Lolita : atemporal Class-Play With tea and cakes

When Tokyopop released the first volume of its English language version of the Japanese collectable magazine Gothic & Lolita Bible in 2008, I predicted that it would not be widely accepted by Australian Lolitas. This thesis began as a media reception study in which I intended to explain why the magazine would fail to capture the imaginations of Lolitas. I assumed that the appeal of Lolita lay largely in an Orientalist fantasy of Japan and that Lolita was a subset of the Australian cosplay1 community. I anticipated the magazine failing to attract a substantial following because its localisation techniques would jar against the prioritisation of 'authentic' Japanese exoticism within the community. I was interested by Arjun Appadurai's (1986: 56) observation that as commodities travel greater distances (institutional, special, temporal), knowledge about them tends to become partial, contradictory, and differentiated. But such differentiation may itself ... lead to the intensification of demand.‚ÄövÑvp I conducted a number of interviews with Lolitas about their media usage (both production and consumption). Over the course of these interviews it became apparent that the questions I was asking were wrong; they were neither as interesting nor as important as the aspects Lolitas themselves emphasised in answering my more open-ended questions. Japan and Orientalism barely featured in their responses. Some were fans of Japanese animation and cosplayed, but they firmly articulated a separation between Lolita and cosplay. Some Lolitas were musicians who had discovered Lolita through Japanese bands like Malice Mizer. Other Lolitas had no interest in Japan whatsoever. As I talked with Lolitas, read the novels and websites they recommended and looked more closely at what has been written about Lolita communities, I saw an as-yet-unexplored but fascinating aspect of Lolita: playing with an identity of leisure. Roger Silverstone (1999: 60) writes that to step into a space and a time to play is to move across a threshold, to leave something behind ‚Äö- one kind of order ‚Äö- and to grasp a different reality and a rationality defined by its own rules and terms or trade and action.‚ÄövÑvp Lolita is the expression of a desire for indulgence untempered by the un-aristocratic concerns of earning income.