Post-work Intimacy: Negotiating Gender among Japanese Retired Couples in Malaysia
On 4 October, 2018 the Department will host a Seminar by Dr Shiori Shakuto titled "Post-work Intimacy: Negotiating Gender among Japanese Retired Couples in Malaysia".
October 4, 2018
3 pm – 4.30 pm
AS8-06-46
Abstract: How does a shift from fulltime work to retirement articulate with the most intimate of human experiences? Among middle to upper middle class Japanese couples, a temporary or semi-permanent relocation to Malaysia has become one of the popular retirement options. Many Japanese men view this overseas move as a new challenge in their second life and call it a joint retirement “project” with their wives. Retired baby boomers have lived through Japan’s high growth period, during which family and firm were strictly demarcated into normative divisions of labour between women and men. Male retirement and their subsequent move overseas seem to have shifted spousal relations from being based on strict divisions of labour to a more equal partnership. By tracing these changing relationships ethnographically from couple’s homes, to the Japan Club of Kuala Lumpur, to online social forums, I observe that the practice of post-work intimacy revolves around particular understandings of spousal equality that emphasize a sense of oneness. This masks the reproduction of gendered hierarchy in which women enable the men’s transformation from workers to actively ageing seniors in their retirement. Equality and love are two affective concepts formerly considered by male workers as antithetical to their masculinity and productivity. In their retirement, these concepts are mobilized in ways that sustain neoliberal precepts of active ageing and in so doing they mute reproduced gendered norms. The distinctiveness of this transnational fieldsite provides a unique vantage point for this ethnographic study to address larger debates over the politics of intimacy and productivity in contemporary Japan.
Shiori Shakuto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Shiori completed her PhD in Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her research analyses how intimate social relations in Japan are reimagined and reorganised through inter-Asian mobility. Applying emerging insights in feminist economic anthropology to longstanding debates about intimacy and productivity in Japan, her research explores these themes through ethnographic research on Japanese retired couples in Malaysia. Currently, at ARI, she is developing a new project on young Japanese families who moved to Malaysia after the 2011 nuclear disaster.