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Paper short abstract

This paper examines practices that queer normative understandings of love and intimacy, particularly monogamy, within Japan’s sex industry. It highlights sex work as a site that unsettles normativity and explores the challenges faced by queer individuals working in a heteronormative sex industry.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores some of the queer attempts and activities that have been developing and blooming within the sex industry in Japan, despite its predominance of heteronormative service styles. While the contention over whether sex work constitutes unfree labor or an occupation that can be entered with valid informed consent remains a major focus among feminist and gender scholars, the complexity of sex workers’ livelihoods and sexualities has been severely overlooked in academic and political discussions.

Nonetheless, many studies on the sex industry and related fields continue to focus heavily on cisgender women sex workers, often without incorporating a queer perspective. This emphasis appears to be partly due to their relatively greater accessibility as a research population, as well as the persistence of protectionist and misogynistic forms of discrimination, which continue to generate urgent issues and constrain sex workers’ ability to make their own choices. My own research has also primarily focused on female sex workers, as I problematize the restrictive regulation of sex work that targets the “female” body, rooted in a long history of monitoring and enclosing women’s sexual subjectivity in the name of patriarchal protection. However, as I investigate the complex livelihoods of sex workers—within which strategies and forms of resistance emerge—it has also become evident that even within a heterosexual service system, there exist multiple practices that queer sexual normativity.

Therefore, this paper aims to highlight sex work as a practice that queers normative understandings of love and intimacy, including monogamy, and positions sex work as a possible mode of survival that does not require the sacrifice of sexual freedom or non-normative gender expression. It also examines the challenges articulated by my interlocutors as queer individuals working within a heteronormative sex industry. In doing so, the paper adds nuance and foregrounds dimensions that have yet to be sufficiently addressed in studies of sexuality in Japan.