Femininity as a virtual object. Interacting with the Japanese girl-machines: Shiori, Monika, Miku, and Kizuna

Abstract

Since the rise of postmodern critical theory and gender related activism, femininity can be understood as a discursive phenomenon and a matter of culture. Nowadays, with everything that new communication technologies have to offer, we find ourselves living in a cultural landscape populated by pixelated girls and women with, I hypothesize, their own particular ways of displaying femininity as virtual entities. Following this hypothesis and within the framework of postmodern critical theory, this article uses a qualitative approach, with its emphasis on the mass culture that digital women populate, through structural content analysis of a selection of machines (Shiori, Monika, Miku and Kizuna) following a media research method with the objective of identifying a particular pattern in how they display femininity in Japan. In this doing, I find that femininity as a virtual object can be defined in terms of the relationship established between machines and humans, needing interaction to exist.