Alice in transnational perspective and through the history of replication: an exploration of adult play in Australian art and Japanese shōjo culture

ABSTRACT

From her nineteenth century origins in a text which satirised the university milieu of Oxford, Lewis Carroll’s Alice became, by the end of the twentieth century, a global icon and an inspiration for serious and subversive adult play in numerous locations across the world. Examining two examples of this diverse adult play – modern Australian art and Japanese shōjo culture – this study of Alice as conduit for adult play reveals relations between individual and society, cultural constructions of identity, and enacted and repressed desires. This article argues that adult play constitutes spaces in which cultural relations of gender and identity are subverted and resisted. Thus, instances of adult play placed within their cultural contexts reveal both relations of power in the societies in which they are situated, and the ability of adult play to act as resistance hidden behind the playful childlike guise of imagined alternative (and impossible) worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Alice
• adult play
• Heterotopia
• performative gender
• Australian art
• Japanese shōjo culture
• comparative history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kali Myers is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines contemporary feminist photography in order to explore the relationship between mythologies of ‘Girl’, girl culture, and the aesthetic of cute in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her past publications have concerned gender theory in translation and the role of art and literature in shaping national narratives and identities.