Otaku for Queer Theory and Media Theory Michael Moon Emory University, [email protected]

Criticism Volume 55 | Issue 1 Article 6 2013 Otaku for Queer Theory and Media Theory Michael Moon Emory University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Moon, Michael (2013) "Otaku for Queer Theory and Media Theory," Criticism: Vol. 55: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol55/iss1/6 Otaku for Queer in 2004, in the initial phases of try- ing to write a book about henry Theory ANd darger and his little-girl combat- MediA Theory ants, i was intrigued to come across Michael Moon an online review of a book on otaku—hardcore fans of “fighting beautiful Fighting Girl by saitoˉ girl” manga and anime—by a Japa- Tamaki, translated by J. Keith nese Lacanian in which darger was 1 Vincent and dawn Lawson. a central figure. for the next sev- Minneapolis: university of eral years, this one review was all Minnesota Press, 2011. Pp. 213 + i could learn about Tamaki saitoˉ’s xxv. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. take on darger and otaku and the figure of the “beautiful fighting girl.” (The review i’d seen was en- titled “Attack of the Phallic girls.”) Then i heard a couple of years ago that J. Keith Vincent and dawn Lawson had completed a translation of the full text of saitoˉ’s book and that it was in press. in his book beautiful Fighting Girl (first published in Japanese in 2000), saitoˉ analyzes the culture and sexuality of otaku, the mostly young male participants in one of the princi- pal thriving consumer-collector- connoisseur subcultures that has formed around manga and anime. With the publication of the pres- ent volume, non-Japanese- speaking scholars and fans of anime and manga, as well as students of sexuality and media, can now form our own responses to saitoˉ’s account of the meaning and significance of the sexuality of otaku and of the erotic charge of the highly mediated “warrior girl” figures who fascinate them. As cotranslator J. Keith Vincent attests in his in- valuable, extensive introduction, Criticism Winter 2013, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 147–154. issN 0011-1589. 147 © 2013 by Wayne state university Press, detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 148 michAeL MooN it is “quite a baggy monster of a widespread, and more controver- book” (xii), comprising chapters sial, in the decade since his book that range in kind from psychoana- was first published. lytic theory to interviews with in- And yet, as Vincent points out dividual otaku and analyses of the in his introduction (xiv), sexuality, workings of temporality in anime and specifically an extreme form and manga. but Vincent goes on to of allegedly perverse sexuality, had make a compelling case that, taken been placed at the center of public together, the parts of saitoˉ’s book debate on otaku over a decade be- still have much to offer readers fore saitoˉ’s and Azuma’s respective across a broad range of disciplines books first appeared. That occurred and interests, especially readers and in 1989, with the arrest of twenty- practitioners of queer theory. six-year-old Tsutomu Miyazaki, indeed, beautiful Fighting Girl a Tokyo serial killer, for the mur- has generated as much heated de- der and sexual molestation of four bate as it has largely because of its girls, aged 4–7. before his arrest, author’s insistence on putting otaku the media had referred to Miyazaki sexual desire and behavior—their as “The Little girl Murderer,” but, strong emotional and/or erotic at- soon afterwards, the discovery (or tachment to comics-and-cartoon planting—the debate about that depictions of cute girls in and out appears to be unresolved) of anime of battle—at the center of his anal- as well as slasher films in his re- ysis of otaku. other commenta- portedly vast video collection (over tors have tended to de-emphasize five thousand titles) led to the me- sexuality in their accounts. A book, dia’s rechristening him “The otaku published in Tokyo in 2001, in re- Murderer.” The notion that watch- sponse to saitoˉ’s, by hiroki Azuma, ing too much video—too many another prominent culture critic in slasher and anime films—had di- Japan, has already been published rectly caused Miyazaki to commit in translation by the university of his crimes gave rise to a full-blown Minnesota Press (otaku: japan’s moral panic in which the otaku Database animals, 2009). Azuma’s subculture was “exposed” and de- book foregrounds political and so- monized repeatedly as a breeding cial trauma and recurrent US cul- ground for deranged and violent tural invasions as primary factors pedophiles. in explaining otaku. he also dep- A full decade had already passed recates saitoˉ’s focus on otaku sexu- since the public outcry against otaku ality and his pioneering attention when saitoˉ published his account to the kinds of highly networked, of otaku sexuality, and the highly mediated, internet-pervaded sexu- sensationalized discourse of otaku alities that have only become more as potential killers of little girls oN TAMAKi’s beautiFul FiGhtiNG Girl 149 had at least partly given way to the emblematic to some of their cham- more measured, if still disapprov- pions of a potentially revolutionary ing, image of them, widespread in form of appropriative, communal the media, as obsessive, unproduc- fan culture. tive, unsocialized nerds—a public saitoˉ’s book labors to create image closer to the one that had some kind of middle ground in prevailed before the publicity sur- which otaku can be seen as being rounding the arrest and trial of the neither budding serial killers nor so-called otaku Murderer. inevita- exemplary and successful sub- bly, there had emerged during the verters of (US or global) capitalist same decade (the 1990s) several ver- consumer culture. What otaku rep- sions of a utopian account of otaku resent for saitoˉ, what makes their that cele brated the subculture for shared practices deserving of a book- its ability to foster community length analysis, is their ongoing among otherwise marginalized existence as a subculture of which and alienated young people, to the members have, collectively and subvert capitalist consumer culture individually, become proficient fic- by radically reconfiguring it into tionalizers of perverse desires, taking networks of fan-producers, and to one another as their primary audi- resist successfully the hegemony of ence for their performances of their US entertainment media with local strong attraction to the girl-warrior media products. in its extreme ver- heroines of their favorite comics sion, otaku were proclaimed unrec- and animated films. These perfor- ognized heroes of contemporary mances, as saitoˉ evokes them, sound Japan’s assumption of international highly rhetorical, as well as highly cultural primacy through the ever- stylized. While there is no entry in increasing popularity of manga and the index to beautiful Fighting Girls anime in many parts of the world. for “dandies” or “dandyism,” nev- rather than a class of young men ertheless, the public or semipublic who needed to grow up, otaku performances of perversity among became in this telling the advance otaku may have illuminating prece- guard of a new world order in dents in other dandiacal subcultures, which manga and anime were east and West. saitoˉ’s pronounce- rapidly establishing themselves ment that “the passion of the otaku is as one of the first fully globalized more performative” than that of the entertainment-media products— merely obsessive collector of anime products around which new otaku (19) now seems ripe for the kinds of or otaku-like subcultures were theoretical development enabled by forming in many places far from the work on theories of performa- Japan. superconsumers to their tivity inaugurated by Judith butler critics, otaku paradoxically become and eve Kosofsky sedgwick. 150 michAeL MooN At the heart of the debate about seems to assume that the reader otaku culture and otaku erotic wants or needs such assurance— culture is a strong disagreement perhaps, as Vincent suggests, in re- between saitoˉ and Azuma about lation to the preceding moral panic) whether, in engaging in masturba- that, while abundantly kinky in tion in conjunction with reading their “imaginary” sex lives, otaku a manga, watching an anime, or are almost entirely straight “in re- playing a video game about a “girl ality” and tend to have “perfectly warrior,” an otaku is performing a respectable members of the oppo- sexual act. indeed, as Vincent dis- site sex as their partners.” otaku, cusses in his introduction, Azuma he argues, are adept at shifting has gone so far as to deny in pub- between desires and their “orien- lic debate (with saitoˉ and feminist tations” thereto (30); for him, both critic Kotani Mari) that “mastur- kinds of desire partake of real and bating to a picture” is an “actual imaginary elements, and the ability sexual act,” insisting that it is more of the otaku to navigate the psychic “like thumb sucking,” more like and social shoals between these dif- the behavior of an infant or small ferent but related kinds of desires child enacting a compulsion rather makes them a type of notably suc- than that of a postpubescent erotic cessful early adopter of a view and subject enacting a desire. given an experience of erotic relations in Azuma’s refusal to consider mas- which one engages sexually with turbation as possibly constituting a high level of awareness of the “real sex” of any kind, otaku are for largely fictive qualities of one’s re- him somehow beyond sex or even lations with one’s objects, whether (francis fukuyama take note) at they are one’s real-life partner the end of sex.

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