Abstract
In Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies, Michelle H. S. Ho, a Singapore-based cultural studies scholar trained in both the United States and Japan, sets out to study nonnormative gender expressions that have proliferated in Japan’s popular culture and urban life since the 2000s. Over a period of fourteen months, Ho embedded herself in Paradise and Garçon (both pseudonyms)—two bars-cum-cafés located in Tokyo’s dizzying, neon-lit Akihabara district that celebrate male-to-female (josō) and female-to-male (dansō) crossdressing subcultures. Although their employees and patrons don’t necessarily identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, Ho regards these establishments as an integral part of a “pink economy” that took shape during Japan’s prolonged economic stagnation, commonly referred to as the “lost decades.” By centering the titular emergent genders, the book seeks to transcend the identitarian models of gender and sexuality established in western discourse and highlight “how trans and gender nonconforming individuals survive and flourish in a capitalist context” (p. 5).
The relationship between economic change and gender innovation is a central theme in this engaging book. Ho insists that the tectonic shifts that have roiled the Japanese economy since the 1990s, together with new gender representations in popular media, have enabled nonnormative practices such as those she witnessed when frequenting the two bars. Here, Ho’s choice of Akihabara for her research setting is particularly apt, given the market transformations this area has also undergone. Known for black market goods in the immediate postwar period, Akihabara subsequently developed into a shopping district focused on household appliances aimed at the nuclear family. Today, it is world famous as an “otaku paradise” that appeals to a consumer base of manga, anime, and video game fans and is dotted with maid cafés, where young women don maid costumes and serve clients whom they refer to as “masters.”
Nestled among these establishments, Paradise and Garçon function as third spaces, removed from the realms of both heterosexual family and corporate productivism that had long defined Japan’s national identity and everyday life. Providing a temporary respite from institutions that many young people find increasingly oppressive and exclusionary, these spaces facilitate “ambiguous, unstable, and incomplete embodiments” (p. 6) of gender and sexuality that cannot be neatly categorized within the spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities. Yet, as Ho emphasizes, the commercial nature of these establishments simultaneously implicates these gender innovations in capitalist relations of production and potential exploitation.
The book opens with an introduction that paints a broad-strokes portrait of the two bars and situates their emergence—along with novel gender performances—within post-1990s Japan. The first empirical chapter traces the history of nonbinary categories in Japan, arguing that they refuse a straightforward categorization within the notions of gender and sexuality that came to dominate the Anglophone discourse and queer theory. The subsequent chapters examine josō and dansō practices in relation to the normative institutions of Japanese capitalism, including the family (Chapter 2), media and popular culture (Chapter 3), paid employment (Chapter 4), and consumption (Chapter 5). Throughout, Ho maintains that these practices are inextricably connected to a more fluid, precarious, but also diversified economy that superseded the formerly taken-for-granted arrangements of work, family, and leisure and their attendant gender norms.
While Ho gives us a provocative starting point for thinking about emergent genders in relation to economic forces, the book could push harder to give us answers. One aspect that would benefit from further theoretical elaboration is a more systematic comparison between the two bars that profit from the labor of gender-nonconforming individuals, their gendered dynamics, and the social inequalities related to different valuation of (cis and trans) men’s and women’s labor. Paradise capitalized on crossing the male to female boundary, Garçon on an inverse process. Further, as Ho estimates in the introduction, Paradise catered predominantly to cis men, while Garçon attracted mostly cis women. And while the latter was forced to close its doors during the COVID-19 pandemic, Paradise successfully reinvented itself and even expanded its operations into the virtual realm. Given our knowledge of the ways in which gender and sexuality are overlaid in the production of profit and the uneven value assigned to bodies and activities coded as masculine and feminine, a more systematic comparison between two commercial establishments capitalizing on oppositional gendered dynamics has much to reveal not only about the Japanese economy but also about broader theoretical implications for our understanding of power relations and imbalances underpinning everyday expressions of gender and sexuality.
I also wanted to know more about Ho’s interlocutors to gain a better understanding of their diverse voices. The book provides rare and much-needed insight into the lives of a queer population that has occupied a marginal position in society and scholarly literature alike. Nonetheless, while the book relays a great number of observations and narratives from the employees, managers, and clients of both bars, we learn little about their lives outside of Paradise and Garçon and what significance the practices they pursue in “peri-capitalist” spaces (to use Ho’s terminology) carry there. With no detailed explanation of methodological choices and challenges, we also lack information on issues such as how the gender status ascribed to research participants throughout the book was ascertained or about their socioeconomic backgrounds. In several instances, the analysis could have benefited from a greater foregrounding of direct quotations from the participants. As a result, Ho’s interpretation occasionally overshadowed the data, making it difficult to see the connections she tries to establish between everyday practices and the structural conditions that produce them.
Despite these longings for more, Emergent Genders is a timely and valuable addition to a growing body of scholarship examining the relationship between gender, sexuality, and economic change, and it provides a welcome addition to scholarly work that seeks to rethink identitarian notions of gender and sexuality from a nonwestern, practice-based perspective. It will enrich discussions in courses on gender and sexuality, embodiment, affective labor, media and popular culture, and contemporary Japan and East Asia.