19/01/2026
The Japanese Studies Program from the
RGL-School of Social Sciences
invites you to our 2026 JSP Lecture Series titled
"Theorizing the Feminist Potentials of Japanese Womenโs Fandom for Male Idols Through Usami Rinโs Oshi, Moyu"
By Dr Thomas Baudinette
Senior Lecturer in Japanese and International Studies in Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Languages and Literatures, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Friday, 23 January 2026
5:00 - 6:30PM
SEC C 201
2/F SEC Building
Within Japanese girlsโ culture, perhaps no fandom is more influential than that of the ubiquitous male celebrities known as โidolsโ who dominate Japanโs media landscape. Usami Rinโs 2020 award-winning novella Oshi, Moyu (Idol, Burning) presents a thought-provoking window into the lives of the women who dedicate themselves to supporting these male idols via the practice known as oshi-katsu (pushing oneโs โbiasโ). Rejecting the view that oshi-katsu solely represents a consumerist behaviour that entangles women within neoliberal structures geared towards their exploitation, this reading of Oshi, Moyu instead argues that oshi-katsu may operate as a significant practice which asserts the agency of women within a society that routinely silences their desires. This article argues that Oshi, Moyu explores the experiences of young women navigating precariousness in contemporary Japanโs hetero-patriarchal society to recuperate oshi-katsu as a feminist praxis. Through a โfanthropologicalโ reading of Oshi, Moyu, it brings previous scholarship on the Japanese idol industries into dialogue with recent feminist theorisations of fandom in Japan, providing a reparative analysis of womenโs participation within the fandom which has been largely absent from the previous English-language literature on Japanese idols.
Dr Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Global Cultures at the School of International Studies, Macquarie University. A cultural anthropologist, his research primarily explores how popular media and fandom culture inform knowledge about gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. He is the author of Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Q***r Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is currently working on his third book, tentatively titled Q***r Fantasies of Asia: Japanese and Korean Media Fandom in the Philippines.
Register for this talk using the QR Code or click this link: https://bit.ly/JSPLectureSeries1