Browsing by Subject "Precarity"

Gacha game is a new type of video game that gained popularity in the 2010s and the 20s. In popular gacha games such as Genshin Impact, Fate/Grand Order, and Blue Archive, like a video game version of lottery, players pay virtual or real currencies to obtain random valuable items or playable characters. In Embodied Fate, the author conducts a symptomatic reading of the gacha game: to analyze the desire structure of gacha gaming from the perspectives of media studies, ludology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Numerous theoretical frameworks and critical categories are used for the analysis, including database consumption, character merchandising, psychoanalysis, avatar theory and action theory of ludology, neoliberalism, and precarity. By contextualizing gacha games in the anime media mix, it is shown that the production and consumption of virtual characters are the foundation of gacha games’ desire structure. Also, the author purposes that over-possession, the sophisticated dynamics between the player and the character, boost the desire for repetitive gacha gaming. Last, the author puts gacha games in the wider context of late capitalism and shows that neoliberalism creates gacha games and gacha players develop parasociality with characters to resist the insecurity of their precarious lived experience.

Although Tunisia has been celebrated as the unique success story of the Arab Spring, its emergent democracy has failed to resolve the structural inequalities that caused the 2011 revolution, or meaningfully include marginal subjects within its address. This dissertation documents the life-worlds of those left behind in Tunisia’s democratic transition by tracking the precarious labor of smuggling by youth in the Western-Central interior. For unemployed youth living in the shadow of underdevelopment, smuggling offers a rare avenue of insertion into productive life, where the border serves as a natural resource for generating value through arbitrage. Disappointed by the revolution’s implicit promise of structural change, many young Tunisians now use these routes of economic survival to join up with jihadist militias abroad. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine, an impoverished province on Tunisia’s Algerian frontier, I examine how smuggling practice generates a landscape of ambivalent belonging to the nation, a “Shadow Zone” that elicits desire for the state, as well as the material means to evade it. I show how cross-border movement refracts the meaning of social justice for local actors, including petty smugglers and informal laborers who work the border economy, Tunisian families whose sons have been recruited to militias in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and unemployed youth and civil society groups who militate for equitable development.

The concerns and questions of this paper focus on what happened when Chinese Internet tech companies initiated an overtime working schedule known as “996—working from 9am to 9pm a day, six days a week—in terms of the intertwined agencies of the state, companies, and workers. I describe how, on the one hand, “996” has gradually been transformed from a specific system of work into a culture of overwork that is not merely confined to Chinese Internet tech companies but has permeated China’s employment market, attracting great attention which is embodied in substantial discussions and critiques in online spaces. These involve explanations given by celebrities, grassroots movements, and interventions by the state. On the other hand, workers, especially tech workers, are trapped by “996” in offline spaces in virtue of the future-oriented promises of the work, at the cost of having to endure present suffering, which is externalized as work-life imbalances, gender inequality, and age discrimination. I have divided this thesis into two chapters: In the first, I have arranged the abundant online materials on the discussion of “996” chronologically, in order to present how “996” has developed in the public’s view in terms of protests and movements, and in order to discuss how these movements contribute to the formation of a Chinese precariat. In the second chapter, by presenting first-person voices from 996 tech workers, I attempt to analyze the term neijuan, which emerges from these discussions, alongside Xiang Biao’s analysis of “suspension” and Lauren Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism” in order to show the complexities, possibilities, and predicaments of the influence of “996” on the working environment in China in general.