In the 1970's, the Japanese film industry began to produce what are
known as "pinkie violence films" or "pink films". These films often
feature female protagonists who are simultaneously sexualized and
physically empowered through violence. Most films follow a plot wherein
the protagonist suffered some sort of physical or sexual attack and
spends the rest of the film pursuing her violent and justified revenge
against either the specific individuals or the society that wronged her.
The characters themselves are often described as sukeban, which refers
to an imagined image of a girl gang member, engaged in crime while
remaining attached to signifiers of institutional youth, such as
modified school uniforms.



In her essay, the author Alicia Kozma, provides analysis of several
Pinky Violence films while providing necessary historical context in
order to argue that the young delinquent women of these films
constituted a radical model of feminine Japanese identity. Part of the
difficulty of studying youth and youth practices is that they are often
short-lived and difficult to trace. Film and media analysis, such as
Kozma's article and some of our other film readings, seem to be an
excellent way to preserve at least a part of the body of past movements,
even in the absence of other disciplines' literature.



With this as the background, her analysis takes the dramatic and
sexualized sukeban archetype and affirms that such a figure represents a
positive radical icon. She points out the sexual freedom of the female
characters, as well as their rejection of typical power dynamic which is
replaced by what Kozma calls "a type of communal feminism" as a result
of "women's threefold minority status, triggered through their gender,
economic, and legal status" (41). Kozma further argues that while the
films contain sexualized female bodies, the Pinkie Violence film
characters she analyzes for this essay rise above "scopophilic fetish
objects" and become "manifestations of socially transgressive female
power" (42), through their demonstrated independent political views and
willingness to engage in violence and physicality.



While I find Kozma's conclusion that pinkie violence films contain the
possibility for a counter-patriarchal reading convincing, I have a few
additional thoughts to consider. As her article is a film analysis and
not an anthropological or sociological piece, there is little to no
discussion of contemporary viewers thoughts or reception of the films.
Despite the apparent radical nature of the protagonists' behavior, there
was no equivalent uprising of actual Japanese women taking to the
streets with violent resistance. Considering that the most common
viewers of these films were men, the issue of consumption looms large.

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