Commodified romance in a Tokyo host club

My original paper title was “Queer Eyes for the Japanese Guy” but I changed it to “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club”. Based on 10 months of fieldwork in Tokyo host and hostess clubs that are currently doing for my doctoral dissertation, today I would like to talk a little bit about male hosts and their female clients, what kind of social context the female clients’ desires derive from, and finally what the host club phenomena means to the gender and heterosexual norms in Japan. Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate some aspects of how the Japanese host club simultaneously reinforces and destabilises prevailing gender norms, and by extension heterosexual norms in Japan.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit