Warrior of Love: Japanese Girlhood’s Postfeminist Asian Body in Cutie Honey (Hideaki Anno, 2004)

Abstract

It would be a mistake to assert that postfeminism as a cultural sensibility operates in all societies across the globe. It is, however, perhaps accurate to suggest that it more commonly operates in economically prosperous neoliberal nations, irrespective of their geographical location. Postfeminism is, after all, strongly implicated in neoliberal governance and citizenship and should be understood as imbricated with global neoliberal ideologies that serve to affirm not only the individualistic values of late-capitalist culture, but also to position feminism as redundant within democratic and ostensibly egalitarian societies. Neoliberalism has expanded its borders beyond the Western free-market, and thus the assumption that postfeminist discourse operates exclusively in Western contexts discounts not only the multinational trajectory of neoliberalism and its influence on economic, social, and policy reform on a global scale, but also the international impact of American popular culture and its multifarious manifestations of popular (post)feminism that are regularly consumed by a global media audience. Simply put, postfeminist discourse cannot be localized into convenient geographical and cultural spaces, for to do so would also entail a rejection of the visible effects of globalization and the cross-fertilization of global popular and consumer culture. With this in mind, and by drawing on the cultural significance of manga in modern, neoliberal Japan, this chapter seeks to understand the culturally loaded figure of the Japanese schoolgirl within postfeminism.