Undermining the gendered genre: Kabuki in manga

According to Jaqueline Berndt, Thomas LaMarre, and other critics, manga is a highly participatory media form. Narratives with vibrant characters and creative inconsistences in the plotline encourage the reader to recontextualise the text, create new contents and unfold activities which go beyond reading (such as fan art and CosPlay). Recent popularity of manga about Japanese traditional arts – for example, Kabuki – further expanded the potential interaction with manga and other popular media to include (re)discovering traditional Japanese culture. Examples, such as Kabukumon by Tanaka Akio and David Miyahara (Morning 2008-2011), or Kunisaki Izumo no jijō by Hirakawa Aya (Weekly Shōnen Sunday 2010-2014) and a variety of other manga, anime and light novels exemplify this tendency. Consequently, influential franchises, such as Naruto and One Piece boast adaptations as Super Kabuki stage-plays. Furthermore, Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto observes how thematic and stylistic overreaching in contemporary manga further distort the notions of the gendered genre that lays at the foundation of the manga industry. In this case, Kabuki theatre as a theme employs a variety of gender fluid characters and situations. For this purpose, Kabuki manga utilise cross-genre narrative and stylistic tropes, from overtly parodying borrowed tropes, to homage, and covert inclusions. On the example of Kabuki-manga I will explore a larger trend in manga to employ elements of female genres in male narratives, thus expanding the target readership. My paper explores specific mechanism that facilitates reading manga cross-genre, I also inquire what novel critical potential thematic and stylistic exchange between audiences may entail.

Politics of Togetherness in Dance: The Affective Persistence of somatic Collectivity under post-Fordism.

The last decade of scholarship in dance has produced a number of literary contributions which account for the need to theorize the radical potential of dance as a site for political activism in the context of global social and economic crises. As a practitioner, teacher and theorist in dance and performance, working in a UK university, I am interested in exploring the potential of somatics to resist a seemingly utilitarian incorporation of somatic principles into the agenda of neo-liberalism under post-Fordist conditions. In this article, I refer to somatics as an umbrella term to discuss practices related to the dance field including protests, walks, flashmobs and choreographic explorations of performative participation. While these practices might not be widely recognized as somatic practices, I argue that all operate at a somatic level and point to an ever-shifting relationship between the individual, the collective and the social environment. I reflect on a number of theoretical ideas pertaining to the relations between the development of somatics and the intensification of cultural capitalism in contemporary western society. In doing so, I aim to theorize somatics as critical and political practices of collective forms of being and working together. Drawing on instances of collective embodiment, I argue for the politicization of somatic practices as it relates to ideas of affect, ethics and time. I suggest that embodied expressions of collectivity as politicized somatics can develop valid tactics to counter what I observe to be a mimetic phenomenon between dance practices and capitalism. A situation that has been only exacerbated by the Covid 19 pandemic. I propose the concept of somatic collectivity as a way to describe the critical potential of collective embodiment found in dance and its expanded field of practices.

‘Dracarys’ for all: TV series and experiential learning

Film has been widely used for management learning, mostly with a focus on the story rather than on the film experience. This study draws on arts-based learning literature, film studies and data from learning interactions, and develops a taxonomy of experiential learning with film as a specific art form and emotional medium. The taxonomy includes three elements: making a film experience, processing the experience and cultural aesthetic reflexivity. This study provides process steps and teaching strategies to help move management learners along in the process towards specific learning outcomes. It introduces a film analysis tool as a method that can be used to overcome aesthetic muteness when reflecting on the film experience. The acclaimed and contested TV series Game of Thrones serves as a point of reference, and examples feature the female leader Daenerys Targaryen. The approach is transferable across films and TV series to integrate knowing, experience and emotions and to use popular culture’s critical potential for management learning.

Humour and TikTok memes during the 2020 pandemic lockdown: Tensions of gender and care faced by Chinese mothers working from home

This article examines a humorous meme that emerged on Chinese TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using #workfromhomewithchildcare, Chinese working mothers shared humorous clips of their experience of working from home with their children who were also at home during the pandemic lockdown. By analysing the themes, protagonists, and humour techniques of a sample of 85 videos, we ask why the mood of these clips is so strongly marked by humour, and what this tells us about contemporary Chinese society, particularly about the position of women and mothers. We show that these memetic clips consist of three distinct genres of mothers working from home: (1) ‘balancing mothers’ who balance between work and childcare, (2) ‘pedagogic mothers’ who give childcare tips, and (3) ‘commercially oriented’ mothers who offer tutorials by means of product placement and advertisement. While these memes express what Mary Douglas called ‘a joke in the social structure’ without offering either relief or critique, they do create an online joking culture that offers temporary relief as well as awareness that others are in the same position. Our analysis tempers enthusiastic claims about both the critical potential of humour and the new ‘liberating’ affordances offered by digital platforms to produce liberating female spaces.

From the theater to the hippodrome: A critique of Jeffrey Green’s theory of plebiscitary democracy and an alternative

The article argues that the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD), originally developed by Max Weber, is in its somewhat rejuvenated version a helpful framework in interpreting longer-term and more recent empirical trends in contemporary democracies, such as the growing personalization of politics, the emergence of populist leaders, rising levels of polarization, and the growing importance of social media. However, to realize the potential of the theory, it should be detached from Jeffrey Green’s most original, yet insufficiently realistic elaboration of plebiscitary democracy that he made a decade ago. The article argues that instead of a passive and unifiable entity, the citizenry should be thought of as reactive and deeply divided, a setting which can be characterized by the metaphor of the infamous Byzantine chariot races rather than that of the theater, implicit in Green’s theory. Plebiscitary democracy should be thought of as representational, where popular control is manifested as the veto power of the popular voice. Additionally, despite its realist minimalism, the theory we propose may still have some critical potential, because it adopts the refurbished ideal of competition. The article closes by identifying further avenues of theoretization leading towards a more elaborate view of PLD.

Heideggers Ungebrauch

This essay is concerned with a topic that has been widely discussed in East Asia for decades – the relationship between Martin Heidegger’s thought and Daoism. At the centre of my reflections is a motif that appears in Heidegger’s 1945 “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man” – a “doing that is a letting” (ein Tun, das ein Lassen ist). Starting from this, I discuss Heidegger’s approach to the Daoist “thinking of the useless” expressed in his Black Notebooks and other texts. In the development of Heidegger’s thought the “turning” (die Kehre) marks an important juncture. I propose speaking of a second or transcultural turning, which begins around 1943. For this transformation in Heidegger’s thought, what has been of outstanding importance is his preoccupation with Daoist texts, and especially his reading of the classical texts Lǎozǐ and Zhuāngzǐ. This is evident in his numerous explicit or implicit references to the Daoist classics. In 1945, in a situation of extraordinary emergency, Heidegger refers to Zhuāngzǐ’s motif of uselessness and the “necessity of the unnecessary”. This can be seen as a personal escape from responsibility, but also, importantly, as a way out of his deep entanglement with National Socialism. Although the way Heidegger proposes is arguably twisted and disturbing, its value lies in its providing a necessary perspective from which to unfold the critical potential of transcultural philosophy.

Desire for sale: Live-streaming and commercial DIY porn among Chinese gay microcelebrities

This paper examines a nascent network of commercial DIY gay porn production by microcelebrities in China against the background of platformization, commodification, and illiberal cultural landscapes. Informed by queer Marxist theories, the paper looks at how the career trajectories of live-streamer-turned DIY gay porn actors/producers are shaped by the intertwining forces of platform capitalism, technological affordances, and state internet governance. Reflecting on the critical potential of these DIY porn production practices, it suggests that they paradoxically showcase both a willing submission to the ever-expanding logics of capitalism and means of creative negotiation with commodification and state censorship.