Female Convict Scorpion: production context, gender politics, and cinematic excesses in a Japanese women-in-prison film series

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Female Convict Scorpion, a Japanese women-in-prison film series (1972–1973), which exemplifies studio-produced exploitation cinema. The series is influenced by the contemporaneous yakuza cycle and its anti-authoritarian social realist agenda. Produced during a time of rapid political-economic-social change in the country, the Female Convict Scorpion series combines exploitative content – the display of nudity, violence, and sensational subjects – with an underlying feminist sensibility, a mixture that embraces the ambiguities of commercial genre cinema. Through close textual analysis, this research explains the contradictions in this women-in-prison series by 1) providing evidence of the female gaze and the subversive narrative tropes, which reveals the feminist subtext in these films, and 2) examining the stylistic and narrative effects of cinematic excesses. This article, thus, re-evaluates these popular genre films as in a time capsule, documenting the significance of their expression of gender politics in 1970s Japan through the distinctive production context and presentation of cinematic excesses.

KEYWORDS:

• Women-in-prison films
• 1970s Japan
• exploitation
• feminist film theory
• cinematic excesses
• gender politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Alternative title: Female Prisoner Scorpion.

2. The transliterations of Japanese names in this article use the convention of surname first, followed by given names.

3. https://www.dgj.or.jp/members/?id=58; see also https://hochi.news/articles/20201219-OHT1T50027.html. Both in Japanese, accessed 7 September 2021.

4. https://mi-mollet.com/articles/-/30327?layout=b (in Japanese). Accessed 7 September 2021.

5. My assertion is drawn from Gill (2007)’s writing on ‘postfeminist sensibility’, which is made up of a series of interrelated themes such as self-surveillance and consumerism.

6. See eiga.com, Toei’s on-demand channel, moviewalker.jp. These genres are given on wowow.co.jp. All in Japanese.

7. http://www.cinematoday.jp/new/N0015383 (in Japanese). Accessed 7 September 2021. Itō spoke at the screening of 701 at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2008.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leung Wing-Fai

Leung Wing-Fai is Reader in Cultural and Media Industries at King’s College London, UK. Her research on East Asian film and media, gender and sexual identities, and cultural and creative labour has been published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Her monographs include Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema (2023), Multimedia Stardom in Hong Kong: Image, Performance and Identity (2014) and Digital Entrepreneurship, Gender and Intersectionality: An East Asian Perspective (2018). Fai has co-edited East Asian Cinemas (2008), East Asian Film Stars (2014) and a special issue ‘Transformations of the Chinese Film Industries’ (2019) for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.