The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club
Issue Date
2008-01-01Author
Takeyama, Akiko
Publisher
University of Illinois
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
Anthropology
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
My dissertation investigates the underground world of Japan’s increasingly
popular host club scene, where mostly young, working-class men “sell” romance, love,
and sometimes sex to indulge their female clients’ fantasy, often for exorbitant sums of
money. I explore this commercialization of feelings, emotions, and romantic relationships
— what I call ‘affect economy’— in the context of Japan’s recent socioeconomic
restructuring, a reaction to globalization that is reshaping the nation’s labor and
commodity forms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Tokyo between 2003
and 2005, I argue that selfhood, lifestyles, and social relationships have become
commodifiable at the intersection of Japan’s postindustrial consumer culture and
neoliberal globalization. My dissertation aims to provide a fine-grained ethnographic
portrait of how hosts and their clients mutually seduce one another to foster a
commodified form of romance whereby both sides seek alternative lives and cultivate
their desirable selves —potentially successful entrepreneurial men and sexually attractive
women—while it simultaneously underscores gender subordination, social inequality,
and the exploitative nature of the affect economy in Japan. I illuminate how mutual
seduction between hosts and their clients intertwines with Japan’s neoliberal
policymaking and governance that similarly capitalizes on and mobilizes individual
hopes, dreams, and self-motivations to satisfy both their own and national interests. In
turn, I theorize seduction as a form of power that entails suggestive speech and bodily
acts to entice the other person(s) into acting for both the seducer’s and the seducee(s)’
ends. Seduction is, I argue, neither a mere sexual temptation nor a sinful deception, but a
ubiquitous yet unstructured tactic that institutions and individuals alike employ to
Description
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.
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