Mechademia 6 (also on Project Muse)
User Enhanced
2011
Frenchy Lunning, editor
Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, producingdôjinshi (amateur) manga and scanlations, and engaging in fansubbing and DIY animation. Indeed, fans can no longer be considered passive consumers of popular culture easily duped by corporations and their industrial-capitalist ideologies. They are now more accurately described as users, in whose hands cultural commodities can provide instant gratification but also need to be understood as creative spaces that can be inhabited, modified, and enhanced.
User Enhanced, the sixth volume of the Mechademia series, examines the implications of this transformation from consumer to creator. Why do manga characters lend themselves so readily to user enhancement? What are the limitations on fan creativity? Are fans simply adding value to corporate properties with their enhancements? And can the productivity and creativity of user activities be transformed into genuine cultural enrichment and social engagement?
Through explorations of the vitality of manga characters, the formal and structural open-endedness of manga, the role of sexuality and desire in manga and anime fandom, the evolution of the Lolita fashion subculture, the contemporary social critique embodied in manga like Helpman! and Ikigami, and gamer behavior within computer games, User Enhanced suggests that commodity enhancement may lead as easily to disengagement and isolation as to interaction, connection, and empowerment.
Contributors: Brian Bergstrom; Lisa Blauersouth; Aden Evens, Dartmouth College; Andrea Horbinski; Itô Gô, Tokyo Polytechnic U; Paul Jackson; Yuka Kanno; Shion Kono, Sophia U, Tokyo; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Miyadai Shinji, Tokyo Metropolitan U; Miyamoto Hirohito, Meiji U; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Wesleyan U; Matthew Penney, Concordia U, Montreal; Emily Raine; Brian Ruh; Kumiko Saito, Bowling Green State U; Rio Saitô, College of Visual Arts, St. Paul; Cathy Sell; James Welker, U of British Columbia; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt U.
$24.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7734-4
336 pages, 57 b&w photos, 7 x 10, November 2011
CONTENTS:
Introduction
Thomas Lamarre
Countering Domestication
Under the Ruffles: Shôjo and the Morphology of Power
Frenchy Lunning
Girliness Is Next to Godliness: Lolita Fandom as Sacred Criminality in the Novels of Takemoto Novala
Brian Bergstrom
Beyond Domesticating Animal Love
Christine L. Marran
Exploited and Mobilized: Poverty and Work in Contemporary Manga
Matthew Penney
Commodity-Life
Tezuka Is Dead: Manga in Transformation and Its Dysfunctional Discourse
Itô Gô
Translated and with an Introduction by Miri Nakamura
How Characters Stand Out
Miyamoto Hirohito
Translated by Thomas Lamarre
Manga Translation and Interculture
Cathy Sell
Speciesism Part 3: Neoteny and the Politics of Life
Thomas Lamarre
Photo Play
Out of the Closet: The Fancy Phenomenon
Photography by Rio Saitô
Introduction by Frenchy Lunning
Desiring Economies
Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part 2: Bellmer's Dolls and Oshii's Gynoids
Livia Monnet
Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women’s Male-Male Homoerotic Parodies in Contemporary Japan
Kumiko Saito
The Sacrificial Economy of Cuteness in Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
Emily Raine
Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shôjo Manga
James Welker
Untimely Effects
Transformation of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcultures since 1992
Miyadai Shinji
Translated by Shion Kono
With an Introduction by Thomas Lamarre
The Logic of Digital Gaming
Aden Evens
Tsuge Yoshiharu and Postwar Japan: Travel, Memory, and Nostalgia
Yoshikuni Igarashi
Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke
Yuka Kanno
Review and Commentary
War for Entertainment: The Sky Crawlers
Andrea Horbinski
Volition in the Face of Absurdity
Brian Ruh
The Past Presents the Future: Toward the Terra
Paul Jackson
トレンド Torendo
Wherein the Author Documents Her Experience as a Porcelain Doll
Lisa Blauersouth
Contributors
Call for Papers
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