Nissan Seminar: Sharon Kinsella (Manchester), 'Cute Male Performative Cultures in the 21st Century: Attention, Attraction and Flexibility and Visual Cultural Capital'

Convener(s): Dr Alice Baldock and Professor Sho Konishi

Speaker(s): Dr Sharon Kinsella (University of Manchester)

In the current opaque and insecure fiscal and social environment ‘aesthetic labour’ to maximise the appeal and cute or girlish ‘physical capital’ has intensified for both genders in East Asia. For men, focus on cultivating girlish and appealing style has been a means to increase their competitive value in employment and homosocial bonding and friendship. Feminine young men gain attention as the bearers of cute ‘sexual capital’ and sophisticated cultural knowing. Enthusiastic adoption of make-up and cute girlish clothes and the rise of cute and caring nonbinary animation avatars and characters, model and exchange a new form of visual-only sexual capital. The rise of cute and willing young men can be considered a flexible and strategic expression to the rapid devaluation of lower class lower middle-class men in the 21st century along with their dangerously out-dated masculine styles and dispositions.

Sharon Kinsella’s earlier work in the 1990s, looked at cuteness and infantilism as rebellion; the educational and class factors behind the institutional and commercial transformation of manga for adults in the 1990s; otaku subculture and Lolita complex subcultures (Adult Manga, 2000). Sharon’s second book, Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2014) continues research into girls’ street styles alongside the journalism and surveilling of girls in current affairs and mass media. This book argues that the 20th century long 'cult of girls' further intensified in the late 1990s to 2000s effectively constructing the phenomenon of schoolgirl deviancy. Sharon’s research focus in the 2010s has been on the rise of fashionable (otoko no ko) female cross-dressing (josō) and its evolution towards nonbinary forms. She is currently working on cuteness and category refusal in East Asian digital culture and politics and an edited collaborative book on contemporary cute politics in the Asian region.