"An intelligent and insightful study" of the cultural and economic factors surrounding female sex workers in Japan (Nicole Constable, author of Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers).
Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy-but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable.
Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Laborexplores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care-a healing labor-that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.
"Will not only enlighten anthropologists with an interest in gender issues, the sex industry, labor relations, and women's rights, but will also provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the Japanese economic system and workplace." - The Journal of Japanese Studies
Autorentext
Gabriele Koch is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College.
Klappentext
Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy-but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care-a healing labor-that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.
Inhalt
The introduction presents an overview of the major themes and methods of this ethnography on adult Japanese women working in Tokyo's sex industry. It describes the market for commercial sexual labor in Japan as well as the exclusions of the female labor market. This chapter explains how anthropologists have approached gendered economies, the mutual constitution of economic and erotic life, and questions of work and rights.
This chapter considers how ideas about the social value of the sex industry drive its regulation as an organized sector of the economy in contemporary Japan. Despite widely held assumptions about the basic necessity of providing men with access to particular kinds of gratification, regulatory strategy has reflected a reluctance to fully sanction commercial sex. This contradiction manifests in the common description of the sex industry as occupying a legal "gray" area that mirrors the social position of sex workers and creates an uncertain environment for those working in this industry. The chapter argues that the grayness of regulation reflects ambivalence about the importance of women's commercial sexual labor to the organizing logic of the economy.
This chapter explores the diversity of those in the sex industry and what attracts them to it. In the context of a limited labor market for women, sex workers foreground the high earnings and the forms of autonomy and flexibility offered by sex industry work. Many of the same aspects that women in the sex industry find appealing about sex work, however, also reflect its marginalization from the dominant norms that structure the male-gendered economy. The chapter examines how this contradiction reveals how sex workers imagine what "work" can and should be.
This chapter examines how sex workers manage a problem central to their work: it is both uniquely lucrative and stigmatizing, opening up possibilities at the same time as being unmentionable. Sex workers go to great lengths to separate their working lives from their "real," socially legitimate identities. The stigma of working in an illicit industry contrary to normative notions of feminine respectability is always on women's minds as they maneuver the moral conflicts that accompany their entry into and departure from the sex industry. The chapter argues that the sexual economy is always also a moral economy and that how women talk about their work is shaped by moral ideologies of whom and what women's labor should be for.
This chapter looks at how sex workers themselves understand the services that they offer to their customers in terms of healing labor. Women working in Tokyo's sex industry value the care they provide for what they see as its contributions to the well-being and productivity of male white-collar workers. Their services center on iyashi (healing), a carefully constructed performance of intimacy that commingles maternal care with sexual gratification. Sex workers regard iyashi as a socially necessary form of women's care of men and centrally assess the value of their work in terms that foreground its contributions to men's work. Although sex workers may devote considerable effort to cultivating their skill at providing iyashi, they conceal this labor so as to engender the appearance of a naturalized femininity.
This chapter follows the advocacy of an anti-human trafficking organization that seeks to reframe the normalization of women's work in the sex industry as exploitation. The individuals involved in this organization are deeply concerned with the vulnerabilities of adolescents and young adults in Japanese society and with how forms of neglect, marginalization, or lack of social connection may lead them into situations in which they can be taken advantage of by others. As with the healing labor of sex workers, the human rights advocacy of the organization's staff and supporters is also a form of feminized care set against the backdrop of a restrictive female labor market. The chapter contrasts the organization's anti-prostitution rhetoric with the responses of sex workers who describe these activists as fundamentally misrecognizing who they are and what they do.
This chapter explores the issues that women wor…