Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana-Champagne
614 Fraser Hall
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008). Faculty member at the University of Kansas since 2007.
gender and sexuality in Japan
Gender and Anthropology; Masculinity and Femininity; Gendered Modernity; Global Consumerism.
My research interest lies in the commercialization of feelings, emotions, and romantic relationships — what I call 'affect economy'— at the intersection of postindustrial consumer culture and neoliberal globalization. My project, "The Art of Seduction and Affect Economy: Neoliberal Class Struggle and Gender Politics in a Tokyo Host Club," investigates the interplay among political economy, social inequality, and subjectivity formation in the underground world of Japan's increasingly popular host club scene, where mostly young, working-class men "sell" romance, love, and sometimes sex to indulge their female clients' fantasy. I am interested in seduction as a form of power that entails suggestive speech and bodily acts to entice the other person(s) into acting for both the seducer's and the seducee(s)' ends. I am particularly interested in how institutions and individuals alike employ a ubiquitous yet unstructured tactic, seduction, to manipulate the other(s) and (re)shape the power dynamics. I ultimately seek to theorize how the art of seduction is a form of social governance-at-a-distance and also a pivot of speculative accumulation of capital in the globalizing affect economy.
My teaching uses gender as an analytical lens to critically analyze social structure and lived experiences in various socio-historical contexts, (post)colonial geopolitics, and global capitalism. Courses that I am (and will be) teaching: Anthropology of Gender: Female, Male, and Beyond (ANTH/WS 389) Gendered Modernity in East Asia (ANTH/EALC/WS 363) Feminism and Anthropology (ANTH/WS 580) Love, Sex, and Globalization (ANTH/WS 583) Masculinity Studies, Feminist Theory