ABSTRACT
Japan offers a rather peculiar challenge to Bourdieu’s hierarchy of tastes. Not only is it not precisely European – so that its bourgeois classes both identify and misidentify from the Eurocentric system of taste and privilege linked to class heritage, but it is also a society in which the structural centrality of gender divisions has generated cultural formations, and tastes linked to gender histories, identities and habitus, which serve to complicate and replace class. This chapter with images will look at the range of tastes, modes of distinction (snobberies, camp parodies and irony) in gendered styles and girls’ street styles in the 2000s. This chapter is accompanied by an interview with the book’s section editor, Dr. Stephen Wilson.
