After completing the first year of my PhD programme on an absolute radio silence (as far as the internet is concerned), I decided to open this website. The research has been good so far, but I still feel like I am too new into this. Let’s hope time cures this.
Honestly, I dislike social media in general so I have delayed this as much as I could. Now it is time to have an open door to the world. Oh well…
I have always been fascinated by the interactions between law and society, by how some regulations have a profound effect on the development of social interactions, specially when it comes to what might be considered unsophisticated behaviours. I also enjoy hearing stories on legal loopholes, cases of malicious compliance, or even news about protests that arise when some government tries to ban something beloved-yet-arguably-harmful to the general population. In that same vein, I am a big fan of Diogenes’ “behold, a man!” anecdote.
My personal interest is on trivial, mundane, day-to-day issues rather than on grand political debates, not because I don’t find them important, but because sometimes an analysis of such trivial issues might reveal something important about those debates. We all have mundane worries. As a hypothetical example: a taxonomical debate on the exact definition of populism, while definitely interesting, does not fix a pothole on a road. Neither does fixing the pothole solve taxonomical debates. But the presence of the pothole, the anger it creates by its presence, the perceived permanent innaction of local bureaucrats, budgets cuts, and the popular feeling of “something must be done” do, indeed, point somewhere into that debate.
It is with this attitude that I tackle the study of eromanga, not in itself as an object of study but as a cultural artifact sorrounded by a complex subculture. I am not interested in the formal study of eromanga as art; I seek to dig into the social reactions to it as well as the ethical and legal aspects of its production and distribution, both in Japan and worldwide. The censorship of genitals in Japanese pornography, a legal requirement born out of social sensibilites and long-established jurisprudence, is but a testament of a sociolegal interconnection worthy of study; again, not for the graphic censorship in itself, but for the ethical and sociolegal circumstances that brought it into existence.
I know I am not the first to talk about such issues, and I do not pretend to come to the field as if I ignore decades of scholarship on the matter. I am just an underfunded scholar-to-be who has found their passion in an absolutely unexpected niche. In the eromanga subculture I have found a lot of loophole seeking, malicious compliance, and protests against arguably defendible policies. Expressions of sexuality and gender, myriads of identities and fantasies, lust and frustration, all around drawings of non-real people. Is it worth researching? I believe so.
Welcome to my webpage.
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