Pop and ma: The landscape of Japanese Commodity Characters and Subjectivity
Larissa Hjorth
The pop of pop and ma is popular culture specifically for this article kawaii which is best translated to "cute" and can be see in it's ultimate incarnation as Hello Kitty. Not being super familiar with the Sanrio world I though I'd take a spin around Google Images, these were the best results.
The ma of pop and ma refers to a concept of ambiguity and blank space, what I think of as "nagative space" of images (nothing neagtive about it really) or in a sense what was meant by "the notes you don't hear". I think. Traditionally ma is the white space around the characters in calligraphy, it is the space between words, the undefined that sets off the definite. It's being extended to a "rhetoical device connoting conceptual ambiguity" which I think is a really facisating idea.
Kawaii, the cute referenced before, implies "childhood or childlike qualities" but as the posits is not asexual but rather a ma like space where the sexual can be redefined. And lastly keitai, which literally means portable, and conotes mobile devices like phones, text messagers, or other portables. This ties in weakly to the main these of the article as it seems merely to be connected by the fact that the surveeys often hang kawaii off their keitai. The primary focus of the article is on the relation between kawaii and sexuality rather than on the "dialoge between kawaii and keitai" as implied by the title.
This article is broken into the following sections
I think I have issues with each section....
essentially defining the terms above (not well enough for my liking) and stateing what I see to be the central argument of the article "cute characters may be appropriated to open up oossibilities of nonconformist gender roles and sexualities. " Again there is a little difficulty with the relation to technology, these characters are important because of their relation to the keitai thus we need to examine whether this is just reinforcing traditional female representations but the article essentially examins the relation between the kawaii and sexuality. The statement is made that "'cuteness' as symbolic of female subjectivities with consumer culture is being revolutionized by shifts towards the internet..."
PostPet refers to a virtual e-mail character made by Sony, used as an example of kawaii, and the term only occurs once in the section. In the previous section PostPet is defined as a symbol of modernization and postmodern society and is claimed to be defined through "the language of either ma abysses or consumer pop (meaningless trash)" The claim is made that ambiguity does not imply a lack of meaning. Thus we have ambiguous as in many possible meanings, not as in doubtful or uncertain.
Kitsch is aparently connected to the division between high and low art, though it's connection to the olympics made me pause, (Olympics indicates low? could be) , the kawaii is located in the inbetweenness of popular culture and thus neither here nor there, it's ambiguity and ubiquity renegotiate the otherness of childhood.l Good quote: "the category of childhood is often defined by adults and thus positioned as "other"" p.166 American = youth culture, Japan = child culture. Kitten writing was aparently a starting point for kawaii...there's this concept that cuteness. I feel like in this section she just references other authors, talks about their shortcommings, briefly states how they might be corrected, but never actually supports her new theories.
Even assuming in previous sections that kawaii is indeep this way to reconstruct genedered relations and that it represents the "blank canvas" where "voiceless" categories can be preformed, now it's relagated to a gift given to someone else. Yes, gifts are important examples of ma already, they fill the inbetween of social spaces. Maybe I just don't get her reasoning, but i wish she'd be more explicit. So kawaii has become an acceptable category of gift,
What does it mean to make ma, something in the margins, the site of female sexual empowerment?
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