Mirror, Mirror : Embodying the sexed posthuman body of becoming in Sion Sono’s Antiporno (アンチポルノ, 2016) and Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (ヘルタースケルター, 2012)

Mirror, Mirror

Embodying the sexed posthuman body of becoming

in Sion Sono’s Antiporno (

アンチポルノ

, 2016)

and Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter

(

ヘルタースケルター

, 2012)

Zara Luna Hjelm

Supervisor: Dr. Marietta Radomska Examiner: Dr. Edyta Just

Gender Studies, LiU

Master’s Programme

Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change

Master’s thesis 15 ECTS credits VT 2021

Abstract

This thesis examines the embodiment of the sexed body and the struggle of fitting into the narrow frames of what a woman is supposed to behave and look like in Japanese cinema. Using the medium of film, I, therefore, seek to produce knowledge regarding the internalized gaze of the oppressor, and self-objectification, caused by the capitalist heteropatriarchy. Thus, I am drawing from cyborg feminism, and the second wave of sexual difference theory’s concept of becoming, expanded upon by the Italian-Australian philosopher Rosi Braidotti. I further use the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of masculine domination and the American philosopher Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle, in creating a theoretical framework, and using the methods of cultural and feminist film analysis to contextualize the films and locate the subjectification of the women. The movies that I will be analyzing are the Japanese director and poet Sion Sono’s Antiporno (アンチポルノ,2016) and the Japanese director and photographer Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (ヘルタースケルター,2012), which both center around two women and their struggle in becoming-cyborg, in relation to power, trauma, sexuality, technology, and beauty ideals in ‘modernized’ Japan. In that sense, I will study the phenomenon of operating outside the lines of social norms of femininity and desire. Keywords: internalized gaze of oppression, Sion Sono, Mika Ninagawa, Antiporno, Helter

Skelter, Japanese cinema, film analysis, gender, plastic surgery, beauty standards, body commodification, self-objectification, Japan, becoming, cyborg feminism, the charmed circle, masculine domination, j-horror, pinku egia, ego guro nansensu, shojo manga, BDSM

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Marietta Radomska, for her excellent guidance, support, and professionalism. Further, I would like to show my

appreciation to all my colleagues and teachers, whom I have worked with and learned from throughout this program of Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change (2019-2021). It has been an honor.

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ... 2

1. INTRODUCTION ... 5

AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ... 6

PREVIOUS RESEARCH ... 6

MOTIVATION... 9

ETHICAL ISSUES AND DELIMITATIONS... 9

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS... 10

2. BACKGROUND ... 11

MIKA NINAGAWA ... 11

SION SONO ... 12

GENRES/THEMES... 13

Ero guro nansensu ... 14

Shojo manga ... 14

J-horror ... 15

Pinku egia ... 16

3. METHODOLOGY AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ... 17

CULTURAL ANALYSIS ... 17

FEMINISM AND FILM ... 18

Intersectionality in cinema ... 19

CYBORG FEMINISM ... 20

Technologies of the gendered body... 21

MASCULINE DOMINATION ... 22

BECOMING... 22

THE CHARMED CIRCLE ... 24

4. FILM ANALYSIS ... 25

ANTIPORNO (アンチポルノ,2016) ... 25

Part 1: The invisible wall... 25

Part 2: Nausea&Shudder ... 28

Part 3: Survive ... 31

HELTER SKELTER (ヘルタースケルター,2012) ... 34

Part 1: Filth in the beauty ... 34

Part 2: Love is dead ... 38

Part 3: Sustain the untruth ... 40

5. SUMMARY AND FINAL DISCUSSION ... 42

CONCLUSION ... 47

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 48

1. Introduction

Who are we in the eyes of the Other, or rather, whom could we be? It may be a question easy to get lost within and even easier to lose the Self in, thy the gaze that stands above all others may possess the power to make us fall apart. In today’s society, we are constantly looked at and looking through screens, whether it is social media or fashion magazines, it fabricates a lie constructing the premises of perfection. It follows us into the most intimate moments, telling us how to experience it and how to appear whilst doing it, which causing us to become voyeurs looking into our own lives as if we were trapped in a dollhouse. Thus, the Self slowly dissolves into the Other, internalizing the gaze and patterns of our oppressor to keep us from drowning. Embodying a subjugating gaze, I argue, causes many, especially women, to have toxic relationships with the bodies and a shattered image of the Self, which

henceforward can lead to body dysmorphic disorder, or other mental health issues, which can affect the physical ability due to cosmetic surgery, or eating disorder etcetera. To examine this further, I am going to study two films: Sion Sono’s Antiporno (2016) and Mika

Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012), in both of which the narratives focus on two women (one character in each film) who are struggling to fit into the narrow frames of the technologized embodiment of the sexed and sexualized body.

Aim and research questions

The study aims to explore how the women on-screen struggle with fitting into the frames of what women are supposed to look, act and be like within the societal norms. In reading the Japanese films Antiporno (2016) and Helter Skelter (2012) together, this thesis also aims to demonstrate how the internalized gaze of oppression is implemented and capitalized on in a so-called ‘modernized’ world of masculine domination.

- How is femininity, and essentially the idea of womanhood, expressed in the films? - What role do power and sexuality have in the becoming of the characters?

- In what ways do the norms around ‘feminine traits’, e.g., beauty, compliance, and chastity, transgress the characters on screen into cyborgs?

Previous research

The field of Japanese feminist film studies in Japan, particularly, is quite new and only became academically mainstream in the 1990s. According to the film theorist Daisuke Miyao, it is because the theoretical film study in itself is marginalized, especially since the Japanese government does not support it because of the commodification of film (Miyao, 2014, p. 1). However, amongst Japanese feminists, media to think critically about media representation is important, which has been demonstrated since the 1970s, alongside the new wave of feminism, ũman ribu (which translates to women’s lib), at that time, in demand for recognition of self and female sexuality (Matsui, 1990; Chovanec, 2016). Further in this section, I will present literature written especially about the films and/or directors I will study, rather in a broader sense, to emphasize the different angles that the filmmakers and films of my choice can be read from.

I did not find much research written about Mika Ninagawa in particular, and only one article about her film Helter Skelter. In the article ‘Female Voice and Occidentalism in Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012): Adapting Kyoko Okazaki to the Screen’ (2016), Rie Karatsu compares Helter Skelter with Kyoko Okazaki's shojo manga Helter Skelter using the concept of Occidentalism. Karatsu means that both the manga and the film have been

inspired by European and American culture and tradition, hence, it is Occidental, in oppose to the Palestinian philosopher Edward Said’s term Orientalism, which refers to a stylized and essentialized representation of the East for social, political, and economic exploitation.

Initially, the author argues that the genre, shojo manga, has evolved over the years adapting to Occidentalized aesthetic reflecting the Westernization of hegemonic beauty ideals and cultural norms in Japan. Thus, Karatsu claims, the characters in the manga and the film tries to conform to the Western-influenced standards of beauty and that the themes in the settings of the film are influenced by Western stylistic, and then compares the two, in which she concludes that the film, in contrast to the manga, tried to transform the genre of shojo and its adaptability (p. 981). The points that Karatsu is making regarding the beauty standards in

shojo manga, and essentially, how colonialism has infected the Japanese standard of

attractiveness will influence this study, although I instead am going to see how it is portrayed in two different films.

Regarding Sion Sono’s films, I did not find any research done on Antiporno, but found a study about his horror film Tag (2015). The study, ‘Análisis fílmico de Tag de Sion Sono: feminae in fabula’ (2017) by Sabrina Varquerizo-González, discusses the women in the film and analyzes whether the film is feminist or not, drawing from psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and cultural analysis. It focuses on the different representations of Japanese women in the genres of, e.g., chambara, girl-ninjo, and yakuza eiga, to form an understanding in

relation to the heteronormative Japanese existence and hegemonic masculinity. According to the study, Tag can be seen as a feminist manifest due to that it offers an identification that questions the female subject embodied into a mystical object (Vaquerizo-González, 2017). As a director, Sono is an auteur, who often uses female subject in his storytelling, and thus, I think it is important even in the film I will be analyzing how he works with feminist

elements. I also got inspired by Chia-wen Kou’s article ‘Quasi-Bodies and Kafka’s Castle in Sion Sono’s Crime Noir Guilty of Romance (2011)’ (2014), which analyzed Sono’s film

Guilty of Romance (2011). The movie was adapted from a real crime in Tokyo where a

woman was found decapitated, and her limbs were re-assembled with a sex doll. Through the cinematic narrative, Sono manages to blur the distinctions between true crime and fictional sin, whereas the ‘quasi-body’ becomes a product of human literality whilst the imaginary collective is shaped to fill the fractures between. Like the other study mentioned, the author emphasizes the female subject(s), which I find interesting. Using a Freudian-Lacanian

framework, Kou states that man occupies the position of lack as the symptoms of the woman, and the voyeur dissolved whilst the erogenous body of the spectator turns to a ‘territory of becoming through desire’ (MacCormack, 2008 in Kuo, 2014, p. 178). In that sense, the female main character in the film is ‘guilty of romance’, where she surpasses the limits of

oedipalization and transforms herself into a ‘the body without organs’ (Kou, 2014, p. 170). Moreover, as the author notes, a voyeuristic erotic game between the two female characters in the film creates a haptic erasure of the Self and the Other, whereas, in the end, the author notes that ‘[…] the sexes become joyless while love is turned to the eruption of their

shattered multiplicities’ (Kou, 2014, p. 178). It blurs the line between the Self and the Other, which is not only between the characters but also regarding the main character’s personality split of being involved in an underground pornographic world and being a housewife to her husband. Thus, she is the ‘beheld to be preyed with eyes of the beholder’ (Kou, 2014, p. 178).

I interpret that dissolving of the Self and the Other is rather present in Andreas Jacobsson’s study ‘Remembering the Future: Sion Sono’s Science Fiction Films’ (2020), where he studies Sono’s film The Land of Hope (希望の国, 2012), which takes place in the aftermath of the 3/11 disaster in Fukushima in 2011, and The Whispering Star (2015), which is about a female android who delivers packages in space in a futuristic setting. The purpose of the study was to highlight the possibly dangerous ecological effects the meltdown of nuclear power plants may have on the future life of earth, drawing from the American film and media theorist D.N. Rodowick’s film philosophical concepts of belief in images and time. Jacobsson argues that the scientific elements in Sono’s films center around the grieving experience and focuses on the constant looming threat of death and extinction, whereas death is caused by man-made nuclear technology that fails and withstands a natural disaster. In that sense, both non-human bodies and land become subjectified, because of their ability to die and take lives. It is also argued that, from a film philosophical perspective1_{, the idea developed by the film}

highlighted the experience of existing without a future, and the importance of value life and making sense of its existence. Hence, death is a ‘necessary condition of the formation of human cultures’ (Jacobsson, 2020, p. 190). I find this interesting in relation to this thesis, in that sense that it, as previously mentioned, subjectifies the techno-body, which does not necessarily need to look human, and the existential questions that arise with dealing with the disastrous ecological effects which are caused by, in this case, nuclear power, that affects all life on earth.

1 _{Film philosophy is a discipline that overlaps film theory and film study, and seeks to understand the basic}

Motivation

The reason that I want to do this research is that, within the culture of social media, reality-TV, and fashion magazines it is stressed that women need to be or look a certain way, which harms people’s, especially women’s, self-image (Hansen, 2016;Nishikawa, 2009;

Tiggermann & Anderberg, 2019; Fox, Vendemina, Smith & Brehm, 2021). I interoperate that the films of my choice, Antiporno, and Helter Skelter, are framing the struggle of orientating womanhood from that perspective whilst also trying to conform to family values in the frames of the genre psychological horror. Looking at society as of today, the issues with, for example, body dysmorphic disorder and social anxiety are massive (Tei & Wu, 2021; Jassi & Krebs, 2021; Castle & Baillharz, et al., 2020). I see celebrities online promoting ‘self-love’ overshadowed by tons of make-up, plastic surgery, and retouches, rather than showing people how to look, and still being praised as if they were goddesses until they become ‘irrelevant’, much like the character Lilico in Helter Skelter. To, for example, lay under the knife only to control the outer shell has become common, which I find to be disturbing because of the risks and think is a part of a deeper issue. Women are supposed to look sexy and be sexual, but at the same time untouched; a contradiction that the character Kyôto embodies in Antiporno. The list of paradoxes of the conditions in our society could go, but the previously mentioned are the ones I want to highlight the most, in relation to gender, and additionally to class, race, and ability, and so on, in the films, where I will be analyzing to dismantle the toxic structures of the capitalist heteropatriarchy. However, I find it important to note that in this state of late capitalism men also suffer, especially regarding the hegemony of masculinity which

subjugates different ‘types of men’ depending on race, sexuality, and class etcetera. For example, as I have argued elsewhere (Hjelm, 2020), sexual identity has a significant meaning in creating the hegemonic masculine identity to conform to the norm (p. 34). As with the idea of women, it also differs depending on the subject’s situatedness.

Ethical issues and delimitations

Due to the scope of this thesis, I will not go into the specific situation of Japan, such as the oppression of the indigenous people, the rise and fall of the colonial empire, or the

development of feminism in Japan. Although, I will go into some of it to contextualize the films I am studying and relevant cultural phenomenon. I, however, want to emphasize my own position, as a Nepali-Swedish researcher based in the West with a background in art history and gender studies, to situate my knowledge. In that sense, the framework I will view

the films from is going to be adapted to my own situatedness and unlock the availability to see the films from perspectives outside their original context. I also want to use the term woman rather as a depiction of how the body often is coded from the outside, which may cause a lack of, but not disregard, the perspective of non-binary genders and inclusion. The reason I chose to do this, in a heteronormative way, is because, as I want to claim, something that is still needed to be discussed and additionally connects to the struggle of being

unwillingly being seen as a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ in the heteropatriarchy at large. Lastly, I want to disclaim that I do not intend to shame anyone who, as the characters on screen, e.g., makes pornography or change their bodies with plastic surgery, but I will look at it as it is portrayed in the films, as an act to survive and to fit in, which I know is not the case for everybody.

Summary of chapters

In the first chapter after the introduction, I will present a background of the directors Mika Ninagawa and Sion Sono as auteurs, emphasizing the work they have done throughout their careers. The following section will be presenting four different genres/themes that are prominent in the directors' work, and especially in the film that I will analyze. The

genres/themes are ero guro nansensu, shojo manga, j-horror, and pinku egia, which does not only provide layers to the films but also will work as a minor (and selective) historical

background into Japanese cinema. In the third chapter, I am going to present the methodology and theoretical framework for the thesis. Firstly, I will present cultural analysis and feminism and film, where I will emphasize feminist film theories and analysis. Then I will introduce cyborg feminism, which will permeate the thesis, in relation to the concepts of Pierre

Bourdieu’s masculine domination, Rosi Braidotti’s concept of becoming, and Gayle Rubin’s

charmed circle. In the following chapter, I will analyze the film, starting with Antiporno

where the topics of trauma and sexual liberation will be prominent. The analysis will be divided into three sections in chronicle order, where I will read and interpret the narration interchangeably. Furthermore, I will analyze Helter Skelter, which also will be divided into three sections in semi-chronological order as the film. In this section, I will discuss the phenomenon of plastic surgery and stardom in relation to the film, emphasizing the effects of beauty standards and colonialism. Lastly, I will summarize and conclude the thesis.

2. Background

In this chapter, I will initially present the directors of the films I will examine. First, I will introduce Mika Ninagawa and her work, which will be followed by the work and persona of Sion Sono. I will here also put focus on the films, which will be notable in the analysis, in order to tie the characteristic aesthetic and narrative storytelling of the directors. Then I am going to extract four genres/themes from the films that I will analyze, to present the

background and define them. Because the stylistic of the films are quite wide, it is going to be presented as a color pallet of four different main themes that shape the films.

Mika Ninagawa

The photographer and director Mika Ninagawa was born on the 18th _{of October in 1972 in}

Tokyo, Japan, and is the daughter of the celebrated theater director Yukio Ninagawa. Today she is mostly known for her flamboyant photographs of flowers and landscapes, both in the commercial and the art world, but also for her three full-length films and her Netflix series

Followers (2020). In the 1990s, she became the leading light of Japan’s Onnanoko Shashin

(‘Girly Photo’) movement, and in 1997, she had her first exhibition outside of Japan (Yamaji, 2018). She continued to be a relevant photographer, and in 2007 she made her first film,

Sakuran, which was about a young girl who was sold to a red-light district brothel and tried

to adapt to her life as a courtesan. The film was screen at the 57th _{Berlin International Film}

Festival and the 31st _{Hong Kong International Film Festival (Mika Ninagawa, Biography,}

2020).

In 2012, she released her second film, Helter Skelter, which was screened at the 56th _London

Film Festival and the 14th _{Taipei Film Festival. The film became the highest-grossing film in}

Japan during that year and was additionally awarded the Kaneto Shindo Silver Price (Mika Ninagawa, Biography, 2020). Ninagawa’s psychological horror film was adapted from the

shojo manga with the same name, written and illustrated by Kyoko Okazaki in 1995-1996. It

centers around the ‘star’ Lilico in the 1990s, when, as Ninagawa claims (Wigley, 2016), there were still real stars. Lilico constantly hunts for the vouge she can lead, in which her value becomes commercialized and grotesque. To some people in the industry, the film was like a documentary (Blair, 2012). The narrative has been expressed to be a ‘modern day’ Dorian Gray, and the technical aspect of the film a mixture between the Italian director Dario Argento’s Suspiria and the American director Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (David, 2017).

Although, as a filmmaker, Ninagawa has expressed that she is mostly inspired by anime, namely the Japanese directors Hideaki Anno and Hayao Miyazaki, but also the Hong Kong-based director Wong Kar-wai (Wigley, 2016). Besides being one of Japan’s most famous female photographers, and an icon for the ‘Girly Photo’ movement, which pushed millions of Japanese women and girls to photograph in the 1990s. In an interview from 2016, Ninagawa bared her feminist vain in her art, saying that: ‘[…] Women are always treated in like

assistants. Japanese men like weak, submissive women, it makes them feel stronger, more confident […]’ and that ‘I don't care about the guys, but it's my duty to help women to become happier’ (Ninagawa in Wigley, 2016).

Sion Sono

The filmmaker, author, and poet Sion Sono are perhaps best known for his film Love

Exposure (2008), which has been described as ‘four hours madhouse kink’ (Toro, 2011).

Sono, ‘the most subversive filmmaker working in Japanese cinema today’ (Tsui, 2016), was born in Achi Prefecture, Tokyokawa, Japan, on the 18th _{of December 1961. At the age of}

seventeen, he ran away from Tokyokawa to Tokyo, where he joined a Christian cult, which inspired the film previously mentioned. After running away from the group, he turned back home and started to study at Hosei University but dropped out. Though, as soon as he entered the university, he made four films on 8mm; in which one, I Am Sono Sion!! (1985), gave him a price for at PIA Film Festival. In 1990, he moved to San Francisco to study at Berkeley University, where he started to study B-movies, mainly in the genera of horror and porn. Coming back to Japan, he stopped making the art house-film that he used to and started to make something that he referred to as ‘black entertainment’ (Hoenigman, 2009), which combined a bit of art-house and ‘weird entertainment’. One example of that was the horror film Suicide Club (自殺サークル,2001), which followed a series of interconnected mass suicides.

Throughout his career, Sono has made circa forty full-length films, a few short films, and a couple of TV series (IMDb, Sion Sono, u.d.). He is frequently called a provocateur and an auteur with his style characterized by, e.g., grotesque violence, eroticisms, and surreal imagery, often with philosophical indications. Sono has expressed that he admires inter alia the Danish director Lars von Trier, the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the American director John Cassavetes (Hoeningman, 2009; The Sion Sono, 2016), which I

would say permeates his work. The genera of the films are often described as, or inspired by,

ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque nonsense), but has made everything from romantic

comedies, and horror films, to pinku eiga. In the documentary, The Sion Sono (園子温とい う生きもの, 2016), he expresses his willingness to create and argues that quantity should be more valued than quality (The Sion Sono, 2016).

In 2016, Sono directed one of a series of five films for Nikkatsu’s project ‘Roman Porno Reboot’ (i.e., Romantic Pornographic Reboot), Antiporno, in which the filmmakers were asked to make a film out of the frameworks of the studio’s popular softcore pornography films from the 1970s. The surrealist film, with elements from the genre of ero guro nansensu, is narrated around the fashion star Kyoto, who is bored in her apartment, waiting to meet a chief editor for a fashion magazine, who is interviewing her. Whilst waiting, she engages in a domination and humiliation game with her assistant, but as the diegesis unfolds, the lines between the real and the fantasy blur. Sion, who, like many male directors, has been debated whether his films are misogynic or feminist, was later praised for Antiporno’s feminist exploration of sexuality (Acevedo, 2017).

Genres/Themes

In this section, I will present four different genres/themes which I find to be present in the films I am going to analyze. Additionally, these themes will function as a minor timeline and background of Japanese film, which puts Helter Skelter and Antiporno to a context in the history of Japanese film. Initially, I will introduce ero goru nansensu, which literally means ‘erotic, grotesque, nonsense’. The elements of the genre, I argue, are attendant in the surreal, and sometimes absurd, storyline, as well as the premating critique of the capitalist realist status quo in both films. I also find shojo manga in the films, because of their topic of ‘girlhood’ and ‘femininity’, as a commodity, wrapped in anxiety and horror. Therefore, both the films carry the traditional storytelling and techniques of Japanese horror films. For example, in Antiporno the ghost of the main character’s sister is constantly present in the film, and in Helter Skelter, the horrors of materialism and gluttony are haunting. Like the fundamentals of pinku egia, the films, especially Anitporno, involve a lot of sex and nudity, and questions the paradox of the liberation of female sexuality in a male-dominated world.

Ero guro nansensu

The genera ero guro nansensu (which translates to erotic, grotesque, nonsense) is often seen as a historical phenomenon that happened in the 1920s and 1930s, facing the social changes of the Taishō (1912-1926) and early Shōwa periods (1926-1989). It was referred to as a ‘bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to the explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, the ridiculous’ (Ranpo & Reichert 2001, p. 114). In her dissertation, Lisa Lackney defines the three words, in which she means that initially: ero, embodied new and disturbing forms of eroticism; guro, included anything uncanny or mysterious, often linked to detective stories combined with sexual deviance; nansensu, which emphasized subversive political message, often arguing leftist economic reforms as the opponent of the government’s censorship. In that sense, the term ero guro nansensu embodied the characteristics and the anxieties of the Japanese modern period, but have been proven relevant still today, for example in Noboru Iguchi’s Dead Sushi (デッド寿司, 2012) and many of Sono’s films (Fredriksson, 2020; Lackney, 2020).

Shojo manga

The imagery of shojo – which means ‘young girl’ and implies the characteristics of cuteness and naïve innocence – can be traced to girls’ literary magazines emerging in the Meiji period (1868-1912), embodying esthetic such as large eyes, romantic settings, and flower design. According to Karatsu, this mirrors the process of the Western influence of Japan, and the assimilation to Western hegemonic beauty ideals and cultural norms, contrasting the traditional hikime kagibana, which was an illustration style that had been established in the Heian period (794-1185). In the 1920s and 1930s, shojo esthetics were still created within girls’ literary magazines, but developed into the manga format in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the girls often were drawn by men. In the 1970s, women artists took over the production of shojo manga and directed it more towards girls to read, which both gave the female readers and creators a voice, although, the style also reinforced a sexist ideology. Simultaneously, the adaption of Wester norms within the romantic narrative and the character’s ability to upward mobility, wealth, freedom, individual liberation, and

empowerment, where also homosexual love started to be portrayed in a different light. Shojo

manga thus became a genre where women could represent themselves (Karatsu, 2016).

However, it is a practice deeply connected to consumerism, whereas they both are consumed by the male gaze and by themselves. The image of shojo has therefore both been sexualized,

commodified, and consumed to be one of the most successful depictions of young girls (Vaquerizo-González, 2017; Karatsu, 2016).

J-horror

Japanese horror (also called J-horror) is a tradition of fictional horror, characterized for its conventional and unique thematic presentation of the genre of horror. It is deeply rooted in the folk tales that were passed down from each generation, originating through both the Shinto and Buddhism system, and tends to focus on psychological horror centered around suspense and paranormal activity involving ghosts (yūrei), in the co-existence of the world of the living (kono-yo) and the world of the dead (ano-yo). Central in the films are themes of isolation, alienation, and emptiness, which has been linked to the loss of connection in the Japanese society based on traditional obligations amongst individuals and communities, but also to an identity crisis characterized by a sense of loss of history and nostalgia (Balmain, 2008; Johnson, 2015).

It is considered that the genera originated during and in the aftermath of the Second World War, forcing modernization of Japan, which had a profound social effect on peoples’ sense of nationhood and identity. In the early j-horror film, Japan's ‘incomplete modernity’ was often personified as the figure of a pre-modern monster of traditional Japanese culture and

mythology that triggers disaster and apocalypse. Another theme that has been present is one with the emperor at the center, as a figure causing social and cultural anxiety, representing the imposition of democratic values in a former feudal state. There has also been an untrammeled individualism which often causes horror, for example in Kenji Mizoguchi’s

Ugetsu (雨月物語, 1953) and Nunou Nakagawa’s The Ghost of Yotsuya (東海道四谷怪談,

1959). Later on, the topic of commodification, materialism, gluttony, and death became the leading trigging themes of horror, for example in Nagisa Ōshima’s The Empire of Passion ( 愛の亡霊, 1959). During the 1970s and 1980s, the films were rather concerned about sexual violence and gender representation, whilst additionally also drawing from the archetypes from traditional folktales, such as ‘the wronged woman’ or ‘the vengeful ghost’ (Balmain, 2008). In more contemporary Japanese horror films, a common theme is the internet and technologies often tend to isolate and kill individuals, which can be seen in Sono’s Suicide

Pinku egia

Pink film, or pinku egia as it is called in Japanese, is a soft-core film genre that includes nudity or sexual content which encompasses everything from drama to exploitation film. The films were produced and distributed in small, independent studios, such as OP Eiga, Shintōhō Eiga. One of the oldest film studios, Nikkatsu, later produced a Roman Porno series, in which they created a set of high-quality romantic pornographic film. The genre emerged in the 1960s with the film Satoru Kobayashi’s Flesh Market (肉体の市場, 1962), which is said to be the first true pink film. In the beginning, it was quite similar to the American sexploitation films in that sense that American films frequently capitalized on cultural anxieties and current ethics (Nornes, 2014; St-Hilarie, 2017). It is important to keep in mind that, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, nudity and intimacy were still taboo. In that sense, pink film enabled sexual liberation, and additionally the intersection of sexuality, mainly sex and politics (Nornes, 2014). This new category of (s)exploitation films was first called erodakshon (eroduction) which was coined by Naigai taimusu’s editor, Fujiwara Isamu. The term pink film was, however, introduced by the staff writer Murai Minoru for the newspaper Naigai

taimusu, who labeled Seki Koji’s Cave of Lust (情欲の洞窟, 1963) ‘momorio egia’. The

word momoiro (which literally means ‘peach color’) was used until the 1950s, whereas ‘pinku’ emerged in the 1960s from the English loanword ‘pink’ to indicate eroticism in mainstream society (Nornes, 2014).

3. Methodology and theoretical framework

In this chapter, I am going to present the methods and theoretical framework which I will use in my film analysis. Initially, I will introduce cultural analysis and feminism and film, where I will highlight feminist film theory and analysis. The first two sections will describe the methods I will use in analyzing the movies, hence, looking at both the culture that they, and I, exist in and the location of the female voice in the films. Here, I will also emphasize the concept of intersectionality in film, especially in thinking about differences. Furthermore, I will present cyborg feminism, drawing Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo, to create a framework of technology that has affected the gendered body. I will also use Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of masculine domination, to further address how women have been

marginalized by men, especially focusing on body image. In using the second wave of sexual difference theory, I will especially draw from Rosi Braidotti’s concept of becoming, which she expanded from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Guattari’s process of becoming. In that sense, Braidotti merged the concept of the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference, who largely was inspired by the French psychoanalytic Jacques Lacan. Lastly, I am going to use Gayle Rubin’s charmed

circle, to discuss how sexuality and power are seen in society, and how it affects the

representation of women. Hence, I am using a multifaceted and complex set of

methodological and theoretical frameworks, which will, however, be necessary to reach the aim of analyzing how the women on-screen struggle with fitting into societal norms.

Cultural analysis

In her book, The Practice of Cultural Analysis Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (1999), the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal defines cultural analysis as a critical practice based on the awareness of the researcher’s situatedness in the present, the social and cultural situation, looking at, and looking back, at objects that are in the past and that could define the present culture. Bal calls this the cultural memory in the present, which stimulates an

indecisive relation to history, and thus, cultural analysis problematizes the hegemonic narrative, and open up different interpretation of the past. Culture analysis, hence, seeks to ‘understand the past as a part of the present’ (Bal, 1999, p. 4), which is how I will use the method in reading film. For example, Bal argues that graffiti is exposed, first as a

combination of text and image, but also for its availability for all members of society to see. To be able to watch films, I want to claim, is a privilege in contrast to the phenomenon of

graffiti, however, it does combine text and imagery. In that sense, they both become

exhibitions in themselves and are essentially exposed. Bal connects the meanings of the verb ‘to expose’ into exposition, exposé, and exposure, which are the issues, in Bal’s case, graffiti brings together to make a ‘public demonstration’. The triple meaning of ‘to expose’, Bal stresses, constitutes the field because it defines cultural behavior rather than then culture, whereas graffiti embodies the concept of ‘culture’, and therefore when exposure reaches the public, it becomes a performance involving the subjects’ belief and values (Bal, 1999). In that way, I will use cultural analysis to expose the films I am analyzing to reach and create a deeper meaning.

Feminism and film

To analyze film from a feminist perspective, it is fundamental to firstly look at ‘where is the female voice located’ and ‘how can the feminist discourse be found’ (Stam, 2005, p. 207). One of the key texts to feminist film theory/analysis is the British film theorist Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in which she emphasizes the unconscious patriarchal structures in film and the socially established ways of

representing sexual difference. Throughout her text, Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to reveal the operation of the film, especially identifying the gaze, voyeurism, and fetishism, which she claims engraves the subject in the social structures. Mulvey emphasizes the male gaze, i.e., a male spectator, that ‘in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/women’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 11). Combining a

psychoanalytic framework, she additionally uses the term castration, to describe how women are represented to evoke male characteristics to defend themselves, which causes anxiety regarding the image of the woman. She also draws from the concepts of sadism, to describe the narrative that tries to ‘save’ women or punish them, and fetishism to define the

glamorization of the female body. These modes of looking and identify thus impose a masculine perspective on the spectator, regardless of gender, whilst the imagery codes women to be looked at.

Later studies have a conceptualization of the female spectator to create a position for both male and female spectators integrating with ‘psychic bisexuality’ (Studlar, 1984 in Stam, 2005). Regarding the female spectator, in her text, the American film and media theorist Mary Ann Doane (1982) uses four terms to center feminine subjectivity in film; (1)

masochism: the sexual perversion where the subject receives pleasure to inflict pain; (2) hysteria: a type of neurosis where a psychological conflict is seen through a certain object;

(3) paranoia: a psychosis but is expressed through erotic fantasies; and (4) neurosis, an in-between of neurotic. Additionally, Stam (2005) notes, drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, that sexuality cannot be assumed, and that both the masculine and feminine are created in symbolic and processes, which thus suggests that sexuality is reversible, changing, and conflicted. In both psychanalysis film theory and feminist film theory, it is necessary to orientate the relationship of the female body in the discourse, where the symbolic construction of sexuality offers a perspective of the body in other terms than of, e.g., ‘mystical essence’ (Stam, 2005), which is how I want to apply the method. However, regarding objectification, I want to note that for women the anticipation of both male and female gaze increases anxiety and shame – but it is the male gaze that is argued to trigger the sexual components of objectification – because women are socialized to value themselves based on their capacity to be sexual objects for men. Thus, women tend to internalize the beauty ideals to the extent of self-objectification and interpersonal experiences of sexual objectification (Guizzo & Cadinu, 2017), which I interpret as an important factor in both looking at women, as a woman, and in representing the woman.

Intersectionality in cinema

The concept of intersectionality comes from the American feminist and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw, who aimed to shed light on how social and political identities can be combined to create different dimensions of discrimination and oppression (Crenshaw, 1989). Thinking about intersectionality in film is to think about power in relation to how the subject is being portrayed regarding its locatedness and situatedness. In representing power, especially in feminist films from the West that seek to empower women, it [power] is often packed in individualism, which seeks to resolve the social struggle with individual perseverance, strength, and exceptionalism, rather than with a collective force to defy patriarchal structures. It is also more common that women with authority are portrayed as young white and/or middle-class, whereas the stories of powerful women of color and/or low-income women, or older women are rarely represented as having agency, choice, or power (Sutherland & Feltley, 2017). Although the film I am going to analyze is strongly located in Japan, I still think it is an important issue to address the differences. It is here important to note that in Japanese society, the woman is valued through their social role, e.g., ‘mother, wife, daughter,

girl, woman (especially working women in male-dominated environments), or prostitute’, which is especially visible in the representation of women in ‘pre-feminist film’ era in Japan. Through speech, women’s language has been associated with certain ‘feminine demeanor roles’ to, for example, be soft-spoke, polite, hesitant, empathetic, gentle, and non-assertive, and additionally have been represented as having a higher-pitched voice, which has a role in shaping gender identity (Inoue, 2006). In the late 1900s, the representation of women started to embrace the perspectives of ecological feminism, sexuality, alienation, and dominance (Prindle, 2013). One of the keys to uncovering the field of identities in a broader sense, whilst at the same time making evident the structural power that produces them, is to understand the concepts of identities, bodies, and institutions within globalization, and thus, to comprehend the intersectional sociopolitical and transnational geographic issues that shape the societies (Mahrouse, 2016).

Cyborg feminism

The American feminist and science theorist Donna Haraway (1995/1991) argued that ‘we all are cyborgs’, that is, hybrids of technology and organisms, which she additionally argued could be a way out of dualism. With her concept of natureculture, Haraway carved out new positions that rejected the Western nature/culture dichotomy and rather claimed that they produce and reproduce themselves through a dynamically changing intertwinement of matter. According to her, cyborg bodies are the only bodies that stand a chance in the postmodern culture, in which she highlights their trans(ag)ressive, subversive, perverse, and carnivalesque characteristics. Hence, the cyborg culture would overcome three boundary breakdowns: the animal/human, the organic/machine, and the physical/non-physical (Haraway 1985/1991). Like Haraway, the American author Anne Balsamo (1995) defines cyborgs as hybrid entities that are not fully technological or completely organic, and thus have the potential to disrupt the persistent dualisms in the ‘natural body’ and to change the idea of the theoretical

construction of the body. She further claims that both gender and the body are boundary concepts, often related to physical characteristics of the body and cultural context. Hence, the body has been recorded within the discourse of biotechnology and medication, as belonging to a culture rather than nature where gender is still perceived as a naturalized marker of human identity. She claims that the female body has been special studies and coded to signify the ‘natural’, sexual’, and reproductive, whereas the womb has become a sign for the

formats power relations that manifests in between the body and technology, which Balsamo suggests can be explained as technologies of the gendered body. She argues that gender is ‘both a determining cultural condition and a social consequence of technological deployment’ (Balsamo, 1995, p. 10).

Technologies of the gendered body

In identifying the structure of nature/culture, Balsamo exposes the hierarchy of culture over nature, which benefits several ideological factors, e.g., the imagination that culture (the man) will triumph over nature. Thus, the role of the gendered body serves as a site for anxieties of the ‘proper order of things’ therefore becomes ideological. Consequently, Balsamo brings up cosmetic surgery, which creates new visualization of technologies that henceforward shape a new form of scientific biopower that objectifies the female body and subjects that body to the surveillance of the ‘normative gaze’. In that sense, Balsamo traces how cosmetic surgery has shifted into technological perspectives to especially make the female body fit into Western beauty ideals. Hence, cosmetic surgery positions three mechanisms of cultural control: inscription, surveillance, and confession. The physician’s clinical eye functions as the

medical gaze, which the French philosopher Michel Foucault described as ‘[…] a disciplinary

gaze situated within apparatuses of power and knowledge that constructs the female figure as pathological, excessive, unruly, and potentially treating of the dominant order’ (Foucault in Balsamo, 2005, p. 57). The medical gaze then disciplines the female body into fragments, emphasizing isolated parts that need to be recognized as flawed and pathological, and

therefore splits the women’s body image into body parts that become something that needs to be ‘fixed’. All plastic surgery involves aesthetic ‘corrections’ to create symmetry, harmony, and proportions, where the human body is measured to additionally fit into categories, e.g., the ideal female face, to invoke the standard definitions of ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’. In the encounter between the women and cosmetic surgeons, Balsamo points out, that is not the ‘inner woman’ that is visualized because she has not the truth of her own, and the identity of the female body is often represented as diseased, in which the storyline obsesses of the ‘flaws’ to eventually transform to sameness. Thus, the fragmentation of the body goes in tandem with accomplishing gender, relying on the essentialist view of the female body as an object that needs to be repaired, and even if the standards of beauty change from time and place, the basic principle remains the same, which is how I will apply the theory to the

phenomenon of bodily transformations in the films and to investigate how ‘feminine traits’ transgress into a cyborgian culture.

Masculine domination

Regarding the embodied sex under masculine domination, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorizes in his book Masculine Domination (2001), that the social condition of women’s disposition isolates women’s experience to the body of a universal experience of the body for others to be constantly exposed to objectification through the gaze and

discourse. The relationship to the body can therefore not be reduced to merely ‘body image’ (i.e., the subjective representation of the Self), but rather as an agent of social effects that are build up from so-called objective representations and opinions enforced by others. Therefore, the perception of the body is socially determined, and the gaze is not universal or an abstract power to objectify. Further, Bourdieu argues that the disposition and the structure because it simultaneously produces and reproduces themselves, especially regarding the construction of gender, which he means centers around the exclusion and subordination of women to ratify and amplify the system of masculine domination, in which he argues that ‘from the whole structure of technical and ritual activities that are ultimately grounded in the structure of the market in symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 42). In that sense, the symbolic order is made into a virtue, whereas the product of the, for example, embodied honor becomes a model of masculinity. Masculine domination, thus, constitutes women as symbolic objects that are(esse) and is being seen (percipi), which then is sought to keep women in a permanent state of symbolic dependence and insecurity. Thus, women are expected to be attractive and available as objects for men, whereas the concept of ‘femininity’ is shaped into indulgence to conform to male expectation, often amongst the petite bourgeoise who predominantly are exposed to the anxieties of the social gaze, intersecting gender, and class (Bourdieu, 2001). This theory will therefore be crucial to examine how women in a patriarchal society navigate, and how power relates to their becoming.

Becoming

In short, the concept of becoming offers a framework for thinking about how the body is produced and performed in social, cultural, and material contexts, and thus, ‘what it can do’ rather than ‘what it is’. In Deleuze and Guattari’s concept (1980/1987), becoming is a matter of the relations and determinations, which they described as:

The indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 262).

Hence, it is a composition of relations that are determined by the time of the occurrence, in which the processuality of becoming connects to concepts that cannot be reduced to ‘molar’ entities, such as individuals, beings, and things that are situated within a linear time to measure the development of forms and the determination of subjects. In that sense, the ontology of becoming is based on that the units are not fixed, but entities-in-processuality. Rather, becoming involves extraction from these forms, subjects, functions, and organs, and so on, which are defined by the relations of movements, rest, speed, and slowness in the in-between. There is no psychology or ‘lived-experience’ attributing to becoming, but

spatiotemporal features in which the distinction between becoming-woman, and women as endowed with organs and functions, are allocated within a dichotomized economy of gender (Burchill, 2010). Therefore, becoming-woman is the disregard of being-man by thinking about figurations (Burchill, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).

To expand the concept, and to shift its gender neutrality, Braidotti synthesizes the Deleuzoguattarian notion of becoming with Irigaray’s sexual difference theory. In short, Irigaray argued that women should not be defined by their relationship to men, but rather as thinking subjects, outside of the binary norms. Braidotti further emphasizes difference in relation to becoming in a new way, where she argues for the materialistic basis of the subject, and the asymmetry between the sexes toward a nomadic mode of thinking. In that sense, she also embraces the difference between women regarding their various locations, and so on, but also the differences in becoming and the complexity of identities. Thus, she means, that identities are not fixed, stable, or united, but in a constant movement. Braidotti describes the nomad as a figuration, that is, alternative images of the Self, not as a metaphor, but rather as ‘materially embedded, embodying accounts of one’s power-relation’ (Braidotti, 2002, p. 13), and that:

She may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis (Braidotti, 2002, p. 12).

In thinking about nomadism, she argues that the embodied subject develops intersecting forces of affects and connections, in which the structure of subjectivity is the capacity for incorporation and transcending variables of inter alia class, race, sex, nationality. Thus, the process of becoming is about repetition and memories, and whilst it does not concern

reproduction or imitation, it demands cultural meditations dealing with the subject’s material and semiotic contrition (Braidotti, 2002), which is how I want to use Braidotti’s concept of

becoming in analyzing film and the characters in constant metamorphosis.

The charmed circle

Because the films are depending on how the characters orientate around sex and power, especially regarding S/M, to their struggle to fit in societal norms, I want to draw from the American cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin’s paper Thinking Sex (1984) which presents a ‘sex hierarchy’ diagram. In the diagram, which she calls the charmed circle, it is illustrated how the dominant way of perceiving sex stays within the inner circle of the diagram. In the inner circle, i.e., what seen as good, natural, and acceptable, there is inter alia

heterosexuality, monogamy, procreation, vanilla, and marriage, whereas ‘outer limits’ there is homosexuality (and other ‘deviant’ sexualities), promiscuity, commercial sex,

sadomasochism (S/M) and so on, which is not accepted by societal norms (Rubin, 1984, p. 13). Additionally, Rubin discusses the relationship between feminism and sexual liberation, where she argues that the liberation of sex is the liberation of women because their sexualities are often policed. She further discusses that the antipornographic movement in feminism, which Rubin opposes, views sex through which women are oppressed. Sexual liberation is for men to have more access to women’s bodies, where it is argued that sex should be policed because it perpetuates male domination (Rubin, 1984). Hence, women, and non-men, are more limited by society in moving to the outer circle than men. Even if the concept and ideas are located in American society, I find it useful to look at in a wide, or even planetary, perspective, and thus, I want to connect to the internalization the gaze of the oppressor, and the role of sex and power in the characters’ becoming.

4. Film analysis

I will, in this chapter, analyze the films Antiporno and Helter Skelter combining cultural analysis and feminist film analysis as methods, and sexual difference theory and cyborg feminism in the theoretical framework. Firstly, I will analyze Antiporno, where I initially am going to present a short description of the plot of the film, which will be followed by an analysis in three parts discussing the different parts of the film in chronological order. The three parts will, thus, discuss the narrative of film within a film, trauma, and the ‘interruption’ of becoming, and its relation to sexual liberation. Further, I am going to analyze Helter

Skelter, where I first will present a short plot, and then I will analyze the film in three sections

on the topic of beauty, consumerism, love, and power. In that sense, I am going to centralize the struggle of women under masculine domination and the phenomenon of internalizing the gaze of the oppressor.2

Antiporno (

アンチポルノ

, 2016)

The Japanese drama film Antiporno was written and directed by Sion Sono and was released as the fourth film on Nikkatsu’s reboot of the Roman Porno series in 2016. It centers around a young woman, Kyōko (Ami Tomite), who is a conceptual artist and novelist isolated in her studio, dialoguing with her haunting memory of her dead sister. As her older personal assistant Noriko (Mariko Trutsi) arrives to help her prepare for an interview by a lifestyle magazine, a power-play of pleasure and pain begins. Struggling with trauma and self-doubt, Kyōko lessens her weaknesses to subject her assistant to a series of rituals involving

humiliation in front of other women. A director yells ‘Cut!’, and it is revealed to be a pornographic fantasy. Behind the cameras, Kyōko is the one getting humiliated by Noriko and the director yells at her for her ‘amateurish incompetence’. As the spectator goes deeper into the rabbit hole of her subconscious – Kyōko memories and the present – the lines between reality and fiction blur, and the layers of past distress form into rituals.

Part 1: The invisible wall

In the first scene, the spectator gets to see Kyōko dancing naked across a room to the tunes of a piano until the lights go out and she wakes up in her bed in a mess, watching a lizard

2 _{The titles of the subheadings in all six parts of the analysis have been inspired by song titles from J-rock}

groups, such as the GazettE, Dir En Grey, D’espairsRay, and Miyavi, which in themselves created an undertone of intertextuality. I will not, however, analyze this further.

trapped in a bottle. She then gets up to sit on the toilet and sees herself in a broken piece of a mirror, in which she yells to herself that ‘it was not my fault!’. As her mood drastically shifts, she gets dressed, and the phantom of her dead sister appears playing the piano. Kyōko asks her if it is sunny in heaven, in which she answers that ‘there are no butterflies’ and Kyōko says ‘butterflies are free, but a lizard in a bottle can never escape’, which marks a significant, and nihilistic, analogy between life and death in the film. In that sense, her sister has an ominous present, co-existing with the living. Therefore, the film early on picks up the themes of Japanese horror regarding paranormal activity, tracing back from traditional folklores, but also concerning isolation, alienation, and emptiness connected to the modernization of the nation.

Kyōko dances to her sister's tunes and lays down on the floor and says ‘I’m a virgin. A virgin, but a whore’, and continues ‘I must be one or the other. But women lose their virginity, not just whores’. She plays a projection of a film showing a younger version of herself having sex with a man, which she screams at the screen ‘Fuck her harder!’ to the screen and throws up. It seems like a memory of hers, reminiscing on how she unwillingly lost her virginity to conform to social norms. Behind her in the studio, here are three paintings of women and the words ‘ladies’ that I connect to the empowering feminist art, which promoted independence and sexual freedom. As her assistant arrives, she comments that the women in the paintings ‘lack ambition and subjectivity, but above all, sex appeal’, which seems like a critique toward the feminist struggle of subjectivity. Her attitude towards her assistant becomes more aggressive, and she accuses her of not understanding her struggle because of her age, addressing the pressure of young women to be desirable. The dialogue turns into a power-play in humiliation, pleasure, and pain, where Noriko becomes the masochistic subject of their play, but who is really being punished? Kyōko then argues that Noriko cannot be a whore, even if she wants to, because she is not pure and explains that ‘only women so pure it breaks their heart can be whores’. Kyōko makes her assistant get on her all fours and bark like a dog, and then lick her feet and legs, but as she receives pleasure from it, Kyōko, yet again, throws up. The crew from the magazine arrive and becomes voyeurs of the sexual game. Noriko undresses, and they all judge her body, saying that she will never be free with a body like that, which I read to a direct critique of the idea of sexual freedom under male domination. One of the women from the crew starts ‘raping’ Noriko, on Kyōko’s demand, as her interview begins, they walk around the room in the constant

I take the annoying freedoms that restrict me and flush them down the sewer. This nation’s paltry freedom of speech gets thrown in a pile of shit. Freedom torments this nation's women. Deceived by freedom, they praise freedom of speech, but not one of them can master it. No woman in this nation can master freedom! Freedom’s servants, freedom’s slaves, freedom’s puppet, forced to act as if they are free! (Antiporno, 2016)

I find this quote to be significant throughout the film, and the paradox of women’s sexual liberation and the antipornographic premises. Later, the lines will be revealed to be a part of a script, and thus a mantra written by men for women to repeat. Kyōko then screams that the girl should pleasure Noriko more, and as the word slips out of her mouth, images of her father having sex with her are juxtaposing the main narrative, and she starts to gag. Suddenly, a male voice in the background screams ‘Cut!’ and it all turned out to be a fantasy, a

performance for a pornographic movie.

Drawing from Mulvey’s notion of the gaze, in this part, Kyōko is an active participant in the film, rather evoking male characteristics of castration, such as establishing domination and power over other women. She is constantly being gazed at, not only by the viewers outside the medium but also by an all-male film crew. Running around within the frames of the narrative, Kyōko becomes subjected to sadism, where she is in some sense both punished and praised for the liberation of her sexuality. Looking at the lizard in the bottle, and identifying with it, I want to make another connection between the symbolism of the lizard and the butterfly in the film from a cultural perspective. In Japan, the lizard symbolizes sexual activity, but it can also mean love, and the ability to adapt and survive. In that sense, I read that Kyōko’s sexuality and ability to love are trapped and that her capacity to adapt has rather led her to feel isolated. Butterflies, on the other hand, are associated with beauty,

womanhood, femininity, and transformation, which Kyōko seems to lack in enviously saying that butterflies are free, in contrast to the lizard in the bottle, desiring death or freedom. She constantly talks about being a ‘whore’ and a virgin, something that I connect to the values of the traditional icons of the Madonna, and her opponent, the sexually free woman. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1905) adapted the complex in his argumentation that some men cannot see the women that they love as sexual, which he connected to Oedipal- and castration anxiety. In this sense, the Madonna-whore complex is constantly present and framed from a woman’s perspective in orientating the desire of becoming loved and desired. Thus, the concept of masculine domination, through the social condition isolates women’s

experience of her body to be constantly exposed to objectification, which keeps women in a permanent state of symbolic dependence. The pressure of being available is depicted in Kyōko’s outburst of filming herself having sex unwillingly – a trauma that keeps making her nauseous every time she feels pleasure – to conform to male expectations. Additionally, she herself engages in reproducing the hegemony of discourse when she shames Noriko, both for her age –- thus ‘fading’ beauty and inability to be perceived as sexual — and body shape.

Humiliation, however, is a part of the sadomasochistic game they are playing in exploring female sexuality, which also starring in a pornographic film created by men, and thus,

conforming their ‘S/M lesbian fantasy’, and feminist sexual liberation. In that sense, they also transgress Rubin’s charmed circle and are being pushed to the outer circle, i.e.,

commercialization of sex, homosexuality, and sadomasochism etcetera. Thus, in portraying sexuality and power in the becoming of the characters, it pushes the limits of aggression enacted on the body as a way of opposing the passivity assumed of women. I connect it strongly to novels and illustrations in reclaiming power, for example in the 1970s shojo movement, but also in books such as Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings (2004) and Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris (1996), which both depicts women involved in BDSM

relationships. The first story deals with elements of body modification in relation to BDSM, whereas the other follows how the relationships clash with the traditional familial authority. In that sense, both films examine how the attitude changed toward women’s subjectivity in modern Japan (Matas, 2019), which then are widening the circles of what is accepted or not, similar to Antiporno.

Part 2: Nausea&Shudder

After the director cuts the scene, he asks Kyōko ‘what are you doing here, Kyōko?’. In this reality, she is the submissive, and Noriko is the veteran and the one with status who

humiliates Kyōko. She apologetically talks to the director because of her ‘bad’ performance, who then asks her if she can do the sex scene even if she is a virgin and insist that she demonstrates. Juxtaposed with moving images depicting two of the other actors

eavesdropping at the other side of the door, the director forces himself behind her to see if she can make a sex scene, but she, instead, almost throws up. Kyōko goes back to the stages where Noriko dominantly asks her to lick her legs causing the film crew to cheer and clap, and thus the next scene starts. The viewer gets to see the filming in action, where Kyōko is

the dominant and Noriko the submissive, although, this time the action behind the scene is as visible, where Kyōko is being directed, and her insecurities shine through. Again, the director yells ‘Cut!’, and the spectator is invited to Kyōko’s subconscious where she is in a room with writings on the wall and several women standing in front of her saying ‘it is ok’. A girl in projection reminds her of ‘that time’, in which a scene is presented where the girl, who seems to be a younger version of Kyōko, walks into the woods with a knife towards her parents having sex in the same way she had sex in the projection of a film, which was a show in the beginning. She again wakes up in her bed, looking at the lizard, and goes to the bathroom, but this time the viewer can hear her inner monologue, which is remorseful. Kyōko puts on the video of her having sex in the forest again when Noriko enters the room, which evokes her

hysteria, drawing from Doane (1982), telling everyone in the film to die, including herself. In

that sense, her feminine subjectivity is emphasized in both hysteria and neurosis. Then she starts to look for the film team but cannot find them and explains to Noriko that it is just a performance where she is playing out the life of an insane woman. As she says it, she and Noriko end up in a theater, full-packed with Japanese girls in uniforms, who are laughing at them. ‘This isn’t my life!’ she shouts in angst. Back in the studio, Noriko tries to comfort her and tells her that the people from the magazine soon will be there. Kyōko looks at the

projection on the wall, which earlier depicted her having sex, but the people in it are gone and it is just a shot of the forest. In the blur of what is real, the memory of her sister is portrayed, and the viewer slowly is invited to follow her in her memory lane.

In the next scene, Kyōko is portrayed sitting at the dinner table with her parents, who are dressed in traditional Japanese clothing, and her sister, where she stiffly, but comically, ask her parents about her genitalia, and if a man’s genitalia will enter her genitalia someday, in which they answer that it will, at will ‘darken it’. Hence, make her ‘less pure’. Further, she also asks about why she cannot learn about and why films about sex are bad, and they answer that is it obscene and indecent. In this sense, I read the voices of her parents as a

representation of traditional Japan, and Kyōko as a young woman in a ‘modernized ‘world. To put it in context, the education around sex in many parts of the world, Japan (and my situatedness, Sweden, alike) is a contentious issue, which especially clashes with mass media and the commercialization of sex. In early Japan, sex and love were considered a part of ‘human nature’, not only to reproduce but also for the purpose of eroticism, especially during the Heian era (794-11192 AD). But during the Tokugawa era (1603-1867), sexual

class system. Stronger hierarchization of class was crucial for the moralization around sex, and with modernization, the deployment of sexuality increasingly became crucial for the government’s organization of knowledge and power, i.e., to learn about sex, and instead, it was women who tried to change the sex education policy. Thus, the Meiji government strengthens their values, arguing that it was only women of lower class who had ‘loose’ sexual morals. At the beginning of the 1900s, Japan got its first sex education debate in a distributed newspaper, which was followed by the Taisho era (1912-1925) and a wave of the democratic and feminist movement that also played a role in educating the masses. However, the liberation was quickly overthrown by militarism, which aimed at securing human

resources for war, and was therefore highly influenced by ‘racial hygienic policies’, and the restriction of sexual publications, contraceptives, and abortion. In post-war Japan, there were still diverse ideas about sexuality, and under US occupation, the government abolished public prostitution and introduced ‘purity education’ to ‘purify’ the Japanese ‘race’ stressing the importance of virginity and chastity. Although attempts were made, it was not until 1992 sex education became an official subject in primary and secondary schools in Japan (Fu, 2011; McLelland, 2015). Thus, in the dialogue, also with connection to pinku egia, I interpret its cultural background of the anxiety around sex, which I argue is highly rooted in historical factors and the control the state has over women’s bodies (Buckley, 1997). In this sense, a ‘modernized’ and ‘industrialized’ Japan has cultivated the [hetero]sexist system, where the body and sexuality are commodities for the desire of the capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Back at the dinner table, the sister says that she is going to die with a smile on her face, whilst a chainsaw is sawing through the ceiling above them. The imagery of her sister is portrayed, where she asks a young man to stick a knife in her belly, which he does. As Kyōko lays in a bed in her parents’ house, looking at an allegoric painting of her sister’s death, she says that she is sure she will die, but people will not understand it. The sequence ends with Kyōko naked walking to her sister, sitting on the couch after being stabbed, saying ‘all butterflies fly way’, in which the butterflies here seem to be a metaphor for hope. I read this as a critique of the patriarchal system and the violence against women, the ‘femicide’, which is a global health issue, and at large normalized in society from objectification to the murder of women. In that sense, women are dying at the hands of men, but people do not seem to understand it.

Another memory is portrayed of Kyōko in her studio with a model, who she brags about having been with a lot of men and treating them like ‘bugs’ in front of. She asks her model to