt that has color) or dare mo mitsukete inai kyara (an animation character nobody has found). By being expressed in compound nouns without explanation, the ideas are presented as presupposed categories. [Okamoto and Smith 2004:141]

Gothic/Lolita magazines have an abundance of such specialized words that both unite readers in their shared knowledge of them and also reify specic substyles. Examples of new expressions include the very name of the community (and also a specic substyle), gosurori, which is a combination of the two English words Goth and Lolita. Other neologisms include the names for numerous substyles created by contracting and combining Japanese and English morphemes, such as kurorori (black Lolita), shirorori (white Lolita), amarori (literally sweet Lolita), itarori (literally painful Lolita) and many others. In the case of these compound Japanese-English neologisms, the new terms are a combination of adjectives and nouns in which the conjugating ending i of the adjective is dropped. In standard Japanese usage, terms like kurorori, shirorori, and amarori would be written as kuroi rori, shiroi rori, and amai rori, respectively. Even grammatically correct, these terms would be mystifying to non-Gothic/Lolitas, as the word rori (short for Lolita) itself possesses a different meaning among those unfamiliar with the counterpublic. The use of such Japanese-English neologisms to create differentiated knowledge value among consumers is a common feature of postwar Japanese advertising in general, as Miller documents in the use of such words in the discourse of beauty products and beauty salons (esute): within the world of beauty, English and other foreign-derived linguistic materials are part of a domestically created semiotic system with its own webs of nuance (Miller 2006:177). In addition to neologisms, Gothic/Lolitas and producers of Gothic/Lolita culture are adept at manipulating the three syllabaries used in Japanese in surprising ways, specically contractions like those above which are written in a combination of kanji and katakana. Kanji are ideograms that were imported from Chinese and became a permanent part of the writing system for Japanese, and katakana is the phonetic (skirt) and (soup). syllabary used for foreign loanwords like One intriguing example of using katakana to set the language of the community apart from standard Japanese is in the spelling of the word rorta. It is unclear when the word was rst used in Japanese. It came into common English use with the publication of Vladimir Nabokovs novel Lolita, and was probably imported to Japan with the translation of the novel. In Japan, however, the word became associated almost exclusively with the sexual attraction of older men to young girls, and the word is now most commonly seen in the compound word that describes this phe nomenon, rorikon, short for rorta conpurekkusu (Lolita complex). Rorikon has also become a genre of comic book that objecties young female charactersmost typically as the victims of rape (Aoyagi 2005:211). It is unclear why Gothic/Lolitas adopted or accepted such a word to describe themselves, and there is very little information available on the actual origin of the term Gothic/Lolita. Interestingly, Gothic/Lolitas have attempted to avoid the conation of Gothic/Lolita with rorikon (rorta), substituting an by adopting a nonstandard way of writing the word alternate phonetic katakana character to enunciate the ( ) sound in the word. Another alternate way of writing rorta has been to substitute the standard character for the long vowel, , with , an archaic katakana character with the same pronunciation. This also lends the word the connotation of antiquity and classical Japanese. In addition, online fan and wiki sites devoted to Gothic/Lolita note that an internet search of the standard spelling for rorta reveals a large number of porno graphic sites, and thus using alternate spellings of rorta prevents Gothic/Lolita devotees from having to wade through unwanted and offensive links (see Gothic & Lolita @Wiki 2006).

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Regardless of the empirical validity of such metapragmatic explanations for the specialized spelling of rorta, the other uses of distinctive neologisms and alternate spellings in magazines and online forums speak to a similar virtual speech community that Inoue locates in womens magazines of the 1920s and that Okamoto nds in general fashion magazines in contemporary Japan. Particularly through the interactive context of street fashion magazines, distinctive terms and specialized neologisms serve as secret codes that unite members of the magazine community. The process of interpreting these new expressions is a process of learning and aligning oneself with these secret meanings of the magazine community (Okamoto and Smith 2004:141). Here Okamoto and Smith are drawing on Goffmans notions of footing and alignment (Goffman 1981), summarized by Michael Silverstein as a stance presumed of both sender and receiver of [a] discourse with respect to the reality one is communicating about (2000:113). The secret meanings thus create a shared, imagined reality, a utopian world that is neither ctional nor real and that dees any realist assumption or skepticism (Inoue 2006:129). For Gothic/Lolitas, the unied virtual speech community goes beyond shared ways of writing and specialized fashion jargon and extends to all aspects of speech and behavior. In addition to merely descriptive sections on new clothes and styles, proscriptive lifestyle guides like Gothic & Lolita Living and the Gentleman and Ladys Gothic & Lolita Manner Encyclopedia are published in magazines and internet sites. The latter gives advice on how to act and speak, and revives and (re)creates a form of joseigo. This instructional revival of joseigo is particularly insightful in the creation of a distinctive princess-like communicative style for Gothic/Lolita. The Gentleman and Ladys Gothic & Lolita Manner Encyclopedia appeared as a one-page spread in vol. 4 of GLB, and features entries for general manners (tach furumai hen) such as eye contact, facial expressions, ways of walking and sitting, and proper greetings (aisatsu). The entire article is addressed to both men and women, but pictures that accompany the text are all of a young woman in a puffy, frilly dress common of the amarori style (see Figure 2). In addition, the article also includes a

Figure 2 A typical amarori, dressed to the hilt, 2006. (Photo by the author)

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section on speech (kotoba hen) aimed solely at women that provides guidelines for speaking shukujo no kotoba, literally ladys speech. Tips for speaking ladys speech are organized into three oaths: 1. Speak slowly and politely; 2. Do not use elliptical words; 3. Be polite when answering in the positive and indirect when answering in the negative (GLB 4:90) These three oaths, like the rest of the article, are written in a highly antiquated, honoric form that is now most commonly identied with the speech patterns of members of the upper class in prewar Japan. The article continues: Ladies, one must take extreme care in language use. Vulgar language is especially unacceptable. Are you speaking ladys speech properly? Lets check the chart below. The chart shows a list of phrases divided into two columns titled ippan jin no kotoba [Ordinary Peoples Speech] and shukujo no kotoba [Ladys Speech]. The phrases in the Ladys Speech column include contemporary honoric words such as osore irimasu (excuse me) and watakushi (honoric form of I), somewhat archaic and literary word forms, such as polite conju gations ending in seu, as well as phrases with aristocratic connotations like sayo de gozaimasu no (Is that so?) and go-kigen yo (goodbye, hello). All of these linguistic conventions are elements of joseigo, and many are seldom heard in contemporary Japan except in historical dramas or when employed ironically. Interestingly, this style of speaking has recently returned to the public discourse with the popularity of a book called Ojo-sama Language Quick Study Guide by Kato Emiko, published in 2000. This book purports to teach how to speak like an ojo-sama, or a daughter from a decent family (Inoue 2006:202), but as Inoue notes it is actually a strikingly faithful replication of the prewar model conversation for the middleclass housewife in terms of the use of stereotypical female utterance-endings, elaborate honorics, and polite greetings (2006:202). The linguistic advice on ladys speech in the GLB article seems to closely parallel the advice in Katos book, and on Gothic/Lolita web forums many girls wrote that they were taking care to watch their language use and that they were studying Katos book to learn how to speak like a lady (Fasshon: gakusei toku keijiban 2006). Interestingly, Inoue notes that the book is half self-help and half parody with tongue-in-cheek remarks on how to fake it, i.e., to cover up ones own non-upper-class origins through the linguistic creation of a cultured persona. While more astute readers may detect this parody within the text, it is unclear whether or not many of the Gothic/Lolitas using the book are conscious of the implicit sarcasm. The degree to which the meta-linguistic rules of language described in books and articles are actually embodied by readers is difcult to ascertain, but one method is to look at the Letters from the Readers section of GLB. Starting from vol. 6 in the November 2002 issue of GLB, the magazine devoted a section called Tsudoi no Hiroba, or Gathering Place, to correspondence from readers across the country, including sections for drawings, photographs, and letters. Intriguingly, the subheading for the letters from the readers section was Dokusha-sama Kara no Koe, or literally Voices from our Readers (in honoric form). Many of the letters printed in this section are written in plain form or polite form, and usually note the readers appreciation for certain clothing lines or models, as well as their thoughts about Gothic/Lolita in general or the magazine in particular. In vol. 8, one reader makes explicit the sense of community created by the magazine, though her letter is written in plain form and makes no use of ladys speech:
Watashi ni ha rorta na tomodachi ga mada hitori mo imasen. Demo kono hon wo yonde, nakama ga takusan iru to ki ni tzuite, tottemo ureshikatta. Arigato! [I dont have any Lolita friends yet. But reading this book [GLB], I came to realize that I have lots of friends, and I was so happy! Thank you!] [GLB 8:118]

Other letters demonstrate the appropriation and embodiment of ladys speech (with various degrees of accuracy), including one letter from a young girl from Saitama Prefecture (a prefecture north of Tokyo) who writes about how happy she was when she went to Tokyo Disneyland dressed in Lolita clothing and received

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praise and invitations to take photographs with other visitors. Her letter is written in ladys speech throughout, and ends with the invitation: Minna-san, korekara mo jishin motte dodo to, gosurori shite iki maseu (heart mark) [Everyone, lets continue to do gosurori with condence and dignity!] (GLB 8:118) Another readers letter remarks that until recently she had dressed as gyaru, but since encountering the rorta no sekai (world of Lolita), she has had an awakening. This illustrates both how uid the practitioners of Gothic/Lolita arethey can move from one youth subculture to anotherand how closely these subcultures are intertwined. This familiarity can also breed ambivalence and contempt, however, as another reader points out in a letter in the July 2007 issue:
Saikin no gyaru-shi no iwayuru musume-gyaru kei no katagata ga rorta ha kinpatsu jyanakya dame na no nado, katte na ruru wo tsukuri, gehin na meiku de rorta fuku wo kiteiru no wo mikakeru to, sukoshi kanashiku narimashita. [Recently, gyaru magazines featuring so-called princess-gyaru style individuals have been selshly making rules like Lolitas must be blond or else, and wearing vulgar makeup with Lolita clothes. Seeing this, I feel a little sad.] [GLB 25:100]

In addition to expressing sadness about gyarus vulgar appropriation of Lolita fashion, this reader also includes a quotation of reported speech attributed to gyaru in a plain form that contrasts with her own polite form of writing, further illustrating that gyaru fail at being Gothic/Lolita because of linguistic vulgarity as well. Apart from the letters themselves, it is interesting to note that many years after the initial section detailing ladys speech in vol. 4 of GLB, the heading for the Voices from the Readers section itself changed to Shukujo no Sasayaki, or Ladys Whispers. No longer was the space left relatively unstructured; the explanation under the Ladys Whispers heading read:
Fudan, futo kuchi ni shite shimau yona . . . keredo, mizukara ga shukujo de aru koto wo omoi, okina koe de ha ienai yona koto . . . Koko deha, sonna minna-sama no sasayaki wo oshiete itadaite orimasu. [For those passing comments that you often almost say aloud . . . but then you realize that you are a lady, and so you cant say in a loud voice . . . In this section, please whisper them to us.] [GLB 25:100]

This explanation given by GLB editors is open to multiple interpretations, however, and the various letterssome written in elaborate ladys speech like the previous letter about gyaru, and others written in plain or polite formstestify to readers various understandings of what or how they should be whispering. Should their whispers be in ladys speech because that is who they truly are? Or should they be in less elaborate form, because they are revealing their true plebian selves? The fact that some letters are written without ladys speech could indicate the kind of selfawareness of the constructedness and parody of ladys speech hinted at by Inoue. Manner guides, internet forums, and letters from readers printed in magazines like GLB all comprise what can be called the media micromarket of Gothic/Lolita. In much the same way that Miller talks of the micromarkets of Kogal-oriented and Kogal-produced media, the media micromarkets of Gothic/Lolita also help establish and maintain youth subcultures, which in turn contribute to a stronger sense of subcultural identity (Miller 2004:226). Though exceptions can always be found among adherents of any particular subcultural style, Gothic/Lolitas who are deeply enough involved to seek lifestyle and language advice from the various Gothic/Lolita media have appropriated ojo-sama language as the dialect of their community in the same way as fans of Sakai Noriko adopted noripgo, and gyaru developed their own slang and linguistic style. By recycling an archaic and feminine form of speaking, Gothic/Lolitas have made it their own, much like the (re)appropriation of past clothing styles in fashion bricolages such as hippie, punk, and goth. Thus, the scandalous jogakusei kotoba that arose in the early 1900s evolved into the idealized joseigo of the postwar period, was rejected by young womens counterpublics in the 1980s and

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onward and has now been re-appropriated, reconstructed, and renamed ladys speech by the schoolgirls and young women of Gothic/Lolita. Indeed, schoolgirl speech is almost like a historical mansion whose origins are lost on passersby. If the jogakusei kotoba builders of the past resemble the ladys speech squatters of the present, it is more a result of a preserved exterior than an unchanging interior. With each reappropriation and reconstruction of this storied jogakusei kotoba, a new layer of meaning is added, continually remodeling the rooms within for new purposes and new tenants in a spiral of sedimented meanings.3 Negative Identity Practices: Sexualization and Kosupure (Cosplay) in Gothic/Lolita For Gothic/Lolitas, there is more at stake in educating each other through magazines and web forums than merely constructing a shared notion of community. Haunting the Gothic/Lolita at every turn is what they perceive as a pervasive misunderstanding of their subculture by society at large, and results in attempts both passive and active to distance themselves from unwanted stereotypes. Negative identity politicsrecursively dening oneself against other groupsis of course a common strategy within subcultures (see, for example, Bucholtz 1999). This is particularly true of Gothic/Lolita due to its supercial similarities to bondage fashion and the fetishized Lolita of rorikon, as well as the subcultural practice of kosupure. These similarities are exacerbated by the fact that Gothic/Lolitas and kosupure fans all share the same primary gathering spot of Harajuku. Harajuku is a popular shopping district in western Tokyo, on the busy Yamanote train line. It is known throughout Japan for its claustrophobic streets honeycombed with small fashion boutiques, as well as a somewhat incongruous youth gathering spot on Jingu Bashi, a bridge directly in front of the shrine to the Meiji Emperor. In the world of Gothic/Lolita magazines and internet forums, Harajuku is essentially the Holy Land of Gothic/Lolita culture and the most authentic site for practicing and experiencing Gothic/Lolita style. Most Gothic/Lolitas in the Tokyo-metropolitan area gather in Harajuku, and some girls even commute several hours from the suburbs or countryside. Harajuku is a subcultural fashion venue not only for Gothic/Lolitas, but for many other subcultural styles as well. In fact, Harajuku has become such a Mecca for outrageous youth fashions that every Sunday the district is inundated with tourists (both foreign and domestic) who swarm through the streets taking pictures of the elaborately adorned youths (see Figure 3). This is how the fashion became known throughout Japan and in many other countries, as images of Gothic/Lolitas have been taken up by many foreign journalists. Special features on the fashion have appeared in Singaporean newspapers, German and Dutch television programs, on the U.S. news program 20/20, and on the Reuters website, testifying and contributing to its global recognition. Such media saturation has also meant that Gothic/Lolitas are exposed to the uncomprehending gazes of outsiders to their style. Unlike the private medium of public discourse in magazines like GLB, Gothic/Lolitas in Harajuku must share a physical public space with other sometimes supercially similar fashion subcultures, even as they carve out a place for their own specic counterpublic. In other words, whatever ambivalence or ambiguity Gothic/Lolitas may express about their true selves in the Ladys Whispers section of GLB, when forced to occupy the same space as other youth subcultures the counterpublic boundaries of Gothic/Lolitas may become exaggerated and reied. News media both within and outside of Japan frequently place Gothic/Lolita and the other fashions present in Harajuku alongside subcultural phenomena that are better known, such as bondage fashions (especially in the West) and rorikon in Japan. Since the publication of Gothic/Lolita magazines like GLB, which publicized the style beyond the small group of practitioners, Gothic/Lolita has had a conicted relationship with these kinds of sexualized and fetishized images.

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Figure 3 An Elegant Gothic Lolita in media-saturated Harajuku, 2003. (Photo by the author)

On the Goth side of the spectrum, there has been a tenuous relationship with bondage clothing. Bondage clothesleather straps and metal accessories, for examplehave always been a peripheral part of the magazines clothing advertisements and occasionally make an appearance in the candid street photographs. The bondage element of Gothic/Lolita is most likely tied up with the European and American Goth scene, where it is a prominent fashion in movies, music, and art. Despite drawing on similar images, however, there is no emphasis or attention paid to the sexual element of bondage lifestyles, and thus Gothic/Lolitas for the most part seem to merely ignore this sexualized side. On the other end of the spectrum of sexualized images of Gothic/Lolita is rorikon. As previously described, rorikon is the term for a mans sexual attraction to young girls. It is precisely the similarity between the word Lolita in this context and the word Lolita as it is use by Gothic/Lolitas that has motivated some to practice alternative spelling strategies. Regardless of this attempt at recursive distance, it seems that the Lolita side of Gothic/Lolita has attracted (and created) the attention of consumers of rorikon pornography. In my own conversations with Gothic/Lolitas on the street and from comments on web forums, many Gothic/Lolitas have a very real fear of being appropriated not as a gure of identity, expressing their own idea of their authentic self, but instead recirculated as a sexualized, pornographic gure of desire, a costume-fetish character addressed to the desires of an indenite population of rorikon fetishists (on the opposition between gures of identity and gures of desire within the category of sexuality, see Cameron and Kulick 2005). When I rst began researching Gothic/Lolita ve years ago, I often saw middleaged men (foreign and otherwise) with massive cameras ogling the girls gathered in Harajuku (see Figure 4). This has continued to the present day, and if anything it has increased. When I talked with some young Harajuku denizens this summer, they all agreed that the worst part about gathering and hanging out in Harajuku is that many people dont ask permission to take photographs, and just snap away as they stroll around the area. The girls biggest fear was that they didnt know where those pictures would end up. Several added that they might end up on internet sites, cropped so that the heads were cut off and only the Lolita body was visible, or in other sexualized ways. For the most part, however, this aspect of Gothic/Lolita is ignored in magazines and by Gothic/Lolitas on the street, though I did witness a few girls refuse photographs from men whom they seemed to feel uncomfortable around.

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Figure 4 An amarori posing for the camera, 2003. (Photo by the author)

An additional catalyst to the sexual objectication of Gothic/Lolita may also be the boom (now waning) in so-called maid cafes in Japan, where one can go for a cup of coffee or a heart-shaped omelet served by a young girl wearing a French maid outt. Gothic/Lolitas (especially those more on the amarori sweet Lolita side) are often mistaken for maids, and maids are often thought to be extensions of the same fashion. Like Gothic/Lolitas, the maids in the maid cafes also use extremely polite Japanese, which was one element taken up briey by the Japanese media in some reports on the maid cafe phenomenon. Gothic/Lolitas I spoke with virulently denied any connection to maids, however, claiming that the crucial difference (beyond that of the maids vastly inferior clothing style and quality) was that maids served people, whereas Gothic/Lolitas were served (because they are princesses). Indeed, one of my informants even mentioned that she enjoyed going to maid cafes with her Gothic/Lolita friends, because they were served like princesses. In general, however, both Gothic/ Lolitas and non-Gothic/Lolitas alike classify the maids of maid cafes within the realm of kosupure, another fashion that Gothic/Lolitas feel they must constantly distance themselves from. More than being targeted as sexual objects Gothic/Lolitas express the most frustration about being categorized together with kosupure (Cosplay). Kosupure is a Japanese neologism that stems from the combination of the English words costume and play. To Gothic/Lolitas I spoke with, kosupure means mimicry and dressing up as someone, that is, as a specic character from comic books, movies, video games or animation. In contrast, my informants would stress that their own Gothic/Lolita style was personalized and was an expression of their true selves, and that they took pride in choosing their own styles and making their own clothing (although kosupure fans also seem to spend a great deal of time making their own costumes to match a character). Exactly what separates kosupure and Gothic/Lolita is very difcult to determine, and merits an investigation of its own. One possible way of conceptualizing the difference between the two subcultural phenomena is precisely the distinction that

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Gothic/Lolitas make: kosupure is always bound up in mimicry, and is not a matter of expressing ones true self, but rather it is masquerading as someone else. In Goffmans terms, Gothic/Lolitas are invested in expressing their self as natural guresa esh-and-blood, animated individualwhereas kosupure fans are always expressing to a certain degree a not-self that involves imitating someone else but with no emphasis on a convincing performance, as in a cited gure (see Goffman 1974). Seen through this lens, Gothic/Lolitas fashion, language, and entire mode of being is thus viewed by themselves as a gure of identity, whereas the entire practice of kosupure is essentially a supercial, transparent, and vulgar mimicry of appearances. Unlike Gothic/Lolitas who strive to perfect an embodiment of a princess-like self, kosupure fans could be seen as having no unique self but being merely an undifferentiated individual on which a costume clumsily hangs. This is precisely what Hastings and Manning (2004:302) call a gure of alterity, what Goffman describes as a kind of gure where serious impersonation is not involved, since no effort is made to take anyone in, nor is theatre involved. . . . At the center is the process of projecting an image of someone not oneself while preventing viewers from forgetting even for a moment that an alien animator is at work (Goffman 1974: 534). Actual practices of Gothic/Lolita and kosupure are not quite so neatly dened, however, and even the individual Gothic/Lolitas themselves may in fact have participated in kosupure in the past. Considering the actual kinds of gures embodied by individual participants in these subcultural practices thus adds an additional layer of complexity to Goffmans continuum of natural, staged, cited, and parodied gures (Goffman 1974: 524537; Hastings and Manning 2004: 3024). It could be argued that Gothic/Lolitas are also involved in mimicry like kosupure fans, although their object of mimicry is an archetypical gurea princess, an innocent sweet lolita, an elegant gothic lolitarather than a cited gure, like a character from a popular manga or anime series like Sailor Moon. More interestingly, Gothic/Lolita motifs are often drawn from inanimate gures like dolls (see Figure 5). This contrasts with the animate (or at least animated) gures of kosupure, which are always recognizable as a pre-existing identity within a narrativized context, like a video game or comic book story. Gothic/ Lolita archetypes that are drawn from dolls or other inanimate sources may lack any pre-existing story-based context. In this way, an inanimate gure such as a doll from the popular Blythe company becomes the model for a Gothic/Lolita, who then strives to become an animate representation of that gurea process that contrasts explicitly with kosupure fans who are always involved in the reanimation of already animate gures. Conceptualizing the kinds of performance of gures that Goffman explores, together with the inspiration and sources of those gures, leads to the intriguing possibility of a matrix of gures, ranging from gures of identity to gures of alterity on one axis, and animate gures to inanimate gures on the other. This second axis might be broken down further into imitations of true animates (other people), animated characters (manga, anime, and video game characters), to inanimate gures (dolls). (For one view on how the boundaries between human and non-human are blurred through animation and toys, see Allison 2006.) In this second axis we could also locate archetypical gures like amarori in the middle, a sort of template that possesses animate potentiality, with certain proscribed ways of dressing, speaking, and acting, but with no narrativized context of its own. Additionally, the fears expressed by Gothic/Lolitas regarding misappropriation of their style by others also remind us that a third continuum must be considered in this matrix, specically Gothic/Lolitas own desired expression as gures of identity (for self) versus the sexualized, fetish gure of desire (for others) consumed by rorikon fetishists (see Cameron and Kulick 2005). Taken together, the various combinatory permutations on these three axes represent how tenuous the process of self-representation is for Gothic/Lolitas (and indeed most subcultures), as they continually struggle to dene themselves against the buffeting winds of adults lecherous gazes, other contemporary subcultures, and their own ambivalent biographies of subcultural participation.4

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Figure 5 Girls and dolls, out on the town, 2006. (Photo by the author)

Ambivalent Representations: Iconization and Erasure in News Media In all subcultures there are numerous layers of media representations involved in the construction of a styles image. In addition to the Gothic/Lolitas own internal projects of community-making and recursive distancing, there are always external media representations as well, and these external and internal representations are often conicting. Considering the polite and feminine linguistic and behavioral aspects of Gothic/ Lolita in comparison to other young womens counterpublics such as noripgo and gyaru speech, it would seem that the princess-like values championed by Gothic/ Lolitas would be welcomed by parents, the general media, and (male) intellectuals concerned about the vulgarity and dangerous lifestyles of todays youth. This is not entirely so, however; there are a number of competing views of Gothic/Lolita that nd expression in various media. On the one hand, there are programs like the segment titled The Summer of Gothic Lolita Girls on Fuji Televisions Super News, which features mostly male interviewers and narrators and is broadcast primarily for a mixed male and female audience (Gosurori shojo no natsu 2004). On the other hand, there are programs like the special Gosurori: Gothic & Lolita on TBSs Hanamaru Market, which features mostly female interviewers and narrators and targets a mostly female audience (Gosurori: Gothic & Lolita 2002). These programs reveal the ambivalence that Gothic/Lolita evokes in the Japanese media, with the former taking a moral panic stance and the latter playfully praising certain characteristics like their language use or elaborate clothing. They achieve this by employing strategies of iconization and erasure via creative narration and editing to construct alternative yet totalizing images of the subculture and counterpublic. The metapragmatic representation of Gothic/Lolita in certain (conservative) news programs like Super News infantilizes and delegitimizes Gothic/Lolita via the iconization of inarticulate utterances and childish Gothic/Lolitas and the erasure of behaviors and individuals that present a positive or articulate image. In the words of Irvine and Gal (2000), iconization is the process whereby linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social groups inherent nature or essence (2000:37). Erasure is the process in which facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away (2000:38). Programs critical of Gothic/Lolita render the utterances and behaviors of inarticulate and

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childish Gothic/Lolitas as iconic of the counterpublic as a whole, while erasing actions that would contradict this image via creative narration and editing. The captions provided for many Japanese television shows reveals one fascinating method of creative narration and editing. In Japanese television programs in particular, captions represent an intriguing example of reported speech in that they are displayed simultaneously while the speaker is still speaking. Such captions effectively employ processes of erasure and iconicity to construct certain iconic images of the counterpublic while masking others. Volosinov (1973) writes that there are two kinds of reported speech, linear style and pictorial style. Linear style construct[s] clear-cut, external contours for reported speech, whose own internal individuality is minimized . . . [where] the grammatical and compositional manipulation of reported speech achieves a maximal compactness and plastic relief (120). In contrast to this is pictorial style, in which language devises means for inltrating reported speech with authorial retort and commentary in deft and subtle ways. When used effectively, the pictorial style in particular can have a powerful inuence on recontextualizing the utterance of the individual as if the reported form of the utterance was the actual form spoken by the quoted individual herself. In addition to these visible processes of creative narration and editing, what is erased can be just as revealing as what is shown. Examining the selective editing of programswhat was left outcan tell us much about how the producers wish to iconize Gothic/Lolita. Though we can never be sure about what exactly has been edited out of television programs, in programs critical of Gothic/Lolita like Super News we only see interviews with Gothic/Lolitas who speak inarticulately or in somewhat slang forms. This notable absence, combined with the pictorial style of reported speech captioning used liberally throughout, reveals the extent to which programs like Super News actively create a moral panic view of inscrutable wayward young girls that at the same time seek to subsume them within a familiar category of young women. A few examples of the practices in Super News will help to elucidate this point. In one portion of Super News in particular, erasure through creative narration and editing is made explicit by a young male interviewer (who remains unseen) when he interviews a particularly outrageously dressed teen in the Gothic/Lolita Mecca of Harajuku. When approaching one gurorori,5 a girl dressed in Gothic/Lolita with bloody bandages, one of the rst questions he asks is Do your parents know you dress like this? (oya wa kono kakko shitteiru no?), spoken in a very casual (almost rude) form. When the girl responds in the negative in the standard polite form (oya ni wa ittenai desu), the male interviewer discursively repeats her words in the same casual form that he used previously, indexing his purported objectivity while really emphasizing the very judgment he attempts to obviate as a fact-nding journalist. Later on in the program, the male interviewer accompanies two Gothic/Lolitas back to their home after a concert. In this portion of the program, his feminizing and infantilizing interview style becomes even more pronounced in both his patronizing questions and the use of captions to paraphrase the interviewees speech. Throughout the entire interview, which is carried out in their room, the girls demonstrate constant collaborative language use where they either answer questions in unison or build off of each others comments, a manner of speaking that Lakoff characterizes as typical of womens language (Cameron and Kulick 2003). The captions on the screen highlight this by embellishing their remarks with colored hearts and squiggle marks signifying girlish intonation. This same pattern is used throughout the program when the male interviewer interviews Gothic/Lolitas, and seems to reinforce the childishness of the girls. The most telling part of the interview comes at the end when the girls say (collaboratively) that in the future they would like to open a shop that sells Lolita clothing. The narrator closes the segment by commenting, Until the end, they want to do what they like! This is where they showed their shojo rash egao (smiles appropriate for/typical of a young girl). The tone of the narrators voice seems to

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imply that, despite their unorthodox fashion and interests, there is still hope that they are typical girls on the inside. What is notable throughout the Super News segment to those who are conversant in the Gothic/Lolita counterpublic is not only the emphasis on outrageous, unrepresentative incarnations of the style like gurorori that are set up as iconic, but also the noticeable lack of Gothic/Lolitas who use ladys speech. Given the discourse on practicing ladys speech in magazines and on internet forums, not to mention interviews with articulate and polite Gothic/Lolitas on other programs such as Hanamaru Market, it is almost certain that the producers of critical news programs choose to erase any such interviews. Such practice is common in broadcast interviews and reminds us that all editing is inherently a discursive process. The processes of iconization and erasure embodied in video editing also involve multiple layers of what Goffman terms footing, a crucial part of narration. News programs incorporate several levels of narrative embeddedness including narration of interviewees responses, narration in the form of interview questions, and narration between segments. Taken as a whole, the entire news program itself can be seen as one narration by a master narrator (the producer(s)), someone who is rendered invisible to the viewers. This is necessary to truly (dis)embody the practice of objective reporting, for as Goffman (1981) notes, a full-scale story requires that the speaker remove himself for the tellings duration from the alignment he would maintain in ordinary conversational give and take, and for this period of narration maintain another footing (1981:152). Speaking on layers of footing, Goffman (1981) writes that each increase or decrease in layeringeach movement closer to or further from the literalcarries with it a change in footing (1981:154). Thus, for each added layer of embedded narration the spectacle is more thoroughly manipulated and controlled by the master narrator who is able to systematically omit the narrative frame breaks that very likely occurred throughout the actual tellings (1981:152), and conduct other editing sleight-of-hand to ignore the Gothic/Lolitas own virtual speech community and erase anything that would undermine the socially shocking image of Gothic/Lolita that such programs strive to create. On the other hand, there are programs that take a positive stance toward Gothic/ Lolita like Hanamaru Market, which demonstrate editing and narration that support the virtual speech community of Gothic/Lolitas. Such programs may feature interviews that match the register of joseigo/ladys speech (re)appropriated by Gothic/Lolitas, momentarily embracing Gothic/Lolita to lend familiarity to it for viewers, and legitimizing it by participating in the co-construction of Gothic/Lolitas speech patterns as a socially viable and intelligible register. Compared with the infantilizing and moral panic of Super News, the differing use of erasure and iconicity in programs like Hanamaru Caf is revealing. In marked contrast to the interview style of the faceless young man in Super News, the very rst interview in Hanamaru Caf combines implied equality by matching politeness in language forms with a linear style in the reported speech of the captions that highlights the articulateness of the interviewee. The rst question that the celebrity female interviewer Kaiho Sato asks is in honoric form, characteristic of both joseigo and Gothic/Lolitas (re)constructed ladys speech. When the Gothic/Lolita being interviewed responds in the same honoric form, Kaiho repeats the utterance and remarks that her use of language is very rened, isnt it! (o-johin desu ne!). Furthermore, unlike the male reporter in Super News, Kaiho does not repeat the interviewees every utterance but rather lets her speech stand for itself. In a later segment of the program Kaiho interviews a shop clerk at a Gothic/Lolita clothing store and several Gothic/Lolitas and a male model at a Gothic/Lolita convention. While the content of the interviews is generally descriptive in nature (i.e., the nuances of Gothic/Lolitas fashion elements), the reported speech in captions is particularly revealing. All of Kaihos questions in these segments are framed in standard polite form (desu/masu), and for the most part the interviewees respond in

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the same form, though they all use common youth slang and some grammatically incorrect utterances. In these segments, the reported speech of the captions rephrases the interviewees utterances in the pictorial style by dropping slang and adding honorics when grammatically appropriate.6 One likely reason for this rephrasing is to facilitate easy reading for viewers, and it is also possible that the use of pictorial style in this way in fact draws attention to the speakers inarticulate/incorrect language use. However, taking into account the supportive and positive tone of the program as a whole, the end result is an image of articulate, well-mannered individuals as opposed to the infantilized and inarticulate Gothic/Lolitas of Super News. The nal scene of the program is a roundtable discussion in the studio by the female commentators. While Kaiho gives viewers various information on the many substyles of Gothic/Lolita in an authoritative tone, the commentators try on various pieces of Gothic/Lolita clothing, such as miniature bowler hats and bonnets. At one point one of the middle-age commentators puts on a bonnet, to which the other commentators respond Oh, it suits you! (o-niai desu!) in a sudden shift to joseigo/ ladys speech, signied particularly by the so-called beautication prex o- (Inoue 2006:14). Conversation then returns to standard polite form. This sudden foray into joseigo of the kind (re)appropriated by Gothic/Lolitas, as well as the matching use of the register of joseigo/ladys speech in the segments rst interview, could be seen as both momentarily embracing Gothic/Lolita to lend familiarity to it for viewers, and as legitimizing it by participating in the co-construction of Gothic/ Lolitas speech patterns as a socially viable and intelligible register. As Agha (2005) writes, registers have a social existence only insofar asand as long asthe metapragmatic stereotypes associated with their repertoires continue to be recognized by a criterial population of users, that is, continue to have a social domain (2005:46). In this way, the use of Gothic/Lolitas speech patterns by interviewers like those in Hanamaru Market serves to enhance a social domain of persons who recognize it as a model enactable through speech. Rather than falling in line with the hegemonic (male) discourse of young women as dangerously unfeminine and bloated with excessive modernity, producers of programs like Hanamaru Market praise their linguistic practices and manners, and display openness to the changing lifestyle options and increasing agency of young women in Japan.

Conclusion Like most youth cultures, the Gothic/Lolita subculture and counterpublic discourse is a bricolage of elements and ideas from a variety of different global and historical sources, ranging from Japanese impressions of Western fashion and history, to contemporary rock music, to postwar ideas of prewar femininity and aristocracy and idealized womens language. Also, like other youth cultures, the syncretic combination of recontextualized elements in Gothic/Lolita, combined with the register of ladys speech and a specialized lexicon that only Gothic/Lolitas have access to, creates an alternative virtual community where they can assume the fantasy role of princesses and step outside of social norms of dress and speech promoted in the (adult male) public sphere and the counterpublic spheres of other young women. As the above examples show, the counterpublic discourse of Gothic/Lolita is supported by enregistered voicessocial voices linked to registers (Agha 2005:39) found in magazines and internet forums from other Gothic/Lolitas and from Gothic/Lolita culture producers. Put differently, the register of Gothic/Lolita is, like all registers, a reexive model of language use (2005:38), and as such it is iconically indexical of what it means to be Gothic/Lolita. Whats more, the individual voices represented in magazines and other mediaand indeed by the very Gothic/Lolitas themselvesbecome iconic of the register itself, transforming it and reifying it with every utterance. In this way, Gothic/Lolitas are able to tap into and create various

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substyles and ways of speaking that provide both structure and creative exibility, and that justify their performance through a register shared by peers and role models. Further, it is through the virtual speech community created by the discourse of fashion magazines and internet forums that the counterpublic of Gothic/Lolita is invested with the unied language ideal of ladys speech (the extent to which it is actually practiced notwithstanding), a (re)appropriated register of feminine and polite speech that adds another chapter to the storied history of Japans vulgar schoolgirl speech cum idealized womens language. This is perhaps an example par excellence of what Agha describes as the dynamic social life of registers, where
the repertoires of a register . . . change . . . whether through analogical extension, borrowing, changes in reference standards (such as changes in exemplary speaker), changes in practices of codication (cf. dictionaries), or even the substitution of the speech of one group by the speech of another under the same metapragmatic label. [Agha 2005:56]

Crucially, the location of the revitalization and (re)creation of joseigo in the context of a young womens counterpublictypically a realm of social concern for adults has engendered confusion and ambivalence in popular media and intellectual discourse. Critical news media and (male) intellectual discourse thus relegates Gothic/Lolita to the standard discourse of dangerous female youth cultures through iconization and erasure, and ignore the traditional nature of its speech practices. This is occurring against the backdrop of a contemporary belief that womens language, which once existed in pure form, is now lost as a consequence of women becoming morally and linguistically corrupted in the present (Inoue 2006:14, emphasis in original), a belief that is reafrmed with every iconic reference to lin guistic practices like noripgo and gyaru speech, and by erasing the polite and traditional linguistic practices of counterpublics like Gothic/Lolita from mass media consciousness. It is unlikely that the counterpublic of Gothic/Lolita indexes a future trend among young Japanese women to return to an idealized womens language and femininity, however. Gothic/Lolita as a counterpublic has not become mainstream (i.e., advertised and manufactured by popular major clothing companies and adopted in toto by a signicant enough number of consumers to become a regularized and naturalized part of Japanese youth culture), but rather its elements have been diluted and fed into the river of mass consumption that ows around the many islands of Japanese youth cultural trends. As with most youth cultures, the music, fashion, and language of Gothic/Lolita will continue to change until it is no longer recognizable as what it once was. What Gothic/Lolitas use of (re)constructed joseigo in the form of ladys speech indicates, however, is how the fertile ground of idealized femininity can be tilled for expressly non-mainstream purposes, presenting the popular media and (male) intellectual discourse with a linguistically nostalgic pastiche wrapped in an inscrutable sartorial coating that is hard for many to digest. Just like Katos Ojo-sama Language Quick Study Course, the counterpublic discourse of Gothic/Lolita magazines and web forums offers a site where the dead womens language is brought back to life and where excessive imitation inadvertently exposes the original absence of pure womens language (Inoue 2006:203), regardless of the intent of Gothic/Lolitas who are trying to use it. In the end, Gothic/Lolita offers young women the opportunity to linguistically and sartorially perform the self-indulgent role of a princess, and allows them to articulate interests and desires in Gothic fantasy and doll-like innocence that are erased by the dominant male public sphere and by contemporary masculine and brash womens counterpublics. It does not matter that they live in early 21stcentury Japan, that they are neither princesses nor dolls, and that many must play the roles of student on weekdays and daughter at home. In his essay Social Life as Drama (1997), Goffman seems to be speaking directly to Gothic/Lolitas when he writes that

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It is not only that the girdle, brassiere, hair-dye, make-up disguise body and face, but that the least sophisticated of women, once she is dressed, does not present herself to observation: she is, like the picture or the statue, or the actor on the stage, an agent through whom is a suggested someone not there; that is, the character she represents, but is not. [Goffman 1997:103]

For those brief few hours after school, for that short afternoon on Sunday, or for those several minutes spent reading a Gothic/Lolita magazine in line at the convenience store, it is this identication with something unreal, xed, perfect as the hero in a novel, as a portrait or a bust, that graties her; she strives to identify herself with this gure and thus seems to herself to be stabilized, justied in her splendour (1997:103). Notes
Acknowledgments. I wish to thank Jennifer Jackson and William Kelly for their patience, support, and helpful advice. I would also like to thank Paul Manning, Miyako Inoue, and Shunsuke Nozawa for helping me work through and revise this article. All translations are my own except where otherwise noted. 1. I use the word alternative here and throughout the text as meaning worldviews, strategies of meaning-making, and language and behavioral practices that exist alongside other worldviews, strategies, and practices. By using the term alternative I do not mean that there are alternative ways of living set against one reied mainstream, but rather a multiplicity of alternatives, some of which are more or less dominant at certain times, among certain groups, and in certain places. 2. It must be noted that the original creator of Gothic/Lolita style and culture, Mana, is himself a fascinating gure. A cross-dressing guitarist and designer, he is regarded as an enigmatic (and paradigmatic) gure within the subculture, and he enhances his mystique by never speaking in public. In fact, the only instances where Manas voice is heard are in magazines like GLB and in printed interviews. In live interviews, Mana employs an interpreter who answers all questions for him while he nods and performs delicate gesticulations. The reason for his silence is no doubt partly to preserve the purity of his role as a perfect feminine gure; in internet forums, many (female) Gothic/Lolitas remark that he is so beautiful that sometimes, I forget he is a man (Mana-sama Aisuru Kai 2006). If Mana were to actually speak, it is likely that his performance of the role would be shattered for his many fans. 3. My thanks to Shunsuke Nozawa for suggesting this phrasing. 4. I thank Miyako Inoue and Paul Manning for bringing this manner of conceptualizing kosupure and Gothic/Lolita to my attention. 5. This is a rather uncommon substyle. In response to the program, several posters on a popular Gothic/Lolita message board wrote comments like Thats the rst Ive ever heard of it! or Whyd they pick something like that to focus on? (Goshikku rorta ni tsuite katari masho 2006). Other posters dismissed the girl as being a kosupure fan. 6. For example, the comments made by a model at the Gothic/Lolita convention are rephrased thusly: Furu de soroe nakereba, futsu no hito mo zenzen ni kirareru to omou ndesu kedo, becomes Subete soroe nakereba, ippan no kata mo futsu ni kirareru to omou. Both sentences mean exactly the same thing, I think that if you dont wear the whole outt, normal people [nonGothic/Lolitas] can wear the clothes, too, but the re-phrased reported speech of the caption is more polite and articulate.

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