Negotiating Gaijin beauty: Media, class, and Western influence in Japanese women's conceptions of attractiveness.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the intersection between feminist theory, representations of female attractiveness, and cultural context through an exploration of (Westernized) cultural constructions of female attractiveness in Japan and their negotiation by Japanese women. Based on eight months of fieldwork in a small southern Japanese village and the urban center of Kyoto, this work specifically examines how western---and westernized---popular cultural representations of feminine beauty entered into female informants' negotiation of their gendered identity. It explores how multiple and interlocking circumstances of these women's lives---including age, socio-economic status, geographical location, and racial identity---influenced their relationship to and interpretation of popular cultural texts, while attempting to locate these negotiations and interpretations within the larger socio-cultural and media environment in which they take place. It also investigates how these women's relationship toward popular representations might influence their definition of their own physical selves.; One of the goals of this research is to provide an alternative to current analyses of media consumption in the form of "audience studies," which have a tendency to be rather "ethnographically thin." In order to do so, I conducted extensive participant observation and numerous in-depth interviews (a total of 40) with my informants. By sharing the daily lives of two three-generational Japanese families and interviewing their friends and relatives, I believe was able to develop a deeper understanding of the context surrounding these women's consumption of popular cultural texts.; I argue that indeed, popular cultural representations and their negotiation could not be adequately understood in isolation from this context, as the various circumstances of my informants' lives combined in multiple and complex ways to influence their experience of popular cultural texts. This works concludes that race was a particularly significant factor influencing my informants' relationship toward the kind of imagery distributed within their cultural environment and the increasingly global "beauty culture" surrounding it.