Abstract
In France and elsewhere, contemporary Japan crystallizes a whole imaginary world of deviance. Often caricatured as a country lax on pedo-criminality and the objectification of women, it arouses a mixture of attraction and repulsion that is highly revealing of the ambiguities inherent in the manufacture of stereotypes: even negative, collective representations of the Other are never devoid of an element of identifying projection. It turns out that the simplistic, caricatured idea that "Japanese people prefer dolls" goes some way to explaining the massive French infatuation with Japanese pop culture. In 2004, Béatrice Rafoni dubbed this craze "neo-Japanism", stressing that it expresses the dream of seeing another model of society emerge.
Taking the approach of studying this dream through the small prism of an erotic fantasy, I'll use the specific case of dolls to reveal a complex and often contradictory dynamic of two-way transfers. Don't we look at Japan through the prism of Japan's images of France? However exotic they may seem, aren't representations of Japan a distorting mirror effect?
By a curious irony of fate, the tenacious prejudice - which associates the word Japan with the image of a woman turned into an immature sex doll - was born in the context of a revolution nourished by borrowings from French culture. The revolution of the 1960s saw Japanese women emancipate themselves under the influence of creators and thinkers whose work helped to disseminate a more or less fabricated image of France as a land of freedom. It was in response to this mirage that a doll aesthetic took shape in Japanese popular culture. By tracing the emergence and evolution of this aesthetic, from the 1960s to the present day - from the Licca doll to love dolls, kansetsu ningyō and Gothic Lolitas - I'd like to show the doll as a strategic site of stereotype production and as the ambivalent tool of transcultural mediation.
