Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

information about public sex locations. Ethical clearance for human research understandably focuses on
risks to the human individual, and the anonymous and public nature of the data on the public sexual culture
platform analysed here poses few problems in terms of gaining institutional clearance. And yet on platforms
such as this, we argue, the locations (which must be geolocatable for the purposes of the site) call for
increased ethical attention.
Aljosa Puzar
Masturbation and/as Cultural Studies’ Research Practice
In the ongoing search for the elusive pure affectivity and the political meaning it can assume, the nonrepresentational
or new materialist ethnographer is tempted to explore the world of solitary pleasures,
assuring a next-to-total externality of the ethnographic gaze, but also the adjacent promises of added
intensities. The sensitive balance of peer-to-peer, familial, corporate and State-related operations regulating
“intimate” and “secret” realms of life leave behind only the rare realms of the purely intimate or even
transgressive practices that still largely lack a visible structure and a voice, leaving the cultural studies
practitioner blind with regards to their discursive and affective organization. Human masturbatory practices,
especially those pertaining to youth and to women, belong to a range of perennially neglected, suppressed
and troublesome topics to begin with, across the humanities, social studies and biomedical sciences. Their
theorization is often lacking depth, and their descriptions remain difficult. The presentation will show,
through generous and brave testimonials of Korean interlocutors and interlocutresses, how the practice of
masturbation vacillates between the total silence of affective build-ups and discharges, and utter
commodification and exploitation, posing some new demands on analytical and critical toolbox of cultural
studies.
4M Transmutation of Political Culture and Media Arts: Democracy, Immigration and Censorship (Chair and
discussant, Yoshitaka Mori)
The panel explores the ways in which media technologies, arts and cinema have interacted as a part of socio-political
transmutation of culture. The conventional meaning of “democracy”, “nation” and “citizenship” are questioned and
shifting as the neo-liberalism had spread globally with violent and militaristic consequences. Our first paper discusses
a correlation between the recent emergence of a new generation of political subjects and developments of personal
media technologies in Japan. The second paper focuses on the current refugee crisis it questions the meaning of art
in contemporary society. The third paper shows a way in which an oppressive censorship and revolutionary film
culture accidentally produced a masterpiece black comedy in Korea.
Yoshiharu Tezuka
Media Technologies and Transmutation of the Post-war Democracy in Japan
Tens of thousands gathered in front of the parliament protesting against amendments to the security
legislation through the summer of 2015. The event was marked as a long awaited emmergence of a new
generation of political subjects – a clear sign of change in Japanese political culture. The paper examines how
the differences of this new generation are being articulated as the political subject – as kokumin (nation or
people) – and considers how the meaning of “democracy” is transmuting. How this transmutation is causally
related to the decline of freedom of speech in conventional mass media, and a new freedom of speech
found in personalized digital media network?
Tomoko Shimizu
Bare Life and the Politics of Fiction: A Genealogy of Art and Migration
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