My dissertation, situated in a Foucauldian framework, begins with a view of visual culture as a discourse where knowledge, pleasure, and power of images intersect. This dissertation first argues that a depthless visual field is discursively formed in and through Japanese culture, which constitutes recurring themes and particularities of Japanese anime. Features of postmodernism, described by Jameson and Baudrillard, are significantly embodied in anime images. By examining three anime works, Cat Soup (2001), The Grave of Fireflies (1988), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996), my dissertation argues that anime demonstrates postmodern “depthlessness,” which questions former understandings of “representation."
Second, my dissertation investigates how anime images generate a specific kind of pleasure, and how this pleasure offers anime otaku a chance to develop not an escape from ideological constructions, but new ways of creative production in the practitioners’ own favor. By examining two anime works, Fooly Cooly (2005) and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999-2001), I argue that anime images deliberately deploy (1) void signifiers, (2) bodily senses, (3) liminal conditions, and (4) taboos and prohibitive themes to generate visual pleasures that may function as resistance to regulatory power. Further, the pleasure of viewing anime empowers anime otaku to go beyond mere image consumption, to actively and constantly change, manipulate, and subvert anime images through practices. Anime otaku’s pleasurable practices demonstrate de-assurance of their supposed identity and engender an imperceptible but playful politics that strays from the social orders in which they reside.
The fundamental argument of my dissertation is that anime itself is a site of viewers’ education about anime, and that anime as an alternative discourse empowers viewers, youth and adolescents in particular, to participate in creative practices that may generate an imperceptible politics in their own favor. Using anime as a means to revisit Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE), I argue that the alternative discourse of anime has potentials to decenter current approaches to visual culture education, and I conclude with a list of what anime is… and what anime does… to discuss how anime can benefit art education.