Doing Business in Japan's Pink Economies: Enacting Home, Family, and Alternative Forms of Belonging
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Published:December 2024
2024. "Doing Business in Japan's Pink Economies: Enacting Home, Family, and Alternative Forms of Belonging", Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies, Michelle H. S. Ho
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Chapter 2 articulates the relationship between capitalism and the cis-heteronormative home, family, and marriage in the Japanese context and the ways in which Paradise and Garçon, a josō (male-to-female cross-dressing) and a dansō (female-to-male cross-dressing) café-and-bar respectively, as profit-making businesses figure within this relationship. Employing a gender lens, it explores capitalist development in Japan and the gradual departure from commonsense expectations of marriage and family while also demonstrating how the cis-heteronormative home lingers in the Japanese imaginary. Telling the stories of Paradise’s and Garçon’s births in Akihabara, this chapter also investigates the café-and-bars’ (dis)connections to Japanese sex and night entertainment through “pink economies,” wider networks of production, consumption, and circulation of goods and services related to how sex, gender, and sexuality have been commodified in both heteronormative and nonnormative sites since the postwar period.
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