Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) - Softcover

Ho, Michelle H. S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478031379 ISBN 13: 9781478031376

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478031379
• ISBN 13: 9781478031376
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280