Akiko Takeyama
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences - Anthropology, Women, Gender & Sexuality StudiesRoom 611
Akiko Takeyama is an associate professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research and teaching interests lie in changing gender, sexuality, and class dynamics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Her first book, Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (2016 Stanford University Press), theorizes the commercialization of feelings, emotions, and intimate relationships among socially marginalized population —the youth and the female— in contemporary Japan’s service-centered economy. Her book was shortlisted for 2017 Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize, Association of Feminist Anthropology in American Anthropological Association.
Her second book project, entitled “Japan's Adult Video Industry: Gender, Technology, and Labor in the Age of Internet and the Content Business,” explores the interrelation among politico-legal systems, information technology, and the global economy. Specifically, she intends to bring human affect —hope, fear, and a sense of vulnerability— to the center of an analysis of 21st century capitalism, complicating such legal categories as human rights and individual consent especially when sexual and economic exploitation are carried out in the name of individual freedom of choice. Her research will shed light on the complex set of social, economic, and legal contexts wherein consent and coercion, pleasure and danger, and hopes and disparity coexist intimately.
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
M.A., Asian Studies, University of Oregon (UO)
B.A., International Studies and Asian Studies, University of Oregon (UO)
A.A., English, Kansai Gaidai Junior College
Teaching
Her teaching explores human experience through which cultural meanings are created and negotiated in everyday lives. She also often uses gender, among other factors, as an analytical lens to critically analyze social structure and lived experiences in various socio-historical contexts, (post)colonial geopolitics, and global capitalism.
Teaching Interests
- Gender
- Sexuality
- Class
- Subjectivity
- The body and affect
- Labor and commodity
- Popular Culture
- Neoliberal globalization
- Trafficking in persons
- Human rights
- Feminist epistemology
- Critical theory
- Japan
- East Asia
Research
Her research interests, as well as teaching interests, lie in changing gender, sexuality, and class dynamics in the context of neoliberal globalization. She employs interdisciplinary informed theories and methods in her research.
Research Interests
- Gender
- Sexuality
- Class
- Subjectivity
- The body and affect
- Labor and commodity
- Popular Culture
- Neoliberal globalization
- Trafficking in persons
- Human rights
- Feminist epistemology
- Critical theory
- Japan
- East Asia
Service
She values service for the university, the community, and the profession as important part of her career and personal development.
Selected Publications
Takeyama, A. (in press). Opening the Box: An International Asian Woman Scholar’s Fight. In . (Ed.), Fight the Tower, eds. Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. (forthcoming).
Takeyama, A. (in press). Possessive Individualism in the Age of Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Self-Ownership, Consent, and Contractual Abuses in Japan’s Adult Video Industry . In . (Ed.), Advanced Undergraduate Theory Reader in
Women’s/Gender/Feminist/LGBTQ+/Sexuality Studies, edited by L. Ayu Saraswati and Barbara L. Shaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (forthcoming)
.
Takeyama, A. (2016). Staged Seduction: Gender Politics and Class Struggle in a Tokyo Host Club (. & Eds.). Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24190#extras
Takeyama, A. (2010). Intimacy for Sale: Masculinity, Entrepreneurship, and Commodity Self in Japan’s Neoliberal Situation. Japanese Studies, 30(2), 231-246. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/6886
Takeyama, A. (2005). Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club. In M. McLelland & R. Dasgupta (Eds.), Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (pp. 200-215). New York: Routledge.
