In Emergent Genders, Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls emergent genders—new practices, categories, and ways of being stemming from the simultaneous fracturing, contestations, and (re)imaginations of older forms of gender and sexual variance in Japan. Such emergent genders initiate new markets for alternative categories of expression and subjectivity to thrive in a popular cultural hub like Akihabara instead of Tokyo’s gay and lesbian neighborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chōme. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, reconfiguring the significance of capitalism for trans studies and queer theory, and decentering theoretical frameworks incubated in a predominantly United States academic context, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.

Michelle H. S. Ho is Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Tracing Emergent Genders  1
1. Categories That Bind: Gender Innovations and Their Sticky Relations to Capital  27
2. Doing Business in Japan’s Pink Economies: Enacting Home, Family, and Alternative Forms of Belonging  52
3. Alternative Worlds in Akihabara: The Rise of Contemporary Josō and Dansō Cultures  79
4. More Than Just Work: Trans and Nonbinary Employees Capitalizing on Their Labor  108
5. Consuming Genders, Fashioning Bodies: Thinking Style and Beauty in Contemporary Josō and Dansō Cultures  138
Coda. Living Otherwise in the New Normal  169
Notes  179
Bibliography  221
Index