‘Nonsensical is our thing!’: Queering fanservice as ‘Deleuzional’ desire-production in Studio Trigger’s Kiru ra Kiru/Kill la Kill

This article seeks to investigate the revolutionary and queer possibilities in contemporary Japanese media and the otaku subculture. By specifically re-evaluating the aesthetic practice of fanservice in otaku media, it further reimagines fanservice as an aesthetically and philosophically productive model for reanimating political and sexual politics of resistance to hetero/homonormative capitalism. Relying primarily on Deleuzian media theory, this reading utilizes Studio Trigger’s smash hit animation Kiru ra Kiru/Kill la Kill (Imaishi, 2013–14) as a case study for the transformative potential of queering sexual-political assemblages within the re-engineered circuits and networks of otaku desire. This series further enunciates an upheaval of traditional discourses pertaining to gender representation and perversion in otaku media through its rhizomatic web of desiring-images that explores queer performativity, politicized desire-production and a collectivist strategy of binding together coalitions of dynamically intense desires into a new queer-otaku assemblage.