“Don Your Armor!”: The Politics of Dress in Higashimura Akiko’s Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime)

In Princess Jellyfish, authored by Higashimura Akiko, fashion is presented as an integral element in the constitution of gender and social status for women. This chapter examines how the protagonist Tsukimi and other female characters, treated as social outcasts due to their otaku obsessions and insufficiently gendered clothes, use fashion-designing to protect their all-female domain. With the help of Kuranosuke, a male transvestite, they learn how to use feminine clothes for their self-empowerment, rather than internalizing the socially appropriate gender assumptions integrated in feminine attire. This self-empowerment, however, does not lead them along the conventional trajectory typical of the female bildungsroman in shōjo manga. Instead of having its characters “grow up” into a heteronormative happy ending by establishing exclusively heterosexual dyads, this “neo”-shōjo manga ends with the re-establishment of the female-centered queer communal space, where the women can continue to live happily and love their objects of obsession.