Akiko Takeyama

Her first book, Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (Stanford University Press, 2016), examines the commercialization of affect —hopes, dreams, and intimacy— and theorizes what she calls an ‘affect economy.’ She defines the affect economy as a postindustrial, service-centered economy that capitalizes on aspiration, especially young working-class men’s upward mobility and aging middle-class women’s romantic fantasy. Her second book, Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry (Stanford University Press, 2023), interrogates involuntary —neither overtly forced nor completely voluntary— consent to precarious labor and problematizes taken-for-granted legal premises of autonomy, freedom of choice, and equality under the law. She argues that the premises based on liberal principles put society’s have-nots at risk to submit to precarious lives by choice while allowing the haves to take advantage of the situation.

Ultimately, her scholarship sheds light on people’s lived experience of structural vulnerabilities through the analytical lens of affect economy and involuntary consent. Her first book explores heterosexual men’s sexual labor, which is understudied in feminist scholarship, to complicate male dominance within a patriarchal capitalist system. Her second book ethnographically traces consent-giving and contract-making processes, which often remain invisible and confidential, to demonstrate the power dynamics behind the scenes. To humanize sexual commerce and labor contract, she employs what she refers to as affective ethnography, an evocative writing with vivid description and insightful analyses. Her first book was a finalist for the 2017 Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize at the Association of Feminist Anthropology.Her article, “Involuntary Consent,” was featured as a major article with commentaries in Current Anthropology, the flagship journal in anthropology.

Her intellectual interests are closely intertwined with her leadership role. To promote scholarly activities and creative workshops at KU, she has developed an interdisciplinary research frame, “Global Asia,” since she became Director of the Center for East Asian Studies in 2021. Instead of demarcating Asia as a discrete geographic location, “Global Asia” allows us to look into the circulation of information, moves of people, and flows of capital that are interconnected with public health, climate change, and economic globalization. It thematically brings scholars together to build intellectual communities through interdisciplinary dialogues and creative work across different fields. Her field building engagement includes a Global Asia speaker series, “Asian Experience in the Midwest” Oral History Project, and “When Global East Meets Global South: East Asia and Latin America” conference, to name a few.  

She also has a stellar record of securing competitive grants. For her own research, she is a recipient of the Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, SSRC (Social Science Research Council)-Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, and Japan Foundation Research Fellowship. For the institutional grants, the Center for East Asian Studies won the prestigious U.S. Department of Education’s 2022-2026 Title VI grant (US$2.1 million), among others such as the Korea Foundation and Laurasian Institution, to serve as a National Resource Center. She is also President of the Association of Feminist Anthropology (2023-2025), one of the largest subsections in the American Anthropological Association.