Intimacy for Sale: Masculinity, Entrepreneurship, and Commodity Self in Japan's Neoliberal Situation

Abstract

This article examines the creation of entrepreneurial male subjects in Japan's host clubs. Based on my ethnographic study, I argue that hosts' entrepreneurship is constituted by commodifying themselves. This paradoxical – commodified, yet entrepreneurial – male subject is embedded in the new possibilities and constraints posed by Japan's neoliberal restructuring and global economic trends. Hosts, who dream of earning fast cash and achieving upward class mobility, perceive the hosting business as a gateway to success, fame, and luxurious lifestyles. As a result, they ‘voluntarily’ commodify themselves and feed into the club's profit-making. They are also exploiting the consumer logic of desirability and the neoliberal values of entrepreneurship. By doing so, they hope to better position themselves in contrast to the work ethic and status of Japan's conventionally hegemonic masculine icon, the Salaryman. I contend that neoliberal reform in Japan is not a mere politico-economic reaction to globalization, but a socio-historically specific situation in which individual desires, Japan's social values and ethics, and global economic trends discursively intersect, align, and produce a new mode of attachment to individual freedom and flexible accumulation of capital.

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