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Emergent Genders

Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies

Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

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Book

Pages: 280

Illustrations: 13 illustrations

Published: January 2025

Author: Michelle H. S. Ho

Subjects
Asian Studies > East Asia, Gender and Sexuality > Trans Studies, Globalization and Neoliberalism

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.

Praise

“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

“Emergent Genders is a critical, timely contribution to conversations on gender innovation amid rising global hostility towards non-conforming individuals. Michelle H.S. Ho lays the groundwork for future studies of contemporary innovations in gender, dress, language, and entertainment.”

- Jan Bardsley, Journal of Contemporary Asia

"Emergent Genders is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. . . . Michelle Ho has produced a book that is empirically rich, theoretically ambitious, and ethically grounded. It will be of lasting value." - Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, Journal of Urban Affairs

"Emergent Genders offers readers in gender studies, queer and trans studies, and Japanese and Asian studies clear and wide-ranging insights into transformations in emergent genders and practices of cross-dressing in Japan." - Kyoko Takeuchi, Gender & Society

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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 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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