Consuming Genders, Fashioning Bodies: Thinking Style and Beauty in Contemporary Josō and Dansō Cultures
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Published:December 2024
2024. "Consuming Genders, Fashioning Bodies: Thinking Style and Beauty in Contemporary Josō and Dansō Cultures", Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies, Michelle H. S. Ho
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Chapter 5 builds on people’s consumption at josō (male-to-female cross-dressing) and dansō (female-to-male cross-dressing) café-and-bars, focusing on style, beauty, and body work—the work individuals do on their or other people’s bodies. Unlike the first wave of contemporary josō and dansō cultures, discussed in chapter 3, in the second wave, josō and dansō practices became more mainstream and embedded in beauty and fashion. How do these embodied modes of consumption offer new ways to think about gender innovation throughout the 2010s? This chapter contends that the café-and-bar owners’, employees’, and customers’ co-consumption—the act of consuming together—of fashion, beauty, and popular cultures motivates and sustains the production and circulation of emergent genders, enabling the generation of diverse class, sexual, and gender subjectivities under nonhegemonic societal and economic formations—what J. K. Gibson-Graham calls “(re)subjectivation.”
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