Permitted and Prohibited Desires

This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes—or obentos—that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

Anne Allison is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, and author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994).

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1 Different Differences: Place and Sex in Anthropology,
Feminism, and Cultural Studies

Story 1
Story 2
Divides Between Theory and Ethnography
Divides Between Gender and Sexuality
Disciplinary and Theoretical Divides
Toward the Bridging of Divides: Playing with the Phallus

2 A Male Gaze in Japanese Children's Cartoons, or,
Are Naked Female Bodies Always Sexual?

Sights/Sites of Gender and Sex: Western Theories
of the Male Gaze
Machiko-sensei and the Male Gaze in Japanese Children's
Cartoons

3 Cartooning Erotics: Japanese Ero Manga

Manga: Comics of (not only) Play
Ero Manga: Texts
Cutting the Other, Cutting Off the Self
Conclusion

4 Japanese Mothers and Obentos:
The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus

Cultural Ritual and State Ideology
Japanese Food as Cultural Myth
School, State, and Subjectivity
Nursery School and Ideological Appropriation of the Obento
Mothering as Gendered Ideological State Apparatus

5 Producing Mothers

Kyoiku Mama: The Everyday Instiller of Everyday Education
The Discipline of Summer Vacation
Productive Mergences: Mother's Love and School's Discipline
Women's Experiences in Their Roles as Education Mothers
Conclusion

6 Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of Mother-Son Incest
in Japanese Popular Culture

Evils of incest
Incestuous Pleasures
Incest, Taboos, and Two Myths: Oedipus and Ajase
Conclusion: Timing and Nationalism

7 Pubic Veilings and Public Surveillance:
Obscenity Laws and Obscene Fantasies in Japan

Travel and Borders
What Is Dirty, and What Is Clean?
Modernizing the Public, Fetishizing the Pubic
Covering Territories: State and Border Control
Lacking Parts
Postscript

Notes
References
About the Book and Author
Index