PCA/ 2025Representations of the Shōjo: Between Identity and DifferenceFrenchy Lunning Abstract“Technologies of visuality played a crucial role in the conceptual articulation of the figure of the doppelgänger,” states Baryon Tensor Posadas, in his compelling book, Double Visions, Double Fictions: The Doppelgänger in Japanese Film and Literature, and hence lays out a case for the study of visuality, particularly in the study of the doppelgänger and the double – not quite the same thing, yet each informing and orbiting the other as documents which inform this study. As part of my research on the subjectivity of the Japanese shōjo, the images of the double and the doppelgänger intertwine and mirror each other as they appear continually as shōjo images in magazines, illustrations, advertisements, photography, manga, anime, and film – themselves mechanisms of doubling, from the late 19th century to the present. Using these myriad images as informing objects, which as Posadas suggests, “are perceived to be indexical images that threaten to replace the subjects they capture,” yet as immediate doubles – then later, performing as doppelgängers themselves, they trouble the notion of identity of the shōjo subject largely assumed to be stable, yet once the magnifying glass is produced, she is revealed to be profoundly unstable and troubling, particularly in the first half of the 20th century in Japan. Going with Posadas and then beyond him to reframe the analysis of this peculiar doubling option, chosen at that moment by both the female subjects and the mostly male artists alike, is quest of this essay.
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