DOLL PARTS

Doll Parts

Kawaii Fashion and Trans Appropriative Embodiment

Representations of trans women, particularly of trans actresses on TV and in film, are few and far between. That’s not to suggest notions of ‘good’ representation or argue what some mythical ‘good rep’ entails. Popular shows like Transparent may highlight relevant fears that accompany trans-becoming, but on a surface level I can’t stomach Jeffrey Tambor attempting a representation of a purported “my” experience without cringing.

I keep blockbuster Euphoria as one of the few exceptions: a show that features a trans actress in a trans role, keeps her transness in focus, and allows her ample opportunity to write her own experience. I can’t help but admit to some swooning at Hunter Schafer’s performance as Jules, the contemporary brand of plucky transbian, so identifiable, so emulable. I can drink in her amateurish lines for hours because, yes, okay, the ocean might just be strong as fuck, even feminine as fuck. I can’t hide from my yearning for flawed mirrors to my experience— for few and far between doesn’t begin to describe the absence of trans women across pop culture.

That uncritical gaze lasts only so long; I begin to wonder whether ‘good rep’ for the Trans Woman even remains relevant, let alone achievable. She has yet to be subsumed within what critic Lisa Duggan terms “homonormativity,” the criteria by which queer individuals become part of the heteronormative temporality: birth, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death. Having had access to surgeries and therapies the proverbial mass can only dream about, and having made clear her own cis-passing privilege, Hunter Schafer herself appears to concede to the cis world. On one hand, her character Jules foregrounds an apparent normalization of regimes of biomedical self-making: “I want to go off my hormones,” she claims in her special episode. On the other hand, in Teen Vogue and other interviews, Hunter offers only begrudging gestures to her transness—a what does it mean to b-be trans whimpering generality—and certainly avoids the grotesque, abject, or otherwise unpalatable.

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Schafer’s foray into acting in the second-most themselves, viewed HBO show in the network’s history, Euphoria, marks terrain for the Trans Woman’s entrance into polite culture. Beyond that, paying close attention to decisions made by the directorial, costume design, and makeup design teams, one might also notice how Euphoria’s Trans Woman is rendered through smatterings of East Asian tropic femininity. Her kawaii fashion quashes the idea of her as a ‘universal’ subject. She’s a queer woman whose ‘relatability’ to cis, straight audiences is made possible by her white affluence. It is through those associations that the sutures between racial and gendered categories, and the inequities and exploitations therein, read loud and clear.

In the wake of Euphoria’s burgeoning popularity, I’m interested in how the Trans Woman teeters as an unmakeable subject on the matrices of racial capitalism. I come to Euphoria to interrogate its model of trans-femininity which revolves around a propensity for kawaii fashion and Japanese media commodities.

As for the dominant aesthetic that Euphoria inscribes onto its Trans Woman, I’m interested in addressing the intentionally demure image that kawaiiness offers the West. Proliferation of kawaii (literally: cute, spec. saccharine, sweet) thingness grew alongside the emergent electronics bubble in the 1980s. I use the term thingness not to obscurify but rather to underscore the massive scale of said proliferation: manga, anime, video games, advertisement, now city-mascots, and military propaganda. Kawaii looks like endlessly remixed Hello Kitty and Pikachu commodities, visible everywhere from a local konbini to contemporary fast fashion warehouses. More broadly, though, kawaii gestures to iconic material culture: the big-eyed anime avatar, Lolita fashion, Nintendo.

Once a byproduct of early animations, which were cheap by necessity in the scrappy postwar economy, kawaii continues to perpetuate gendered, national dynamics in the wake of atomic subjugation. Never separate from its neocolonial origins, underneath kawaii remains a specter of the Pacific Century. The idea that kawaii aesthetics serve to disguise fear of Asia remains nothing novel. Aesthetics theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that kawaii names the transpacific “encounter with difference,” the colonial ever-presence that haunts the postwar moment. Sculptor Murakami Takashi believes the style “[aestheticizes] Japan’s occupation-era emasculation.” This commentary, from his 2005 art book, was particularly inflammatory for anthropomorphizing Japan with “Little Boy,” the name of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki. Beyond the icons Western imaginations of cuteness often serve an illusory ideal: the feminized East.

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Throughout season one of Euphoria, Hunter dons a series of pastel looks. She reads like a manic pixie dream girl, arriving in town as rescue—and respite—for our protagonist, Rue. In episode one, Hunter Schafer’s character Jules gets introduced without her name; instead, Angus Cloud’s character Fez likens her to Sailor Moon. Across the remainder of the show, Jules remains the only character who takes on references to anime: she mentions that she’s going to go home to “binge watch some Madoka Magica” in episode two, and her phone background features Madoka’s co-protagonists.

This association in Euphoria is one in a long list of connections between trans subculture and anime signification. Subreddits like r/egg_irl and Instagram meme accounts like @cruel______moons are rife with comparisons of trans-becoming, feminization, and trans lesbian relationships with moefication: becoming cute. r/egg_irl overwhelmingly traffics in anime meme formats and gravitates toward animated characters as stand-ins for panel-by-panel jokes. The format “realistic transition goals,” for instance, not only uses an animetic avatar (Sayori from the game Doki Doki Literature Club!) but also evinces a desire to construct a feminine aesthetic that emulates animated characters’ looks.

By emulating anime tropes, these women reflect what University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Asian American Studies Leslie Bow terms “risky kawaii.” Risky kawaii rides a line between “affection and mockery” and additionally signals the “fluidity of global commodity” to the extent that the product’s national origin appears obscure. Mukokuseki, or the “[perceived] whiteness of human anime characters,” for instance, allows Western audiences a space to forget race in favor of unabated consumption or, here, emulation.

Hunter’s character Jules has a similarly identifiable body. Beyond connections between magical girl anime and Jules’ kawaii style, episode four explicitly renders her transition as a movement toward Asian commodity signifiers. The transgender subject is a fertile ground for examining reproductions of race as they morph alongside gendered modes of embodiment.

Within rigid beauty standards that demand individuals to performatively ‘pass,’ the transgender body illuminates what constitutes prop- er femininity and masculinity in the first place. This includes voice, fashion, and the biomedical ‘edits’ that now construct the trans body.

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Episode four starts with Jules’ childhood institutionalization and subsequent transition. Jules’ child actor Clark Furlong wears a Hello Kitty backpack and a vintage “Catch Your Dream” T-shirt. Hello Kitty, for critical theorist Leslie Bow, serves as an example of deterritorialized Asian commodities—meaning those whose ties to nationality, ethnicity, and race are obscure. To the Western imagination Hello Kitty’s Japanese national origin seems negligible. In her essay “Racist Cute,” Bow cites journalist Douglas McGray’s commentary on the reciprocally lucrative nature of the Hello Kitty mega-commodity: “‘Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West.’” The success of Hello Kitty lies in its bilateral appeal—a chameleonic nation-fetish. A marriage between the nostalgic and exotic, Hello Kitty might simultaneously signify racist kitsch and just another ‘global’ commodity.

A series of shifts in Jules’ costume design makes her representation inseparable from appropriative embodiment. In a 2020 video conversation between Schafer and Euphoria costume designer Heidi Bivens, Bivens explicitly references Sailor Moon as an inspiration for Hunter’s wardrobe. She says that the children’s show appears in creator Sam Levinson’s costume cues on Jules: Schafer “is into Sailor Moon,” Bivens says. Bivens also describes Schafer’s wardrobe as “candy-colored” and rife with pastels: the episode one Vanna Youngstein “atomic” top comes to mind. Still, Euphoria’s creators never cite kawaii fashion or Japanese brands in interviews, and the burden falls to criticism to notice a plausibly deniable japonisme nouveau.

A handful of other contemporary on-screen representations of trans women feature representations of trans womanhood that appropriate Asian commodities and femininity. In The Silence of the Lambs, director Jonathan Demme uses Asian kitsch on the trans-coded character Buffalo Bill: Bill’s costumes include a bomber jacket emblazoned with a pictoral Mount Fuji and a kimono that he raises like a butterfly.

Analyzing Asian kitsch in The Silence of the Lambs, Japanese film critic Miri Nakamura points to the overlapping yet unequal tropes between trans and Asian feminine embodiment. Bill’s jacket might signify for Demme the character’s inability to achieve Asianness and womanhood: as Asian kitsch ‘approximates’ the veracity of Western commodity, so does the Trans Woman meet womanhood only through a kind of estimation. By constructing suspiciously yellowish skin suits, Bill attempts to meet Madame Butterfly, adopt Asianness. Gross representation thus makes Butterfly, Cio-Cio-san, legible as the ultimate feminized blueprint, the perpetual seducer-victim to colonial patriarchy.

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In Bivens’ costumes, Hello Kitty is divorced from national signification (Kitty is meant to evoke a British girl), effectively encrypting its racial underpinning. The question of appropriation might become irrelevant in the face of such indecipherable commodity origin.

If someone were to ask me, “Are you saying that wearing sheer pink implicates trans expression in an appropriation of Asianness,” I might be unable to answer “yes” without a well-worked network of associations: examples from media and subculture, all the scroungings necessary to locate a self-orientalizing trans subject. I wonder, though, whether anyone embodying trans or racialized flesh questions the validity of these discourses. Even though self-orientalization often remains central to trans embodiment, it’s difficult to analyze the origins of cultural objects and their appropriation in a way that satisfactorily condemns the apparent appropriators.

The nature of Hello Kitty’s orientalism implicates itself and similar objects in the vain notion of ‘global’ commodity. The ‘global’ commodity is revealed as an empty boon to U.S. commercialism, its racialization visible only when turned inside-out. Few see brands of ‘trans cute’ as endemic to Western unconsciousness, let alone as eyebrow-raising. These appropriative objects mandate a lens beyond the oriental-ornamental—they fail to coherently produce race but nevertheless instantiate it. Once again, it’s in the apparent white space where race is erased that race becomes invariably conjured. Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton describes commodity’s ‘disdain’ for such social overlaps—racialization, gendering, queerness. The now-gravitational commodity nestles up to its buyer.

For instance, in her master’s thesis, trans scholar Emmy Vaught pursues an interview-based approach to interrogate the relationship between trans-feminine identity and East Asian appropriative embodiment. About a third of Vaught’s thesis “Cute Racist” centers on Morgan, a trans sex worker in whose fashion Vaught interrogates the fetish of seifuku (Japanese school uniform). Morgan narrates how kawaii fashion waters her down during sex and contributes to her interpretation as submissive and vulnerable on-and-off screen. She additionally describes donning the seifuku in her porn as a hyperbolic mechanism that clarifies (or compensates for) a heterosexual matrix.

Vaught’s thesis settles on an associative conclusion and definition for a term that I’ve used four times thus far: appropriative embodiment. While it’s relevant to ruminate on how the Trans Woman reproduces race, I ultimately feel weary about Vaught’s toothless, call-to-action conclusion that the future trans self-making totally doesn’t have to be so, so problematic, you guys. Vaught’s interviews produce intrigue through their mundanity, through how they fail to concretely articulate uncomfortable fetishes. Sure, I might consider Morgan’s propensity a seifuku fetish, but her explanation for her fashion choices is almost childlike in its simplicity: it either mimes an iconic (that is, animated) woman, or is an almost sympathetic attempt at safety through heuristic hyper-femininity. Her choices signal to a similarly constituted, deeply nested image of the Asian Woman: after a century, she’s still cute, submissive, a perpetual child.

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We might consider the appropriative embodiment of kawaii style as less damaging than Demme’s crude Buffalo Bill symbology. In any event, the ‘global’ commodity is key to Western commercialism’s viability, at once perpetually producing and fetishizing the Other while simultaneously reducing or erasing any path toward reclamation. Costume choices for Euphoria lodge in the sometimes subconscious, sometimes conscious idea of a feminized East, made visible by the trans body’s illumination of the instability of gender style.

Author Anne Anlin Cheng comments on the “China: Through the Looking Glass” Met Gala that “what is at stake [in the museum space] is not just the objectification of people but [also] how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood and life.” Cheng sees the Chinese female body in particular as subconsciously petrified in vases and dresses, increasingly found in pillaged collectibles. Cheng’s commentary reveals feminization as orientalization: a landscape for becoming a woman is also one for —subconsciously or consciously—becoming Asian. Popular conceptions of the Trans Woman reinscribe racial inequities across and between transpacific commodity networks. Only through thick semiotic swamps can we manage to refocus a concept as blurry as kawaii back to its “material” roots in neocolonial subjugation.

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In 2018, Brown University student Finch Collins wrote a blogpost on the semiotics of Doc Martens under the title “Objects as Texts,” particularly on their legibility as a queer commodity. Through the lens of “reading” objects, we can envision how the costume itself brings attention to what is beautiful, utilitarian, and marketable. If neoliberal globalism merely introduces more stuff to the United States, it is necessary to recognize how object choice remains implicated in specters of coloniality.

In her conclusion Vaught suggests that “tremendous potential exists for trans self-making.” But it is naive to imagine that gender self-construction is possible without compulsively repeating corrosive models of femininity, those which mold the Asian body to the contours of fetish.

KIAN BRAULIK B’24’s a new girl in town.