Self-Torturous Aesthetics and Self-Orientalism: Affective Economies of Submission, Sovereignty, and Queer Temporality in Post-WWII Japan

This research theorizes “self-torture” as an affective technology and aesthetic strategy embedded in neoliberal economies of anxiety, labor, and desire. Masochism is approached not as individual pathology but as a socio-historical and epistemic apparatus: a structure of affect producing, regulating, and circulating subjectivity while shaped by modernity, coloniality, and governance imperatives. Post–WWII Japan serves as a critical case study. After 1945, the nation reconstituted itself as a “self-colonizing” entity—internalizing U.S. imperial oversight, reproducing colonial hierarchies, and deploying self-Orientalist narratives through cultural policy and the commodified “Japan Brand.” In this context, self-torturous aesthetics intersect with self-Orientalism to generate recursive circuits of submission and sovereignty, aestheticizing pain, shame, and humiliation as consumable and regulatory phenomena, reflecting a negotiation of trauma in the face of an all-powerful Other—Euro-America. Self-torture functions dually as a survival strategy and mechanism of compliance, enacting embodied endurance that navigates subordination while sustaining power hierarchies. Drawing on Deleuzian masochism, Sara Ahmed’s affect theory, postcolonial critique, and queer temporalities, the study examines how self-torture reproduces colonial, neoliberal, and heteropatriarchal logics while opening potentials for queering autonomy, futurity, and selfhood. Methodologically, it combines arts-based research, critical discourse analysis, and close readings of literature, film, media, and digital practices, linking historical self-subordination with digital labor, social media self-surveillance, and globalized cultural consumption. By tracing these entanglements, the research exposes self-torture as both a mechanism of domination and a site of rupture, revealing the stakes of desire, submission, and cultural memory across postwar and contemporary Japan.