Project MUSE - The Labor of Cute: Net Idols, Cute Culture, and the Digital Economy in Contemporary Japan

This essay analyzes how the digital media economy harnesses young people’s search for meaningful work to develop new apparatuses and mechanisms of extracting value from activities that are not typically recognized as work. Drawing on interviews with net idols and an analysis of the digital infrastructure that evolved around the trend, the essay offers three arguments. First, it claims that the digital economy has adopted a particular mode of accumulation — the social factory — that has expanded sources of value extraction by blurring the boundaries between paid/productive and unpaid/reproductive labor. Second, this essay conceptualizes the net idols’ production of cute culture as emotional labor and claims that the digital media economy has effectively expanded the practices through which value is extracted from women’s unwaged labor far beyond the domestic sphere. Third, it demonstrates that young women did not uncritically embrace this logic. Rather, they insisted on using digital me

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