“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. <i>Emergent Genders</i> 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) “<i>Emergent Genders</i> 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)

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 josō and dansō 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-chōme. 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.
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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. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.
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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 Josō and Dansō 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 Josō and Dansō Cultures  138
Coda. Living Otherwise in the New Normal  169
Notes  179
Bibliography  221
Index
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Product details

ISBN
9781478031376
Published
2025-01-28
Publisher
Duke University Press
Weight
386 gr
Height
229 mm
Width
152 mm
Age
UP, 05
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Number of pages
280

Biographical note

Michelle H. S. Ho is Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies at the National University of Singapore.