**Anthropologist Mila and Unraveling the World of “Babiniku” The Possibilities of an Age in which Anyone Can Be an “Ideal Self”**
Liudmila Bredikhina, a Swiss anthropologist who works as “Mira”, won the “Pri Genre” academic award in the field of gender at the University of Geneva for her paper on “Babiniku” (=virtual beautiful girl incarnation). â? was awarded. It was the world’s first achievement to receive an academic award for her research on “Babiniku”, and it was one of the notable virtual movements in 2022.
This time, we asked Mira about the details of her research so far, how she got interested in “Babiniku” and started researching it, and about virtual appearances and gender norms.
��First of all, please tell us about the specific fields and contents of your research, Mira.
Mira: In 2021, I completed my Master’s Degree in Asian Studies from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. A recent ‘Puri Genre’ award-winning paper explored Babiniku and traditional Japanese theater. The title of my master’s thesis is BABINIKU: What’s Behind Virtual Performance. Defying gender norms through technology and Japanese theater.
In fact, in 2020, I became the first European and American researcher to publish an academic paper on Babiniku. Since then, he has published several papers in scientific journals. I am currently applying for a PhD in Gender and Sexuality at the University of Malta. My research is about â??virtual cutenessâ? and â??beautiful girlsâ? expressed by Japanese men.
��Why did you become interested in Japanese culture?
Mira: When I was a child, my father’s Japanese friend from work taught me origami, and that’s when I first became interested in Japanese culture. After that, I started collecting ukiyo-e books and reading about zazen. When I was a teenager, I found a photo of Japanese lolita fashion on the Internet, and after reading a scan of the magazine “FRUiTS”, I fell in love with Mana, the guitarist of MALICE MIZER. Hey, I got interested in otome games.
ã??When I went to Japan, I met geisha, cross-dressers, drag queens, theater people, and Nekama people.
–Why did you become interested in Babiniku?
Mira: I got to know Hatsune Miku in 2018, and a year later I got to know VTuber. Since the Vtech Challenge was held at the end of 2019, I decided to do a simple survey on the similarities and differences between Japanese and Western VTubers. That’s where I learned about “Bami meat”. Interest in Japanese culture, habits of gender play (When I was a teenager, I liked changing genders and dressing up as the opposite sex. But acting wasn’t just on stage. Webroll I like playing games, so I made two main characters, a cat girl and a boy), and combined with my habit of spending too much time on the Internet, I thought that researching babiniku would be a perfect theme for my master’s thesis. Also, I’ve always wondered why men reincarnate as cute girl characters.
��The paper that won the Pre-Genre Award the other day was an examination of the Japanese theater culture and the beauty of the meat. What made you think about this topic?
Mira: There are multiple reasons. For example, in Nehorin Pahorin, I saw a virtual beautiful girl Nemu talk about the similarities between Babiniku and Ningyo Joruri, and Akihiro Hatanaka wrote about the popularity of VTubers in his book “Democracy of the Dead”: “Ningyo Joruri, 3DCG It is born from the combination of characters and state-of-the-art technology.” From this, I started researching “similarities between Babiniku, Onnagata, and Ningyo Joruri.”
By using the latter to investigate the discourse of Ba Biniku, rather than making a historical association between it and traditional Japanese theater, the aesthetics and conventions reminiscent of those traditional theatrical arts have been explored. , was able to discover social interactions. According to informants, they took inspiration from Kabuki and Ningyo Joruri to justify their practice.
However, it should be noted that not all BABINIKU think so or claim to refer to traditional theater. My research focuses on investigating one of the many discourses surrounding Babiniku.
��What possibilities do you feel in an age where everyone can have their own virtual or visual identity?
Mira: I can only answer based on the results I gathered in my master’s thesis on Babiniku. It seems that I am living as “I want to be”. They use their common knowledge of the visual elements surrounding bishoujo in order to be beautiful, satisfy their needs for approval, protection, recognition, and be perceived as cute. While they live as virtual beautiful girls, they use technology and stereotypes of beautiful girls to create alternative male images and destroy conventional gender concepts.
��Also, what do you think about the possibility that it is not just a single icon on SNS, but is accompanied by embodied expressions and real-time characteristics in metaverses, etc.?
Mira: Being a virtual character opens up a lot of possibilities for individuals, and some even â??hackâ? existing socio-cultural expectations. For example, there was an opinion from Babiniku that “I can be more selfish” and “I can express my emotions”. In a society where traditional masculine values are said to still be strong, I was able to realize my own values.
“Even if the sexual expression in the virtual world changes, there is not much change in the physical world.” However, I hope that the discourse that “anyone can be a cute virtual girl” will be born in the future. In this way, cuteness can be separated from symbols such as gender and femininity.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/a6540702e7550a281e721f1209e9510b50140172