Second Arc

The Mechademia series continues twice a year from the University of Minnesota Press, edited by Frenchy Lunning and Sandra Annett. Mechademia: Second Arc is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of East Asian popular cultures, broadly conceived. Forthcoming issues and current calls for papers (CFPs) are as follows. (All issues are dated in Minneapolis, i.e. the northern hemisphere.)

Calls for Papers

All submissions should be sent to the Mechademia submissions editor. Please indicate the title of the volume you are submitting to as follows: “Submission–[volume name]” in the subject line. Submit two copies of your article as a Word document. One of these copies should be anonymized: do not include your name anywhere in the article, and remove the author’s name from the document properties (look under “Info” in Word). Named citations of your own work are acceptable, provided you do not use first-person language to discuss the work in question. Submissions should be 5,000-7,000 words and follow the Mechademia Style Guide, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style. Figures are limited to eight per essay; image permissions are the responsibility of authors upon acceptance. Figures should be at least 300DPI and in either TIFF or JPG formats submitted in a separate file and not embedded in the text, with captions, submitted in a separate Word document.

Call for Papers: Vol. 20.1: “Gametides” — The Cross-currents of Digital Play in East Asia

What do the tides of digital games wash up on the shore—or take out to sea?

This special issue of Mechademia: Second Arc explores the fluid movements, exchanges, and rhythms of digital gaming across East Asia. As waves of technological innovation, cultural production, and player communities move through and beyond national and linguistic borders, they create distinctive patterns of engagement—currents that surge, recede, and return in ever-changing forms.

The notion of “gametide” evokes more than the ebb and flow of global media or the circulation of franchises; it suggests a living ecology of play shaped by time, environment, and affect. Like the sea’s cycles, gaming habits and industries respond to local rhythms—school years, work schedules, internet access, and cultural expectations about leisure and productivity. The “tide” also hints at accumulation and erosion: what digital games deposit on the cultural shore (new narratives, aesthetics, and communities) and what they take away (attention, time, tradition, or older media forms).

We invite papers that investigate how digital gaming moves within and across East Asia, attending to the material, affective, and temporal dimensions of play. How do the tides of gaming connect disparate regions—Korea’s PC bangs, Japan’s mobile gacha economies, China’s esports arenas, Southeast Asia’s community-driven mods, or Indonesia’s burgeoning indie scenes? What residues do these movements leave in the cultural landscape, and what undertows—censorship, commercialization, gendered labor—pull against them?

Possible areas of inquiry include:

• Flows and drifts: Transnational movements of genres, aesthetics, and production practices across East Asia and into global circuits.
• Affective tides: Games as spaces of comfort, stimulation, or community; as an escape in times of crisis; emotional economies of digital play.
• Temporalities of play: How do players and designers structure daily or seasonal rhythms around games?
• Ecologies of gaming: Interactions among developers, players, technologies, and infrastructures—how do these shape regional gaming environments? How have historical contexts of imports and exports affected game culture?
• Cultural sedimentation: What remains after the wave passes—fan archives, memes, mod cultures, or discarded technologies?
• Value and time: How are games positioned in social discourse—as leisure, addiction, creative labor, or cultural capital? How have these valuations shifted over time and/or between regions?
• Media shorelines: Intersections of games with anime, manga, film, or art practices that blur the boundaries of digital play.

By thinking with the sea—its tides, flows, and ecologies—this issue seeks to map an oceanic model of game culture that resists static borders and emphasizes connection, change, and return. We encourage contributions that take an interdisciplinary approach in charting the contours of these gametides across East Asia’s diverse shores.

The deadline for submission of essays for this volume is July 1, 2026. All submissions should be sent to submissions@mechademia.net. Please indicate the title of the volume you are submitting to by writing “Submission to SA20.1” in the subject line. Submit two copies of your article as a Word document. One of these copies should be anonymized: remove the author’s name from the document properties (look under “Info” in Word) and do not include your name anywhere in the article. Named citations of your own work are acceptable, provided you do not use first-person language to discuss the work in question.

Submissions should be 5,000-7,000 words, including abstract and citations. They should follow the Mechademia Style Guide, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style. Figures (and separately submitted captions) are limited to eight per essay; image permissions are the responsibility of authors after acceptance. Please submit your article in Word only, no PDFs. Figures are limited to 8 images and/or tables, at least 300DPI and in either TIFF or JPG formats submitted in a separate file and not embedded in the text, with captions submitted on a separate Word document. The Mechademia Style Guide can be found at www.mechademia.net.

Call for Papers: Vol. 20.2 – “Erotic Bodies – Mediation, Affect, and Embodiment “

What makes a fictional or mediated body erotic, and how is eroticism represented and experienced through sensation, embodiment, and affect across East Asian popular culture?

This special issue of Mechademia: Second Arc explores eroticism across diverse East Asian media forms, genres, and cultural contexts. The title “Erotic Bodies” foregrounds two interconnected concerns: eroticism and embodied experience. Erotic representation is not limited to explicit sexuality; it is shaped by sensory perception, affective response, and personal and cultural expectations surrounding intimacy. How do media construct erotic experiences of touch, gaze, voice, sound, or atmosphere? How are erotic bodies framed differently across media, audience formations, and industrial contexts? How do regulatory regimes, market logics, and social norms shape what can be shown, suggested, or withheld? And how do audiences experience, interpret, negotiate, or resist these representations?

We welcome scholarship on a broad spectrum of East and Southeast Asian media cultures. Topics may include BL, GL/yuri, gay comics/bara, and transgender-related media, as well as representations of heterosexual intimacy in shōjo and shōnen anime and manga, ladies’ comics, and dating simulation games. We also encourage submissions engaging with themes explored in Porn Studies, including erogē (erotic games), hentai discourse, adult animation, alternative and underground comics, and related media industries, to reflect the wide range of erotic representation in East Asian popular culture.

We invite contributions examining erotic embodiment, particularly those drawing on theoretical approaches suited to analyzing eroticism, embodiment, and sensuality, including feminist theory, queer theories, phenomenology, affect theory, Porn Studies, and related approaches in media and cultural studies.　

Possible areas of inquiry include:

Erotic Phenomenologies of Media: Media-specific constructions and negotiations of erotic embodiment, sensation, and affect in animation, manga, games, and virtual media.
Discourses of Pornography: Histories, aesthetics, regulations, and receptions of pornographic and semi-pornographic media cultures.
Affective Practices: Fan practices and modes of audience reception, including parasocial intimacy, networked communities, and participatory cultures.
Media Industries and Political Economy: Industrial logics, platform economies, and market segmentation shaping the production, circulation, and visibility of erotic representation.
Technological Mediation: The technological construction and remediation of bodies and erotic representation, including CGI performers, virtual idols, AI-generated imagery, and digital performance.
Intersectional Embodiments: Aging, disability, race, class, and other intersecting identities in the representation and reception of erotic embodiment.

By bringing together scholarship on diverse genres and methodologies, this issue seeks to map contemporary discourses of erotic embodiment and affective eroticism in and through East Asian popular culture.

Future Issues

Vol. 18.2: Studio Ghibli, guest ed. Rayna Denison and Jacqueline Ristola

- Coming summer 2026

Vol. 19.1: Semiosis/Symbiosis, guest ed. Vincenzo Idone Cassone

- Coming winter 2026

Vol. 19.2: Graphic Narratives, guest ed. Deborah Shamoon

- Coming summer 2027

Vol. 20.1: Gametides, guest ed. Rachael Hutchinson

- Coming winter 2027

Vol. 20.2: Erotic Bodies – Mediation, Affect, and Embodiment, guest ed. Kazumi Nagaike

- Coming summer 2028

Vol. 21.1: Urban Architectures & Fan Spaces

- Coming winter 2029

Vol. 21.2: Isekai: Other Worlds

- Coming summer 2029

Vol. 22.1: Race, Class, and Asian Hip Hop, guest ed. Arthur Mitchell

- Coming winter 2030

Vol. 22.2: Indigeneity, guest ed. Christina Spiker

- Coming summer 2030

Vol. 23.1: Subjectivities

- Coming winter 2031

Vol. 23.2: “-Punked”: Imagining Resistance

- Coming summer 2031