In Emergent Genders, Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in joso and danso cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls emergent genders-new practices, categories, and ways of being stemming from the simultaneous fracturing, contestations, and (re)imaginations of older forms of gender and sexual variance in Japan. Such emergent genders initiate new markets for alternative categories of expression and subjectivity to thrive in a popular cultural hub like Akihabara instead of Tokyo's gay and lesbian neighborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chome. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, reconfiguring the significance of capitalism for trans studies and queer theory, and decentering theoretical frameworks incubated in a predominantly United States academic context, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.
Michelle H. S. Ho is Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Tracing Emergent Genders 1 1. Categories That Bind: Gender Innovations and Their Sticky Relations to Capital 27 2. Doing Business in Japan's Pink Economies: Enacting Home, Family, and Alternative Forms of Belonging 52 3. Alternative Worlds in Akihabara: The Rise of Contemporary Joso and Danso Cultures 79 4. More Than Just Work: Trans and Nonbinary Employees Capitalizing on Their Labor 108 5. Consuming Genders, Fashioning Bodies: Thinking Style and Beauty in Contemporary Joso and Danso Cultures 138 Coda. Living Otherwise in the New Normal 169 Notes 179 Bibliography 221 Index
"By charting the landscape of sexual minority venues and populations in Tokyo, Michelle H. S. Ho offers a compelling theory of queer and trans sociality, intimacy, and self-fashioning. Her engaging, provocative, and deeply informative study of new modes of gender identification in Japan makes an indelible contribution to discussions of global genders, trans markets, and neoliberal economies. Emergent Genders serves as a model for thinking about alternative gender and sexual practices outside of Europe and North America." - Jack Halberstam, author of (Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire) "Emergent Genders is a wonderfully crafted and trenchantly analyzed ethnographic study that offers a more expansive notion of gender beyond the Western binaries of male/female. While focusing on the particularities and unique assemblage of genders in Tokyo's nightclubs, Michelle H. S. Ho jumpstarts a global and transnational discussion and understanding of trans cultures, institutions, politics, and economies. This book will set the terms of future debates in gender and sexuality studies, queer and trans studies, East Asian and Japanese studies, anthropology, globalization, and beyond." - Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of (Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora)
