Riley Hannah Lewicki

This paper engages in a reading of Hannah Arendt’s consideration of the concept of art in relation to the three central aspects of the vita activa: labour, work, and action. The central argument is that Arendt miscategorises art as work, whereas it is a process of thought. There appears a tension in Arendt’s conception of art, or perhaps more accurately by her placement of art under the domain of work. Work relates to labour as use objects, and to action as art. However, this muddles a concept of work and its place in the world, hampering the “disclosing quality” of words valorized by Arendt. This fraught conjuncture is smoothed if we distinguish the process by which something becomes a use object from the process by which art is created. Thus, I examine the differences Arendt draws between art and use objects, and between what Arendt calls artwork and the wider scope of what is called art within contemporary society. Through this process of comparison, Arendt collapsed the process of fabrication and the two processes which create art: that of judgement and that of art, leading to an unnecessary restriction within her own theory, as it leaves implicit the idea of art as a process itself. Despite its lack of articulation, this idea of art as a process is inherent to her own conception of art. It renders artwork only one form of art and reveals the possibility of art-labour and art-action. Art is not missing from Arendt’s work. It is only muddled. She writes that the process of writing a modern novel is a process of artistic invention. Likewise, Arendt despairs of those who fabricate or manufacture books. If art is fabricated, and books are works of art, as she claims in The Human Condition, then it is meaningless to say that they are no longer written but fabricated, for to write is to fabricate. Thus, we can read her as conceiving of art as a distinct activity. I argue that it is a parasitic activity, one which corrupts the pure forms of activity, that of labour, work, and action, and renders their output and purpose as something “useless”.

This article examines two manga, Stop!! Hibari-Kun! and No Bra, which prefigure the increasingly popular anime and manga genre of otokonoko from a queer studies perspective. Otokonoko, also known as otoko no musume, is a genre of manga in which persons assigned male at birth (AMAB) wear women’s clothing and are perceived as attractive women. The term otokonoko (男の娘) is pronounced identically to the term男の子, meaning boy-child; however, due to a pun in the kanji which replaces "child" (子) with "daughter"/"girl" (娘), it translates to “boy-girl”, “boy-daughter”, or sometimes“boy-princess”. It is often translated into English as “cross-dresser”. The genre emerged in the early 2000s and has since become a popular point of reference and conversation both within and outside of anime and manga communities. Both the genre, and its titular characters have become iconic within both Japanese and Western online culture. As with most genres, the otokonoko genre is trope heavy, so I decided to look at works that prefigure the genre to better understand the appeal without the weight of the traditions of the genre weighing too heavily on the content. Both Stop!! Hibari-Kun! and No Bra follow the story of a boy who becomes increasingly attracted to a gender ambiguous character assigned male at birth, but who appears female to most. Both manga are centrally about this conflict between the love interests’ perceived maleness and the protagonists perceived heterosexuality. The article analyses the appeal of each work to both male and trans feminine readers, because what would later become the otokonoko genre is popular with both male and trans feminine readers. It also argues that these manga offer something unique from Western depictions of transgender lives, based on the popularity of manga and anime among Western trans feminine readers.

This dissertation is concerned with a fundamental problem at the heart of Arendt’s The Human Condition—namely, ‘the problem of idleness’. This problem is related to the three types of human Arendt identifies as correlated to dominant activities in one’s life, animal laborans, homo faber, and the acting person. It explores Arendt’s predictions of an oncoming automation crisis, and the possibility of a corresponding crisis in the production—consumption cycle. The problem of idleness can be understood as the claim that if people are provided freedom from job-holding so that they may pursue other activities, they would likely turn to consumption to occupy their time. I claim that this problem of idleness is important in any consideration of an oncoming automation crisis, especially in relation to Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to such a crisis. I claim that there is a hole in the UBI literature concerning this problem of idleness, and if left unaddressed it would result in both an ineffective UBI, and in a crisis of meaning for the general populace. This dissertation demonstrates what the problem of idleness is, why it is important, and what possible solutions exist. This contributes to the UBI literature by diagnosing and attempting to solve a gap in the literature which I argue would cause practical challenges in the implementation and stability of a UBI system. I also contribute to the Arendtian literature by problematizing traditional readings of Arendt, and offering a reappraisal of her thought on Marx, art, and the social.