Michelle Ho

National University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Communications & New Media

This article investigates “ toransujendā” (transgender), “ josō” (male-to-female crossdressing), and “ otoko no ko” (boy/male daughter) as categories that bind through ethnographic research in Tokyo’s contemporary josō gyōkai (scene and business circles). Building on queer and transgender scholarship, I ask what these categories mean, what they do,...

In January 2019, instant noodle giant Nissin Foods released two animated advertisements online featuring Naomi Osaka, which elicited backlash over “whitewashing” the multiracial professional tennis player who represents Japan. Although Nissin has since pulled the advertisements and officially apologized for portraying Osaka as lighter-skinned, unde...

Scholars have criticized how tarento (television personalities) who might be considered “transgender” have for decades provided comic relief on Japanese mainstream television, but few have considered the recent emergence of a different kind of trans celebrity who rejects the entertainment narrative to embrace the “wrong body” discourse (having mism...

In sport and sport media, figure skating is often perceived as ‘feminine’ and male skaters frequently occupy an ambiguous position, especially for Asian (American) athletes in a historically White-dominated sport. Based on discourse analysis, this article compares how English- and Japanese-language news narratives represent elite male figure skater...

This chapter explores how thinking gender and sexuality transnationally can help us make sense of “queer” media, practices and performances proliferating across East Asia and Southeast Asia through two prominent examples – South Korean popular music (K-pop) and “boys love” (BL) media. Thinking gender and sexuality transnationally is useful for maki...

In this introduction, we highlight the developments and transformations that have been put forward and situate our examination of Queer Asias within that context. We then turn to the contributions in this special issue, which collectively examine the intricate and imbricated flows of capital, power, intimacy, citizenship, sexual politics, and categ...

This article explores the mediation of androgynous bodies and styles in contemporary Japan by mapping the relationship between dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) and genderless (jendāresu). Dansō refers to gender-crossing practices usually by individuals who are assigned female at birth, whereas genderless is a mode of fashion emerging in 2010 wh...

Though dansō—female-to-male crossdressing—has been historically embedded in Japan as tradition, performance, and entertainment, in the last fifteen years it has fractured and increasingly become commercialized, adopted by young people—a phenomenon I call “contemporary dansō culture.” One example this article explores are dansō café-and-bars—establi...

In 2014, ASTIGU – a Japanese pantyhose brand – launched ‘ashi wa, kao’ (legs are face), a new series of advertisements featuring a female model whose face is painted black. Although scholars have previously written on blackface and blackness in Japan, they have focused more on subcultural contexts and men’s instead of women’s experiences. Drawing o...

Anticipating the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, this article uses the triple axel jump, one of the most challenging moves in women’s figure skating, as a heuristic device to track representations of Japanese skaters Ito Midori and Asada Mao in the New York Times and Asahi Shimbun. Ito and Asada are two of only six women to have landed triple axels at interna...

In 2013, Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo/Pa ma bu zai jia became the first Singaporean film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Singapore during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the film portrays the lives of an ordinary middle-class family and their Filipino maid, Teresa. This article explores the affective ties to the ‘Singapore Story,’ an...

When the Japan women's soccer team, more affectionately dubbed "Nadeshiko Japan," emerged FIFA World Cup champions in 2011, its members became celebrities overnight. However, central to their celebrityhood is the media's obsession with "femininity." Through constructing sport celebrities, or tarento ("talents"), I argue that the Japanese media shif...