Cool, Creepy, Moé: Otaku Fictions, Discourses, and Policies

Abstract

This essay looks at the otaku phenomenon in terms of the production of consumption (what produces consumption, and what consumption produces) primarily three registers: fictions of otaku that stage the repression of otaku desires and identities in order to form erogenous zones; cultural discourses that pathologize otaku consumption; and government policies related to Cool Japan that strive to reconfigure otaku consumption in terms of markets and self-satisfying subjects. Considering these different registers brings into a focus a neoliberal socius or social being, which allows constant intervention into everyday life in the name of the fragility of the global free market by typologizing and pathologizing consumers.