ABSTRACT
The last chapter turns to another popular youth cultural form: shojo manga (girls’ comics). On the one hand, this manga subgenre has shaped the new subject matter and aesthetics of Chinese youth literature, graphic novel, and youth film. On the other hand, its aesthetics of cuteness also helps create a reinvented form of social activism that resorts to the combined strength of popular culture, manga visuality, street performance, young women’s creative labor, and new media fluidity to weave a network of gendered resistance and grassroots feminist movements. On the basis of a series of case studies in this chapter, I contend that the transmedial and transcultural visuality of shojo manga is central to the exploding youth culture characterized by an aesthetics and politics of youthful smallness that can be understood on dual levels: the sense of smallness is often associated with the marginal positionality of youth culture in a male-dominant adult world and cultural establishment, yet smallness can also be transformed into a cultural expression of youthful fantasy, freedom, and pleasures, or a new cultural sensibility and gendered affect growing and thriving from the margins of the mainstream aesthetic hierarchy and cultural establishment that could be reinvented as alternative means of youth empowerment and resistance strategies.
