March 16th, 10 am Pacific Time
Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89116266821
Amy Ireland: Moé is Incomplete Burning: The Pasts and Futures of Nonhuman Love
In an article for UnHerd written in late 2023 entitled ‘We Are All Fictosexuals Now’, Katherine Dee muses on the nature of the social stigma surrounding fictosexuality:
[I]t’s not hard to see why some people prefer to laugh at fictosexuality. It destabilises our most basic assumptions about love. Or at least what we think our most basic assumptions about love are. But what if those assumptions are worth revising?
Dee is one of the few contemporary commentators who have attempted to discuss the recent spike in parasocial relationships between humans and nonhuman avatars or characters in an open-minded and impartial manner. A far more common response is to dismiss those who identify as fictosexual, zhixinglianren, or nijikon, who have waifus, husbandos, or are dating an AI, as ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘deluded’—a diagnosis often grounded in the belief that a ‘fake’ fantasy relationship is being substituted for a ‘real’ human relationship which the person in question would prefer to have but is unable to obtain—a patronising interpretation that mobilises particular assumptions about the relationship between reality and fantasy, ‘true’ experience and ‘fictional’ experience, and even, in some forms, the role of biological reproduction in the future of human evolution.
This talk aims to approach contemporary incarnations of nonhuman love in the former spirit, offering several lenses through which it might be theorised in ways that refuse to pathologise or stigmatise its practitioners. Grasping phenomena such as moé, nijikon, fictosexuality, and romantic relationships with chatbots as part of a broader set of cultural and historical continua opens alternative interpretative trajectories which, when properly unfolded, entail the dismantling of concepts that organise reality at its most fundamental level, making way in turn for new modes of being better fitted to our rapidly approaching nonhuman future.
Key Texts
2.5 Dimensional Seduction, Okamoto, Hideki (dir.), series 2024.
Anikina, Alexandra, ‘Procedural Animism’, APRJA, vol. 11, issue 1, 2022:134–151.
Caughey, John L., Imaginary Social Worlds (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
Galbraith, Patrick W., Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)
Honda, Toru, ‘The Love Revolution is Here’, in Galbraith, Patrick W, (ed.), The Moé Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2014.), 116–125.
Ireland, Amy and Maya B. Kronic, ‘Several Regimes of Lines’ in Cute Accelerationism (Falmouth: Urbanomic 2024), 35–40.
Konior, Bogna, ‘Angels in Latent Spaces, Notes on AI Erotics’, talk given at MediaLab Matadero’s Synthetic Minds Symposium, 10 February 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXGLC5SFErw
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Konior, Bogna, ‘Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy and Other Erotic Suspensions’, ŠUM #22: Angel Mode, 2703–2715. https://www.sum.si/issues/angel-mode.
NTU-Otastudy Group, ‘Fictosexual Manifesto’, Vocal Media, February 2023, https://vocal. media/humans/fictosexual-manifesto.
Parzival, ‘Love is Dead, Long Live the Otaku’, Artificial Night Sky, https://artificialnightsky.neocities.org/honda-san/kimomen.
Saito, Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, tr. J. K. Vincent and D. Lawson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Bio
Amy Ireland is a writer and theorist best known for her work with the technomaterialist transfeminist collective, Laboria Cuboniks, whose Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (2018) has been translated into 18 languages. With Maya B. Kronic she is the author of Cute Accelerationism (2024). Amy currently works as an editor and translator for the UK contemporary art and philosophy publisher, Urbanomic.
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