Categories That Bind: Gender Innovations and Their Sticky Relations to Capital

Chapter 1 begins by examining emergent genders in the historical context of Japan, drawing on the 1995 documentary Shinjuku Boys. Following Michel Foucault to take a genealogical approach, this chapter explores how these configurations of gender and sexuality have been foundational to current categories and have also figured complexly within them. Turning to categories like new half (nyūhāfu; someone of mixed gender), onabe (masculine-presenting individuals assigned female at birth), and x-gender (ekkusu jendā; neither male nor female, or both), it traces the forces behind their emergence during and after the bubble economy. Connecting these categories to the ethnographic data gathered from josō (male-to-female cross-dressing) and dansō (female-to-male cross-dressing) café-and-bars, this chapter also shows how contemporary categories are complicated by the owners’, employees’, and customers’ individualistic practices and understandings. It contends that those pushing for these categorial innovations cannot be neatly contained within identitarian notions of articulating gender and sexuality.