Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club / Edition 1

by Anne Allison

Overview

In Nightwork, Anne Allison opens a window onto Japanese corporate culture and gender identities. Allison performed the ritualized tasks of a hostess in one of Tokyo's many "hostess clubs": pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes, and making flattering or titillating conversation with the businessmen who came there on company expense accounts. Her book critically examines how such establishments create bonds among white-collar men and forge a masculine identity that suits the needs of their corporations.

Allison describes in detail a typical company outing to such a club—what the men do, how they interact with the hostesses, the role the hostess is expected to play, and the extent to which all of this involves "play" rather than "work." Unlike previous books on Japanese nightlife, Allison's ethnography of one specific hostess club (here referred to as Bijo) views the general phenomenon from the eyes of a woman, hostess, and feminist anthropologist.

Observing that clubs like Bijo further a kind of masculinity dependent on the gestures and labors of women, Allison seeks to uncover connections between such behavior and other social, economic, sexual, and gendered relations. She argues that Japanese corporate nightlife enables and institutionalizes a particular form of ritualized male dominance: in paying for this entertainment, Japanese corporations not only give their male workers a self-image as phallic man, but also develop relationships to work that are unconditional and unbreakable. This is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in gender roles or in contemporary Japanese society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226014876
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/28/1994
Edition description:	1
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Anne Allison is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prelude
Introduction
Pt. 1: Ethnography of a Hostess Club
Ch. 1: A Type of Place
Ch. 2: A Type of Routine
Ch. 3: A Type of Woman
Pt. 2: Mapping the Nightlife within Cultural Categories
Introduction
Ch. 4: Social Place and Identity
Ch. 5: The Meaning and Place of Work: The Sarariiman
Ch. 6: Family and Home
Ch. 7: Structure of Japanese Play
Ch. 8: Male Play with Money, Women, and Sex
Pt. 3: Male Rituals and Masculinity
Introduction
Ch. 9: Male Bonding
Ch. 10: The Mizu Shobai Woman: Constructing Dirtiness and Sex
Ch. 11: Impotence as a Sign and Symbol of the Sarariiman
References
Index