Queer and normal: dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) lives and politics in contemporary Tokyo

Abstract

Though dansō—female-to-male crossdressing—has been historically embedded in Japan as tradition, performance, and entertainment, in the last fifteen years it has fractured and increasingly become commercialized, adopted by young people—a phenomenon I call “contemporary dansō culture.” One example this article explores are dansō café-and-bars—establishments where employees dress as another gender—which since the mid-2000s have emerged in Nakano, Ikebukuro, and Akihabara, areas in Tokyo where anime, manga, and game fans gather. How do dansō individuals understand their practices and everyday lives? Based on field research, this article explores how dansō individuals’ rejection of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) identity and politics can provide a starting point for rethinking queer theory’s relationship with normativity. Taking a queer anthropological approach, I contend that dansō individuals’ politics simultaneously lies in their turn from “LGBT” and alignment with the “normal,” compelling us to reconfigure queer and norms in the Japanese context.

Keywords:

• Queer
• norms
• antinormativity
• cross-dressing
• Japan

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my interlocutors, without whom this research would not have taken shape. I am also grateful to Sabine Frühstück and Kirsten Janene-Nelson for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts, and to Vicky Hesford, Kadji Amin, and Anne Allison for their continued support of the larger project. In addition, I thank Gordon Mathews and the anonymous reviewers for their productive suggestions. An earlier version of this article was presented in “‘Queer’ Lines: Genders and Sexualities in Institutions and at Play in Japan I & II,” a double panel co-organized with S.P.F. Dale at Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) 2016, where it benefited from participants’ insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All translations are the author’s except when otherwise noted.

2 “Garçon” and all names of informants are pseudonyms. Informants were asked to choose their pronouns in English.

3 It was only upon repeated visits that I discovered that those gray curtains covered the few windows the establishment had.

4 “Cis” or “cisgender” refers to individuals whose configurations of gender correspond with what is assigned at birth, whereas “trans” or “transgender” index individuals whose configurations of gender do not align with what is assigned at birth.

5 For a list of works on LGBT issues in Japan, see Suganuma (2015), 244–247.

6 “Mizu shōbai” (water trade) glosses the “vast world of bars, cabarets, clubs and massage parlors that exist in Tokyo and other major cities,” which is typically regulated by the Adult Entertainment Law (fūzoku eigyō torishimari hō) (McLelland 2004, 1).

7 Kabukichō is a red-light district in Shinjuku that is well-known for its concentration of host clubs, establishments where young, good-looking men, known as “hosts,” entertain women in conversation. Dansō host clubs, which are staffed by dansō hosts, are much less prevalent than dansō cafés and café-and-bars.

8 As S. P. F. Dale notes, this is a larger linguistic issue that is beyond the scope of this article (2012, footnote 27).

9 ‘Nyūhāfu’ (new half) describes someone of mixed gender who has partially undergone sex reassignment surgery; many such have worked in mizu shōbai (McLelland 2004, 9; Mitsuhashi and Hasegawa 2006, 204).

10 See footnote 4 for definitions of “cisgender” and transgender.”

11 The LGBT boom was preceded by several booms related to heightened media visibility of various sexual minorities, such as the 1950s and 1990s gay booms and the 1980s new-half boom.

12 While Hiyori does not discuss this explicitly, the Japanese media have a long history of producing gender- and sexually variant individuals as spectacle. See Ishida and Murakami 2006; Mackie 2008; Maree 2013.

13 This is so even though it was originally translated from the English word “liberty” in the late nineteeth century using the Chinese-character expression for “jiyū” (Howland 2001, 167).

14 That said, the term has not always been consistent in its meaning in Japanese society (Howland 2001, 167).

15 It is likely, too, that working more hours would earn them a more decent wage to maintain a higher cost of living in central Tokyo than in rural and suburban areas.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been generously supported by a National University of Singapore Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Start-Up Grant, a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship (2016–2017), and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship (2017–2018).

Notes on contributors

Michelle H. S. Ho

Michelle H. S. Ho is an Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies and Advanced Graduate Certificate in women’s and gender studies from Stony Brook University (SUNY). She is currently at work on a monograph on trans/gender and the economy through an ethnographic study of josō (male-to-female crossdressing) and dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) café-and-bars in contemporary Tokyo, Japan.