Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies
Key information
- Date
- Time
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11:00 am to 1:00 pm
- Venue
- Online
About this event
In this book, I trace 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, I show how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what I call 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, I offer new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.
Registration
This event is free, open to the public, and held in online only.
Organiser
This event has been organised by the SOAS Japan Research Centre.
Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk
Header image credit: Sebastian Kurpiel via Unsplash
About the speaker
Michelle H. S. Ho (she, they) is an Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and Advanced Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her work spans the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, affect and emotion, and media and popular cultures in contemporary Asia. Her first monograph, Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies, came out with Duke University Press in January 2025. More information can be found on her website.
