The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club
Takeyama, Akiko
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/85285
Description
Title
The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club
Author(s)
Takeyama, Akiko
Issue Date
2008
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Karen Kelsky
Department of Study
Anthropology
Discipline
Anthropology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Women's Studies
Language
eng
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."
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