YA or STFU

Gothic Lolita, by Dakota Lane

Lane, Dakota (2008). Gothic Lolita. NY: Atheneum. 208 pages.

Anyone who has found themselves transfixed by Masayuki Yoshinaga and Katsuhiko Ishikawa’s photo essay book Gothic and Lolita or has witnessed the growing interest in gothy-girly fashion in the cosplay world knows that the Gothic Lolita fashion movement that originated in the Harajuko district in Japan is growing in popularity in the West. Gothic Lolita girls and boys construct elaborate wardrobes of what would seem to be 19th century inspired doll clothing and sometimes engage in activities associated with a romanticized idea of the past, like tea parties. With the increasing popularity of manga and anime in the United States, the Gothic Lolita style of some of the series characters has begun to rub off on American readers. Enter: Dakota Lane’s Gothic Lolita.

I am always wary when the Establishment co-opts a youth subcultural trend, even if it is with the best intentions (I’m still reluctant to praise Ellen Wittlinger’s Hard Love); when an Eastern cultural or subcultural trend is exposed and manipulated by a Western author or artist (and I’m referring here to Gwen Stefani’s brief “bindi” period and her current and confusing relationship with and fetishizing of Japanese Harijuku girls), I get even less comfortable. Lane’s Gothic and Lolita unquestionably documents and fetishizes the movement in a way that I believe is supposed to give respect, but ends up Orientalizing the movement’s participants.

The story: Chelsea and Miya are both half-American, half-Japanese girls living in Los Angeles and Tokyo, respectively. Both girls are enamored with the Gothic Lolita movement and both girls have suffered recent loss: Chelsea and her mother are still mourning the death of Chelsea’s brother and Miya is desperate to keep her own brother (with whom she shares a relationship similar to the one Chelsea shared with her own brother) by her side following the death of her father. Former bloggers, the girls were fans of each other’s writing and blogstyles, but never directly communicated and, since both blogs went silent three years ago (when Chelsea’s brother died), each has fantasized about the strength of the other. When a Japanese-speaking American comes to the orphanage where Miya and her brother are staying, Miya is wary of the women; however, we soon discover that this woman is Chelsea’s mother, who–unaware of Miya’s and Chelsea’s virtual relationship–has come to adopt Miya and her brother.

Told as if each girl is speaking to the other, Lane’s prose attempts to be ethereal, but comes off more juvenile. While this could be a literary attempt to capture the true spirit of many young people’s Gothic Lolita blogs, which no doubt are super cheeseball, here, it’s just kind of lame. Much of the story hinges on the girls’ virtual and spiritual connection, a premise I find sort of hard to believe, particularly as it seems to depend on Chelsea’s and Miya’s “mixed” status. Inserted among the pages are photographs meant to illuminate the novel’s mood and depict the dreams, fantasies and realities of the characters; however, the pictures are not that good and serve to Orientalize the characters and the racialized characters further.

I think the problem I have with this novel is that so much seems to depend on the characters’ racial status. While one could argue that the racial status of any literary character is always already an issue, I think that, in this case, the racial identities of the characters are used in a sort of essential way that borders on offensive. That is, this is not a story about the different articulations of the same mixed racial identity in the U.S. and in Japan (which would be an interesting story), but about characters whose mixed race identity is tied up with a subcultural movement associated with fantasy in a story with distinct fantastic pretensions. Here, the racial identities of the characters become almost plot devices, something I find kind of offensive. That Dakota Lane is a Western (white, I think, based on her pic) author further complicates the interpretation because we’re dealing with two dimensions of Orientalism: the literal white colonization of the East and the adult colonization of youth.