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Beautiful Fighting Girl (Paperback)
Saito Tamaki; Translated by J. Keith Vincent, Dawn Lawson; Hiroki Azuma
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R503
R452
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From "Cutie Honey" and "Sailor Moon" to "Nausicaa of the Valley of
the Wind," the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with
prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual,
always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both
hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the
objectification of young women in Japanese society.
In "Beautiful Fighting Girl," Saito Tamaki offers a far more
sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and
capable figure. For Saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex
sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional
spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku
(obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds
with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless
proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing,
Saito understands the otaku's ability to eroticize and even fall in
love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity
or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the
multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute
life in our hypermediated world--a logical outcome of the media
they consume.
Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a
comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an
analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose
baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku
culture, "Beautiful Fighting Girl" was hugely influential when
first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of
manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the
first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played
by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
According to Azuma, the collective will and the general social
contract has changed the world's political landscape over the last
couple of years. Azuma looks back at Rousseau and Freud then
forward to Twitter and Google to express how man deals with their
part of the collective will through time. Azuma challenges
society's perceptions of general will by looking at three
philosophies through both time and technology.
In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime
are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first
emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within
mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today
otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan
but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hiroki
Azuma’s Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical
inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer
subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public
intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar
Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern
era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the distorted conditions
created in Japan by the country’s phenomenal postwar
modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in
the Second World War, and America’s subsequent cultural invasion.
More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku
is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in
general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to
almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture
becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers
mere “database animals.” A vital non-Western intervention in
postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and
perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.
In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime
are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first
emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within
mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today
otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan
but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hiroki
Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical
inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer
subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan's leading public intellectuals,
otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese
society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He
traces otaku's ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in
Japan by the country's phenomenal postwar modernization, its
inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War,
and America's subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma
argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of
the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices
the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant
gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database
of plots and characters and its consumers mere "database animals."
A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory,
Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese
popular culture.
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