The work of the Japanese artist Yanagi Miwa (1967-) explores received images of women and their own self-images in contemporary society, particularly through the reconfiguration of the intergenerational relationship between women. Among the cultural stereotypes reexamined in Yanagi's synthetic photographs and video installations are the images of female characters from classic fairy tales such as "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty," and "The Little Match Girl." Yanagi's fairy-tale images reverse, blend, and dissolve the binary oppositions well established in traditional European fairy tales, which are often typified by the opposition between the princess and the witch. Her restaging of the relationship between the young girl and the old woman is more ambiguous and uncertain rather than simply either antagonistic or harmonious, which puts into question the apparent familiarity of the scenes taken from well-known fairy tales. On the one hand, the all-female fairy-tale fantasy staged in Yanagi's work can be seen as a feminist rein-terpretation of the Freudian uncanny (unheimlich) which, instead of repressing autoeroticism with the threat of difference, castration, and death, allows for the sameness, the imaginary relationship with the mother, and the continuity of life and death. On the other hand, the same fantasy reveals itself as just another artifice that can constrict women's lives and imagination. In this article I also examine the way in which Yanagi's work dismantles not only the gender stereotypes in fairy tales but also the quintessential storytelling space of the fireside--a symbol of the homely and the familiar (heimlich)--to which women and children have traditionally been confined as marginalized figures in a patriarchal society.

Dreaming of Grandmotherhood

Yanagi first became known for her synthetic photographs using prosthetic makeup and computer graphics. All the images in her oeuvre are elaborately manipulated, not to naturalize but to enhance their constructed nature; as Linda Nochlin puts it, "revealing the device" is Yanagi's prime strategy (232). Yanagi's first major series, Elevator Girls, appeared between 1993 and 1999 in the aftermath of the bursting of the bubble economy in Japan. The Japanese expression erebeta garu (elevator girl) refers to a profession followed by young women in department stores. (1) Although the job had virtually disappeared by the end of the 1990s, for more than half a century it had been one of the most sought-after professions for young Japanese women, probably ranking just below flight attendant, which still remains a much desired job. Apart from pressing the elevator buttons for their customers, elevator girls announce such information as whether the elevator is going up or down and what kind of products can be found on each floor. The superfluous nature of their work seems to be an essential condition for its fetishized status as a kind of luxury commodity to be viewed for pleasure.

In the Elevator Girls series young women of "standard" body proportions wear the same uniform (often red), makeup, and hairstyle and assume an identical expression and similar postures (fig. 1). The provisional nature of their existence--elevator girls are replaced as soon as they are...