The Bangya Alternative: Belonging and Identity within the Subculture of Visual Kei

• In Event: Ambivalent Hopes, Gendered Desires: Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture

Abstract

Visual Kei is a Japanese music subculture defined broadly by its uniquely flamboyant outward appearance, comprised of mostly male performers with a predominantly female fanbase This latter gender bias is especially apparent in those fans who participate in, or “sansen” (participation in battle) live performances—what I term the genba of the subculture (Condry 2004). Based on more than three years of ethnographic research and qualitative textual analysis, I argue in this preliminary study that these fans, or bangya(ru) (a portmanteau of “band” and “girl”) have found their ibashō, or place where they belong, outside of the heteronormative, “reproductive futurism” which designates Japanese citizens as “winners” (Allison 2012), experiencing fulfillment from their affective consumption of Visual Kei bands and performers. Many bangya fall within the loose category of shōjo, or post-pubescent, unmarried women who still live with their families despite maintaining employment; those who have left home often live alone with no apparent desire for romantic companionship. Thorough their identification as bangya, and especially within the space of the live, these women are, at least tenuously, freed from hegemonic restraints of gender norms while actively consuming performers whose masculinity is also distinctly non-hegemonic. The adoption and performance of the bangya identity, which often comes at the (dubiously termed) “expense” of neglecting other, heteronormative roles of femininity, can be thought of as an alternative to the increasingly precarious pursuit of hegemonic Japanese womanhood, and a method of denying (re)productivity as a measure for personal satisfaction and social worth.

Author

• Adrienne Johnson, University of Tokyo