Members

研究発表：曹思敏、「日中BL作品から見る国家規範性とその超克」、カルチュラル・タイフーン2024、神戸・KIITO、2024年9月

研究発表：曹思敏、「二種類の悲しみ——日中BL作品における悲恋の比較」、カルチュラル・タイフーン2025、台湾・高雄大学、2025年11月

• Comparative Civilization Studies
• Representation Studies

Popular culture studies remain a relatively new academic field in China and still possess significant potential for further development. By introducing the latest achievements in Japanese popular culture studies to China and contributing to the fuller institutional and intellectual development of this field within China, I aspire to become a researcher who serves as a bridge between Japan and China.

Furthermore, by using comparative research between Japan and China as a foundation, I hope to expand my work toward broader Asian cultural studies and contribute to the promotion of academic and cultural exchange across Asia.

　I am building the theoretical foundation of my research by examining the differences in cultural characteristics between Japan and China as reflected in the narrative structures and character representations of web novels and manga, as well as the social and historical backgrounds underlying these differences. In particular, I draw upon the cultural theory of Slavoj Žižek to analyze how representations in popular culture participate in the formation and reconfiguration of social values.

　As my theoretical framework, I employ theories of “desire” and “jouissance” developed in the cultural theories of Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson in order to connect micro-level textual analysis with macro-level social theory. By utilizing Žižek’s concept of “cynical enjoyment” and Jameson’s theory of the “utopian impulse,” I analyze how cultural representations contribute to the repetition, deviation, and reconstruction of social imaginaries and ideological frameworks.

　These theoretical perspectives are particularly effective for comparative analyses of cultural representation in Japan and China, especially within the domain of popular culture such as web novels and manga. Žižek emphasizes the differences embedded in socially shared jokes, advertisements, and symbolic forms, arguing that they function as a “fantasmatic supplement” compensating for individuals’ sense of helplessness in confronting the inconsistencies—or “cracks”—between social norms and lived reality. Meanwhile, Jameson argues that popular cultural texts often symbolically process social contradictions by presenting a “utopian impulse,” offering “imaginative resolutions” to the tensions and limitations of reality. By combining these perspectives, I seek to capture both the region-specific characteristics of cultural representation that emerge from differing social and cultural conditions and the latent aspirations toward idealized resolutions embedded within them.

　I argue that differences in social conditions between Japan and China generate divergent cultural imaginaries, which become concretized in the character representations and narrative structures of web novels and manga. Such an analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of differences in national consciousness while simultaneously revealing that these differences themselves can be understood as reactions to historical and social transformations. In this sense, I aim to demonstrate that both societies are confronting shared underlying challenges despite their apparent divergences.

　Based on this theoretical framework, I connect the micro-level analysis of cultural texts such as web novels and manga with macro-level examinations of the sociocultural values reflected within them. Ultimately, by fostering mutual understanding through the analysis of cultural differences and by providing an intellectual foundation for overcoming misunderstandings rooted in divergent value systems, I hope to contribute to the expansion of the “possibility of dialogue” pursued within the field of reconciliation studies.