Mutating Hyperfemininity in <em>Bishōjo</em>-Inspired Art

Introduction “With most people, you cannot tell just from looking at them that they are fighting a silent, unseen battle”, says Sugary Symbiote, a Black, disabled, and sapphic artist in the United States. “That is what a lot of my illustrations represent. The girl is surrounded by cute things that make her happy, but she still feels alone and sad” (Sugary Symbiote). Central to her work is the bishōjo, or “cute girl”, drawn from manga, anime, and related media. While scholarship has largely treated bishōjo as objects produced for and by men (Galbraith; Galbraith and Rose), artists such as Sugary Symbiote reveal their queer and transformative potential. Women, queer men, and gender-diverse people have long engaged with bishōjo as sites for self-expression, identity, and resistance. For Sugary Symbiote, the bishōjo “may be assumed to be for the male gaze, but she is more than that. She has internal struggles that no one else can see” (Sugary Symbiote). Her illustrations reconfigure bishōjo through a Black queer lens, forming part of a broader movement by global fans to reclaim and reimagine Japanese popular culture (Gresham; Hassel; Jordan-Zachery and Harris). As Laura Miller notes, bishōjo figures can “serve … important social and cultural functions” by persuading, informing, and resisting through stylised cuteness (“Afterword” 172). In seeing the bishōjo through Sugary Symbiote’s eyes, we aim to draw scholarly attention to these underexplored dimensions of embodiment and affect. Figures such as the bishōjo can be continuously reimagined as mediators of body, self, and gender. This aligns with Jack Halberstam’s idea of “sublime mutation” (143), wherein women and gender-diverse people enact the bishōjo’s pliability through an ongoing interplay of the “fem(me)” and “hyperfemininity”. We use “fem(me)” to describe feminine-identifying and/or -presenting people of all genders, who have reclaimed the term “girl” to signify a queer excess. Scholars such as Rhea Hoskin and Allison Taylor show how hyperfemininity, pushed to its extremes, becomes an “agential femininity” that “veers from patriarchal sanctions” (283), offering genderqueer potential (Schippers). Fem(me) cultures also give room for the “cripping” and “queering” of bodies, opening up possibilities of expression and reflection on pain, trauma, and marginality (Kafer). While much academic work universalises fem(me) experience, artists like Sugary Symbiote speak from the first person—visibly and loudly—through their practice. As Lauren Elkin argues, “the feminist artist who addresses herself to the question of beauty and the female body has to be ready for other people to see her as a monster” (35). We are reminded of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s queer-crip performance in Sins Invalid, where she highlights how significant it is to give voice to disability in this context: “queer women of color never say we are disabled if we have any choice about it … . Our bodies are already seen as tough, monster, angry, seductive … . How can we admit weakness, vulnerability, interdependence and still keep … our perch on the ‘thin edge of barbwire’ we live on?” Here Sugary Symbiote’s work and its open, cute vulnerability offers much to contemplate. Like in many other contemporary fem(me) practices, her monstrous feminine appears and demands to be seen. Yet “repetitive academic attention” (Kinsella 18) to male fans and artists continues to dominate the field, leading to misconceptions and ignoring the rich, creative output of women and gender-diverse practitioners. As Miller notes, this marginalisation “forestalls a consideration of female agency and resistance through aesthetic forms” (“Cute” 24). This article contributes to a larger project titled Girl Estranged, which examines how women and gender-diverse people in Japan and beyond reinterpret bishōjo figures through their own illustrations. Drawing on Elkin’s Art Monsters, we foreground the fem(me) figure as central to exploring “complex feelings” and multiple “forms of embodiment” (22). Even when rendered in the language of cute girl characters, these voices can be, we argue, defiantly monstrous. In the Girl Estranged project, we explore how fem(me) and queer artists engage with bishōjo—manga/anime-style cute girl characters—as symbols, texts, and avatars. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion that “we are composed of lines”, we examine how artists invent “lines of flight” through their characters, expressing selves and desires beyond normative structures (202). These lines are not just drawn—they draw us in, enabling expression through and with bishōjo. While we centre sapphic representation—fem(me)-identifying people attracted to fem(me)s—we also include heterosexual fem(me)s and ace-spectrum perspectives, expanding beyond sexual intimacy to explore alternative forms of affect and connection. We collaborate with artists and illustrators who work in local subcultural scenes in Tokyo, Japan, and international digital spaces such as Instagram. Here emerges a convergence of local Japanese cultures and a diverse array of communities who co-participate with them in parallel overseas. In Japan, this includes YUI, an illustrator who creates sapphic works inspired by dating simulation games, and whose joyfully queer and girly images were taken up by English-speaking meme boards worldwide. Other examples include Aoi Uni, who paints abstract interpretations of the bishōjo figure to create her own “ironic and poisonous” queer world. Sugary Symbiote presents one of the many global artists we reflect on, including Australian street artist Bei Badgirl and American-resident artist Junko Mizuno. The visual work of artists across these two scenes tends to operate in intimate gallery networks where zines and low-cost goods circulate. Their curation diverges from mainstream white-wall conventions, shaping a fem(me)-centred aesthetic that resists institutional norms. As should be clear from bishōjo or “cute girls”, the artists we feature reclaim the figure of the “girl”, which does not denote “child”, but rather is a the fem(me) full of self-identifying, agentic presence. Imagining and Creating “Bishōjo” Originating in the ferment of the nascent movement of mature fans of comics for girls in Japan from the 1970s into the early 1980s, bishōjo are manga/anime-style cute girl characters. This manga/anime style is in contrast to the more realistic drawings seen in Japanese comics, which had dominated the previous decade and continued to have a hold on the popular imagination. In contrast to action stories presenting gritty representations of pulp-like intrigue and violence, a “cuter” manga/anime style provided a more playful and flexible alternative (Shiokawa 97). Here the playfulness of manga/anime’s form, with simplified rounded shapes and bold cartoony line work, shone out in the Japanese media landscape. This was, in some ways, a return to classic visual representation such as Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1952-1968, see fig. 1), which spanned out from work for children to include people of all genders and age demographics. Fig. 1: First appearing in the 1950s, Astro Boy was a hit among children. The cute style of the character, pictured here, spread to works targeting more mature audiences in the 1970s. Image courtesy of Tezuka Osamu’s official Website. Comics targeting girls and young women, written by women and queer men in particular, became a driving force in shaping and expanding on these logics. Given the association of comics for girls with “cute” (Shiokawa 99), it is not too much to say that the bishōjo, representative of the manga/anime style, is above all else “cute”. Even the distinctively large, shimmering eyes of bishōjo, which emerged from the contribution of girls’ comics as a way to encourage “empathy” (Takahashi 124, see fig. 2), are now emblematic of cuteness. Fig. 2: The characteristic look of comics for girls evolved from lyrical pictures in the pre- and interwar periods. Note the massive, sparkly eyes in this poster for an exhibition of illustrator Youko Tadatsu’s work. This capacity to feel with and as the cute girl mutated further, generating hybrid art appealing to men, women, and others. Appearing first in 1978, Invader Lum is perhaps the most famous of the bishōjo pinups and cover girls of the time (Galbraith 107-112, see fig. 3), but she certainly was not the only or the last one. While much has been written on Lum as a character “for men”, little attention has been paid to her significance as an important figure for sapphics, or indeed, the artist Takahashi Rumiko’s own sapphic intimations. (One recalls an interview where Takahashi quipped that, if she were a man, she would “get a wife”; Shōnen Sunday Graphic.) Further to this are assumptions in the literature as to how men engage with these texts. For example, today, the largest university clubs dedicated to queer pairings of bishōjo characters are not only a mixture of genders and sexualities, but also circulate and discuss books on Japanese lesbian politics as part of community-building and allyship (for more, see Welker). On the ground in Japan is a far more dynamic field than scholarship and English-speaking fandom presupposes, and this arguably begins with figures such as Lum in the 1970s. Fig. 3: In the late 1970s, Lum, featured on the cover of this art book, made a huge splash among manga/anime fans in Japan. As the centre of the mega-popular franchise Urusei Yatsura, she appeared in countless media and material forms for over a decade. Beginning in Japanese subculture and underground comic markets, cosplay, and spectacular fashion cultures, the bishōjo became increasingly “cool” through international fan movements from the 1990s into the early 2000s, and subsequent Japanese government initiatives, and finally the inclusion of anime on large streaming platforms such as Netflix. Here, a mutation of meaning and cultural capi