Living with Gender: Ordinary Affects and Everyday Knowledge in Tokyo Youth Culture, 1990s-2000s

Abstract

1 Abstract This thesis asks how youth cultural practices in 1990s-2000s Tokyo can help us understand the lived experiences of gender and the forms of knowledge that emerged around them, drawing on oral history interviews with seventeen people who spent their youth in Tokyo. Throughout, it distinguishes gender-the social phenomenon feminism has generally referenced-from "ジェンダー[jendā]," the loanword through which it came to be widely recognised in Japan. Reading these accounts with Stewart's "ordinary affects" as an experimental starting point, the thesis shows, first, that the term "ジェンダー[jendā]" was largely absent from participants' everyday lives; where they did encounter it, it was understood mainly as the top-down, social-justice language required for institutional procedures, or as another word for "queer." Second, as a lived reality, gender was rarely recognised as a structure to be resisted: many participants' personal choices were not reducible to gendered structures, yet the boundaries between their own agency and the influence of those structures were often experienced as blurred. What matters, however, is that their experiences neither simply upheld traditional gender norms nor settled into a clear departure from them; rather, conformity and deviation coexisted, with neither resolved into a fixed...