Research Interests for Anne Allison

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products and the precarity of irregular workers. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994—an ethnography of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining employees and customers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs; Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (University of California Press 2000)—a collection of essays analyzing the complex desires linking motherhood, pornographic comics, and popular culture; and Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006)—a study of the intermeshing of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of Japan's brand of "cool" youth-goods on the global marketplace. Her most recent book, Precarious Japan (forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2013) looks at the socio-economic shifts in post-corporatist Japan towards precaritization of work, sociality, and everyday security.

Keywords:

Home, Hope, hope/hopelessness, Japan, Japan - contemporary Japan and Japan in global, mass culture, Political science, Politics, sexuality/desire, temporality/future, transnationalise, Youth, youth culture

Current projects:

sociality in precarious times; 21st century Japan

Areas of Interest:

Japan
global culture
youth
precarity/security
sociality
desire/fantasy/sexuality

Representative Publications

1. Allison, A, The Cool Brand and Affective Activism of Japanese Youth, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26 no. 3 (Spring, 2009), pp. 89-111 [repository], [doi] [abs]
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. Allison, A, 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. Allison, A, 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. Allison, A, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), University of Chicago Press