Paper short abstract

This paper explores how the rise of new modes of cute and girlish male imagery and ideals in 21st-century Japan can be understood as a form of inchoate mobilization towards new and digitalized relational and sexual futures predominantly via visual media and digital social space.

Paper long abstract

In Japan, younger male generations who might identify themselves sub-culturally as ‘love market dropouts’ or more unhappily as ‘unpopular’ (himote), are also theorized as ‘sexual weaklings’ who have become unable to adapt and survive the processes of neoliberalism or female empowerment. Evidence shows that the structural and sexual marginalisation of these men is configured with changes in employment structures, involving a forced flow of men into ‘non-regular’ labour and a ‘working poor’ existence. The ongoing dissolution of heteronormative modern society and its gender-based social classes based on middle and lower-class masculine labour privilege is the historical material context for many of the themes of otaku and idol fan subcultures and their increasingly ‘queer’ or nonbinary practices in East Asia. This paper explores how the rise of new modes of cute and girlish male imagery and ideals in 21st-century Japan can be understood as a form of inchoate mobilization towards new and digitalized relational and sexual futures predominantly via visual media and digital social space. Recent case studies in cute and nonbinary animation/game character and self-modelling (bedroom to video upload) fashion and vlogging will be discussed to draw out the deeper meanings of contemporary cute expressions online.