Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty

Akiko Takeyama

The following is contact information: Akiko Takeyama 614 Fraser Hall 864-2645 takeyama@ku.edu

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.

Research Area - Gender, sexuality, and class; affect and the body;
neoliberal globalization; Japan, East Asia.

Teaching Area - 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