The Libidinal Economy of the Japanese Sex Industry: Sexual Politics and Female Labor.

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of contestations over the meaning of labor in the mainstream Japanese commercial sex industry. Through introducing the analytic of sex as care, this study explores new ways in which sex may be imagined as a socially productive activity. In Japan, female sex workers offer iyashi (healing), a deeply gendered affective labor that is seen as integral to the maintenance of male economic productivity. The value of this care rests on sex workers’ successful enactment of the very assumptions of naturalized femininity that justify their exclusion from the full-time labor market. Consequently, women working in the sex industry present themselves as “amateurs,” thereby concealing the laboring aspects of their work and contributing to the lack of labor protections in this industry. My research situates women’s ambivalence toward selling their care as labor in the context of two competing rights movements that address abuses in the sex industry. The first is a sex workers’ rights movement that uses a labor rights framework to mobilize sex workers and organize for political recognition. The second movement, driven by an American-backed anti-human trafficking “rescue industry,” seeks to reframe the normalization of short-term female employment in the sex industry as exploitation.

Through approaching sex as care, this study reveals why women in the sex industry do not recognize themselves in the advocacy of competing rights movements even as they are deeply preoccupied with navigating the risks of an industry with few labor protections. I argue that the political-economic, legal, and cultural structures that normalize sex industry work in Japan also preclude female sex workers from making political claims on their own behalf. This dissertation contributes to larger conversations and informed scholarship on what constitutes “sex” and how such definitions reframe our understandings of the political and economic implications of erotic life.