Emergent Genders:

Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies

Dr. Michelle Ho, Department of Communications and New Media, NUS

Date & Time: Thursday, 16 April 2026 | 4.00-6.00pm

Venue: NUS FASS AS8 Level 4, Seminar Room 04-04

Discussant: Professor Akiko Shimizu (The University of Tokyo)

About the Book

In this book, I trace 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, I show how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what I call 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, I offer new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.

About the Author