ABSTRACT
One of the arguments of the last chapter was that despite commonalities among message consumers in the media/tion equation, differences are likely to emerge based on the particular contexts in which audiences experience the media/tion. This poses the question: Do audiences engage media texts differentially, in accord with particular, specifiable subjectivities? This is a question Christine Yano takes up in discussing “pink globalization” – the spread of kawaii (cute) goods and related media, generally from Japan, throughout the industrial world. In attending primarily to the aesthetic and sexual dimensions of Kitty, both at home (i.e. in Japan) and abroad, Yano concludes that this character is a complex signifier: variously re-inscribing slippery boundaries between child and adult; lower and upper class; feminine and feminist; Japan/Asia and Euro-America; and global and local.
