LOL, yeah she kind of came in and made a few mill of their image. I love Gwen though.

but that's not Gwen though. She incorporates a worldly fusion into her fashion.

What's Wrong With Gwen's Harajuko Girls
Thomas Elliot


Gwen Stefani’s CD, "Love Angel Music Baby" is rife with new and extremely popular dance hits. It is, as pop CDs go, pretty good, extremely catchy, and just a well crafted piece of popular culture. It contains, as do most of these types of CDs, the requisite objectification/sexualization of women. It is, however, written by a female, and thus has a slightly different vibe than say, a rap CD or video where women are so often portrayed as @$$-shaking faceless sexual objects. However it is impossible to ignore the troop of oriental women that sycophantically follow Gwen around in her videos, interviews and shows and adorn her cover art. They are the Harajuku girls (or as MTV calls them, “Gwen’s Harajuku Girls”8) and they offer a stark example of the potentially dangerous, certainly irresponsible ethnic/gender stereotypes that are accepted in mainstream media.

Harajuku, the girls’ namesake, is a particularly hip area of Japan. Gwen Stefani chose these Harajuku girls because she so admired the crazy style of this particular area and wanted to emulate it, perhaps feeling that it could create the perfect delegates for her new clothing company, L.A.M.B. (shorthand for the title of the CD). It appears that to this end, she renamed these four women after it: Love, Angel, Music and Baby respectively, that act itself being extremely paternalistic. Now, the problem as I see it with this bizarre act of fantasy or publicity, is that the Harajuku girls are not portrayed as women, but as accessories to Stefani’s style, at best, and at worse, as a group of Asian concubines in her royal court. The relationship, then, reinforces the negative stereotypes of Asian women as quiet and submissive sexualized objects.

Most obviously, we can see this portrayal on the cover art of the album, where Gwen is quite literally portrayed as a queen, complete with crown, throne and scepter, while the four Harajuku girls sit underneath her or on either side of the throne.

Their image outside of this is consistently manipulated to suit the fantasy of the eroticized submissive Japanese woman. For example, despite the fact that they are professional dancers, their dance segments in Stefani’s videos are extremely brief, maybe 5 seconds long at most, making it highly unclear that they are in fact professionals. Instead of as professionals, the viewer is invited to see them as but a type of romanticized ethnic jewelry, their only defining characteristics being their ethnicity and their crazy dress (even that is claimed to be a creation of Stefani’s). This also leads the casual viewer to imagine that they somehow entered into this friendship on free will, chosing to fawn over their cooler American friend. Their submissive attitude becomes somehow their natural choice and role, perhaps because they are Asian.

Making it especially obvious that they are crafted to fit a gender ethnic stereotype in the minds of Middle Americans is the fact that we are expected to see them as a homogenous group of Japanese from Harajuku Japan. They’re not. Angel is a 4th generation American who spoke no Japanese prior to joining the group, while Baby attended dance school in New York and was ‘found’, so to speak, in London9. And yet they are all grouped together, dressed the same, wear the same makeup, and often wear the same facial expressions in pictures.

Also, there are several things of note from their online interviews (they have ‘their own website, strangely called "Harajuku lovers", a choice of language which seems to again reinforce the idea of these women as spectacle objects to be consumed10). Firstly, only ‘Love’ mentions her real name and she does so apparently because it means love in Hindi, as though she were predestined to play this bizarre role in Stefani’s fantasy world. This strikes me as odd insofar as it erases their character precedent to this idealized manufactured image of innocent sexuality. They are given these somewhat childish nicknames and their real names and the history, family associations, complex pasts and the agency associated therewith is eliminated and ignored. This, in and of itself, is a type of ownership hinting again at the Asian girl as a possession. These women are portrayed less as whole human beings than as some type of doll to be owned, dressed, and paraded around.

Secondly, ‘Angel’ is the only one to talk about her co-workers, in these highly scripted interview scenes. This I think is particularly perverse. Presumably ‘Angel’ is the halfway person, the bridge between us and these three other foreigners. Because of the colour of her skin, this American girl from LA is still considered different, an authority on these strange/exotic Japanese women. Clearly, Angel is being portrayed less as an American than as an Asian American. Not to mention that the other members’ opinions are again being ignored; their agency and inner world is ever more discredited. Indeed their written ‘definitions’ on their website have little or nothing to do with them as people, but are definitions of their ‘names’ which does more to reflect Stefani’s character than theirs.

I also find it odd that the translations for the Japanese speaking Harajuku girls are done in a voice with a strong Japanese accent and fairly weak English, somewhat infantilizing them. Here we see the ‘foreigner as different’ aspect of this fantasy reinforced, as well as the portrayal of these women as infantile girls.

Now this is not to say that this is all bad, these women are all being employed, presumably at some expense, they get to travel all around the world with Gwen, they get to dance and meet new people and “represent their culture”11, they entertain and offer an amusing kitsch. They thereby gain a significant level of agency that might otherwise would have been impossible for them to achieve. And if Gwen Stefani can afford it, there is really no reason that she shouldn’t be able to fulfill her fantasy to “get me four Harajuku girls to inspire me and they’d come to my rescue. I’d dress them wicked, I’d give them names. Love, Angel, Music, Baby”.

And yet their bizarre portrayal doesn’t reflect very well on her or the music industry, as it was clearly hatched in Gwen’s fantasy with reference to the popular American image of the submissive Asian women.

This most obvious and egregious exploitation of gender and ethnicity is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of negative stereotypes of women in the media. And yet, as we’ve seen, the media fails miserably to examine itself or do the minimum of education and critical analysis integral to journalism of any sort. We need good journalists to point out the real and dangerous impact of these types of manipulations and offer an example of critical thought if we are going to dispel or even come to terms with the gender/ethnicity gap.

You can group them like this


Cosplay


Close to being a lolita

Cosplay


Cosplay


Cosplay

Possibly kogal, probably those girls that dress and act like ayumi T_T

keep in mind they were contractually obligated not to speak english in public as well

harajuku girls






WHAT is that suppose to be?


smile for the camera.