«Yo soy Vegeta y cuando jugué con Messi me hice Súper Saiyajin»

Biografización y socialización otaku, entre la nostalgia y el sincretismo cultural

Abstract

In this article we intend to reflect on the processes of identity construction that unfold around Argentinian fandom of Japanese mass culture, conceptualized in terms of otakism (Álvarez Gandolfi 2016). To do this, we will analyse how fans of content such as anime, (self)identified as «otaku», give meaning to the experiences linked to their consumption practices, noticing the tensions in the constitution of the national identities of these subjects crossed by transnational objects, between meanings that they assign to «the Argentine» and «the Japanese». All of this in a current context of growing access and global circulation of cross-cultural productions, hand in hand with digitization and the consolidation of participatory culture in an interconnected era (Jenkins et al. 2016), within which we will base ourselves on our own empirical research (Álvarez Gandolfi 2014; Del Vigo & Carpenzano 2014) consisting of the application of qualitative interview techniques with these fans and an ethnographic fieldwork on the main digital platforms through which they interact. On the one hand, we argue that the aforementioned tensions would be resolved through otaku prosums that imply a sex-affective socialization and a syncretic identity bricolage both dislocated and potentially resistant within the framework of waifuism (Del Vigo 2018). On the other hand, we argue that in order to understand the tensions that go through the processes of identity construction based on otakism, the dynamics of fragmentation within the fandom nor the asymmetric ways in which the fans in question signify their favourite contents in their nostalgic biographic narratives cannot be forgotten. Here we will contrast such proposals and arguments in a dialogical way, displaying a conceptual journey that is indebted to cultural studies and fans studies, and currents such as postmodernism and its problematizations, in order to consolidate possible bases to continue studying this increasingly visible and important phenomenon in our contemporary societies.