Thomas Baudinette – författare

Shinjuku Ni-chōme is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city’s gay male community. Typically understood as a “safe space” where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan’s largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Regimes of Desire reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted in prior literature. Through fieldwork observation and interviews with young men who regularly frequent the neighborhood’s many bars, the book reveals that the district is instead a space where only certain performances of gay identity are considered desirable. In fact, the district is highly stratified, with Shinjuku Ni-chōme’s bar culture privileging “hard” masculine identities as the only legitimate expression of gay desire and thus excluding all those men who supposedly “fail” to live up to these hegemonic gendered ideals. Through careful analysis of media such as pornographic videos, manga comics, lifestyle magazines and online dating services, this book argues that the commercial imperatives of the Japanese gay media landscape and the bar culture of Shinjuku Ni-chōme act together to limit the agency of young gay men so as to better exploit them economically. Exploring the direct impacts of media consumption on the lives of four key informants who frequent the district’s gay bars in search of community, fun and romance, Regimes of Desire reveals the complexity of Tokyo’s most popular “gay town” and intervenes in debates over the changing nature of masculinity in contemporary Japan.

Pornography’s impact on transnational models of media aesthetics and governance has been well documented from a Euro-American perspective. This book contributes to the field of pornography studies by rethinking the cultural impact of pornography as audio-visual and online media from an East Asian perspective. It focuses on pornographies made and consumed in and across Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. The chapters examine under-reported East Asian cultures of pornography, not only to uncover phenomena from within this region but also to challenge and fine-tune existing academic research networks and paradigms. This book proposes that the lived experience of producing and consuming various pornographies throughout East Asia may extend, nuance, challenge, or even affirm the dominant Euro-American understandings of pornography that are becoming increasingly axiomatic within pornography studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field of study. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Porn Studies.

Pornography’s impact on transnational models of media aesthetics and governance has been well documented from a Euro-American perspective. This book contributes to the field of pornography studies by rethinking the cultural impact of pornography as audio-visual and online media from an East Asian perspective. It focuses on pornographies made and consumed in and across Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. The chapters examine under-reported East Asian cultures of pornography, not only to uncover phenomena from within this region but also to challenge and fine-tune existing academic research networks and paradigms. This book proposes that the lived experience of producing and consuming various pornographies throughout East Asia may extend, nuance, challenge, or even affirm the dominant Euro-American understandings of pornography that are becoming increasingly axiomatic within pornography studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field of study. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Porn Studies.