Alice in lolicon: cartography of desire as the ‘West’ meets the ‘East’

Concern in the Anglophone West over the representations of sexualized underage female characters in popular culture had cast Japan as a perverse ‘other’. Yet this orientalist lens prevents productive engagement with the issue of girl commodification in the West. A contextual and formal analysis of the representations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in the erotic landscape of Japan demonstrated that the characterization of girlhood originates more in the processes of modernity than in socio-cultural particularities. My findings propose a new model for envisaging the girl’s commodification less in terms of gender than in terms of power.