Subversive script and novel graphs in Japanese girls’ culture

This article describes how young women in Japan transgress ideals of proper literacy, particularly notions about normative women’s writing, when they compose carefully wrought yet hard-to-read texts. Writing in this novel style serves as a generational and gendered identity marker, and elders and outsiders find it nonsensical, unfeminine and unsightly. In addition, the writing style itself demonstrates an expansionist stance through appropriation of multiple script sets, fonts and icons. The findings offer a corrective to scholarship on writing systems that routinely neglects the importance of a gestalt understanding of writing.