Anime Pleasures as a Playground of Sexuality, Power, and Resistance

This paper argues that the pleasure of viewing anime (Japanese animation) enables anime otaku’s playful practices and engenders an imperceptible politics in viewers’ own favor. First, by examining two anime works, Fooly Cooly (2003) and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999-2001), I argue that anime images embody the pleasure of evasion and the pleasure of transgression as a form of resistance to the regulatory power and the normative sexuality. Deliberately deploying (1) void signifiers, (2) bodily senses, (3) liminal conditions, and (4) taboos and prohibitive themes, both anime works provide a temporal revelation of social orders and body disciplines for viewers. Further, these evasive and transgressive pleasures empower anime otaku (commonly referring to obsessive fans among English speakers) to go beyond image consumption, actively and constantly changing, manipulating, and subverting anime images in their practices, such as creating amateur manga, peer-to-peer networks and websites, and anime cosplay (costume-roleplay). Anime otaku’s pleasurable practices demonstrate de-assurance of their supposed identity and engender an imperceptible but playful politics that strays from social structures in which they reside. Lien Fan Shen Visiting Assistant Professor Electronic Art & Animation Department of Art, AJ 216 Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 Email: [email protected] Phone: 765-285-8117