Digital (Dis-)Embodiment: Virtual YouTubers, Queerness, and Neoliberalism
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2024
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Virtual YouTubers, or VTubers for short, have gained immense popularity in the past few years as an originally Japanese cultural phenomenon. These VTubers differentiate themselves from standard video game live-streamers by using an anime-style avatar instead of showing their actual face on stream, thereby erasing their physical body in favor of a virtual one. This thesis engages VTubers through a lens of queerness, studying VTubers that claim queerness in some form, whether in their avatar or in their lived body, in order to shed theoretical light on what it means to claim identity and embody gender / sexuality in a virtual realm. Refusing to accept VTubers as merely their fantasy characters, I advance a framework that allows one to understand these VTubers also as real streamers, thereby encouraging one to look beyond identity as a private endeavor and towards the body as an irreducibly material existence. Doing so allows me also to connect this analysis of queer VTubers to a critique of neoliberal identity politics, showing how neoliberal discourses on identity cast it as an individual matter separate from material structures of oppression. As such, VTubers become the medium through which I re-conceptualize identity as based in sociality, inhering in lived bodies that are positioned within larger societal modes of power
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Asian studies, LGBTQ studies, Cultural anthropology, Identity Politics, Japan, Neoliberalism, Queer Theory, Virtual YouTubers
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81 pages
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