Visual Kei: Hybridity and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture

Abstract

This article examines the Japanese pop music genre of visual kei, a genre marked by emphasis on elaborate visual display often involving cross-dressing of male band members. The genre, in addition, employs a variety of musical styles and influences that speaks to an underlying concept of hybridity in the construction of the visual and sonic image of both practitioners and consumers of the genre. In particular this article analyzes the practice of visual kei from the perspective of the bands and their music, fans of the genre and the relationship of visual kei to other forms of Japanese popular culture that involve androgyny and gender slippage. As such this article theorizes the importance of the concept of ‘hybridity’, as developed in postcolonial studies, to illuminate the liminality of recent Japanese cultural identity formation that is promulgated through visual kei.

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