Research Interests for Anne Allison

Anne Allison (Ph.D. University of Chicago 1986) researches the ways in which desire seeps into, reconfirms, or reimagines socio-economic relations in various contexts in postwar 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. Her current research is on the recent popularization of Japanese children’s goods on the global marketplace and how its trends in cuteness, character merchandise, and high-tech play pals are remaking Japan’s place in today’s world of millennial capitalism.

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