Consuming Female Masculinity: Affective Labor in Japan’s Drag Cafes

• In Event: Gendered Spaces, Precarious Bodies: Affective Labor in Neoliberal Japan

Abstract

This ethnographic study tracks the affective labor—the work of caring for another living being—of drag cafe employees in Tokyo, specifically dansō cafes, where women dressed as men attend to customers. I argue that relationships nurtured between employees and customers, who are mostly young women, provide avenues for them to cope with social precarity. Examining women’s practices of dansō (literally “dressing as men”) and their experimentation with gender and sexuality in the affective spaces of drag cafes is significant for understanding changing perceptions of gender and sexual identities in an increasingly precarious Japan.

Presenter

• Michelle Ho, Stony Brook University