Files in this item
Files | Description | Format |
---|---|---|
application/pdf ![]() ![]() | (no description provided) |
Description
Title: | The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club |
Author(s): | Takeyama, Akiko |
Doctoral Committee Chair(s): | Karen Kelsky |
Department / Program: | Anthropology |
Discipline: | Anthropology |
Degree Granting Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Degree: | Ph.D. |
Genre: | Dissertation |
Subject(s): | Women's Studies |
Abstract: | This 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 manipulate the other and shape power dynamics. The art of seduction is, thus, a form of social governance-at-a distance and also a pivot of speculative accumulation of capital. |
Issue Date: | 2008 |
Type: | Text |
Language: | English |
Description: | 242 p. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/85285 |
Other Identifier(s): | (MiAaPQ)AAI3314910 |
Date Available in IDEALS: | 2015-09-25 |
Date Deposited: | 2008 |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
-
Dissertations and Theses - Anthropology
-
Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois