Event

This presentation examines what was called the net idol trend in 2000s Japan. It traces how young women developed unique styles of cuteness to build careers as Internet idols and how Internet entrepreneurs harnessed the online activities of net idols to develop a platform architecture that enabled them to package and sell Internet users to advertisers. I conceptualize the net idols’ production of cuteness as affective labor and propose that the net idol trend illuminates how the digital economy has expanded the practices through which value is extracted from women’s unwaged labor to spaces beyond the domestic sphere. However, I stress that net idols did not uncritically embrace this logic. Instead, they used the Internet to develop new DIY careers. Yet, to build these careers, they had no choice but to perform unpaid affective labor, which was in high demand in the wake of growing labor market volatility that generated a soaring care deficit.

Gabriella Lukacs is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of two books: Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan (Duke University Press 2010) and Invisibility by Design: Women and Work in Japan’s Digital Economy (Duke University Press 2020). Her third book she is currently completing is titled From Counterpublics to Commons: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary, while her fourth book project will explore how discourses of reproductive justice are articulated in the works of Internet influencers who promote and practice single living and alternative forms of kin making in Japan.