The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club

Abstract

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