Research Interests for Anne Allison

Anne Allison (Ph.D. University of Chicago 1986)is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between the political economy and imaginative dreamworld(s) of everyday life in contemporary Japan.Her first book, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994) is a study of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs. Her second book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) examines the intersection of motherhood, productivity, and mass-produced fantasies in contemporary Japan through essays on lunch-boxes, comics, censorship, and stories of mother-son incest. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (California, 2006), Allison's third book, analyzes the intermeshing of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of "J-cool" (Japan's brand of "cool" youth goods) on the global marketplace. The Japanese edition of this book came out in 2010 by Shinchosha Press under the title, Kiku to Pokemon: Guro-barusuru nihon no bunkaryouuku. Currently, she is working on a book about precarious workers and the precarity of sociality as well as the hope (and hopelessness) surrounding futurity in the context of 21st century Japan/ese.

Keywords:

mass culture, Japan - contemporary Japan and Japan in global, hope/hopelessness, temporality/future, youth culture, sexuality/desire, transnationalise

Current projects:

Sociality of the present: Japanese kids, family, and affect in the 21st century.

Areas of Interest:

Japan
global culture

Representative Publications

1. A. Allison, The Cool Brand and Affective Activism of Japanese Youth, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26 no. 3 (Spring, 2009)
2. A. Allison, Pocket Capitalism and Virtual Intimacy: Pokemon as Symptom of Postindustrial Youth Culture, in Figuring the Future: Youth and Globalization, edited by Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham (Summer, 2009), School of American Research
3. A. Allison, Tamagotchi: The Prosthetics of Presence, in Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Summer, 2006), pp. 163-191, University of California Press [abs] [author's comments]
4. A. Allison, Japanese Mothers and Obentōs: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus, in Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (2000), pp. 81-104, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
5. A. Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), University of Chicago Press