Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. xi, 236 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0648-0.
In this finely crafted ethnographic study, Gabriella Lukács analyzes gender and labour inequality in post-1990 Japan through the lens of young women’s participation in the digital economy. Through in-depth case studies of “girly” photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists, Lukács deftly demonstrates how online platforms betray their potential as forums for the self-actualization and employment security of women by exploiting women contributors for profit and in ways that reinforce and repurpose gendered divisions of labour and inequality in the broader Japanese economy. Along the way, Lukács offers a ringing critique of neoliberalism during the decades bracketing the turn of the twenty-first century, as well as poignant insights into Japan’s popular culture and shifting social relationships.
Key to Lukács’s neoliberal critique is her analysis of labour in the new, digital economy. The rise of the digital economy, she argues, was rooted not just in the invention of the cell phone, the Internet, and other digital technologies, and the deregulation of corporate and labour markets, but also in the exploitation of women’s labour. Young women in the digital world provide mostly unpaid content to male-dominated online platforms and are given few opportunities to transfer that content into commercialized products; those platforms, for their own part, manipulate women’s contributions to attract lucrative advertising and build mutually beneficial partnerships with other powerful players. In these contexts, labour differs markedly from its more traditional economic form during the industrial era, when workers exerted sustained efforts to produce some conventionally marketable service or physical product for an employer. Drawing from the work of Marxist scholars, Lukács makes the case that labour in the digital world is also intellectual, phatic, emotional, interpretive, and especially affective. It is feminized affective labour, she argues—the investment of a woman’s unique personality traits—that provides much of the raw material for profit making in digital contexts. Since that labour goes uncompensated, however, it is rendered invisible. The digital economy is thus a duplicitous site: one that entices young women into its folds with promises of “do it yourself (DIY) careers” and the “good life,” only to exploit those women for the sake of its own long-term profitability and reproduction.
Invisibility by Design also does an excellent job of identifying and analyzing the myriad historical and socio-economic drivers behind the digital economy and its contributions to—rather than alleviation of—employment precarity. In so doing, the volume illuminates the complementaries between different sectors of the economy, both past and present. The digital economy is what it is, Lukács argues, in large part because of the gender inequality inherent in the “conventional labor market (160),” for it was precisely because they had been relegated for so long to low-paying, irregular positions that women were attracted to the promise of potential employment autonomy within the digital economy. Meanwhile, women’s pursuit of greater economic returns in the digital world simply reinforced employment insecurity in the conventional economy by alleviating pressures on employers to provide their employees—men and women—with better wages and more job security. In these ways, Lukács argues, the exploitation of women in the digital economy helps prop up the economic status quo in much the same way that unpaid housewives and low-paid office ladies served and lowered the costs of lifetime employment during the high growth era.
Lukács also takes a deep dive into the meaning and significance of the digital world’s complex cultural content. She illustrates how net idols during the 1990s and early 2000s embraced the familiar tropes of vulnerability and cuteness (kawaii) in their cultural product, how women online traders portrayed their work in online tutorials and other self-help resources as opportunities to supplement their husband’s income and did little to contest depictions of themselves as “amateurs,” and how the majority of Japan’s legions of cell phone novelists embraced traditional themes of women as wives, girlfriends, daughters, and victims. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that these women were voluntarily conforming to the norms of traditional society and popular culture. Examples abound of online cultural product that subtly—and sometimes violently—poked fun at or questioned prevailing norms and stereotypes. More to the point, male-dominated Internet platforms often gave women no choice but to play to those norms, in part by carefully orchestrating the social relationships between those women participants and their audiences. In one of the book’s crowning ironies, Lukács shows us how Internet providers increased advertising revenue by democratizing many of these genres. Net idols were urged to grow their audiences by establishing individualized relationships with fans (a highly time-consuming task). Cell phone novelists had little choice but to develop their plots through systematized, online consultations with their readers. Of course, the bigger the audience, the greater the consumption of online advertising.
Lukács’s careful exploration of the rich theoretical and internationally comparative foundations of her story makes Invisibility by Design a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections between the digital economy, gender, and employment precarity in an increasingly globalized world. Her attention to the historical context and relevant literatures—both English and Japanese—is likely to appeal to a broadly interdisciplinary Japan Studies audience. Some social scientists may question the volume’s expansive conceptualization of labour and progressive critiques of neoliberal economics, but this political scientist would counter that we have much to gain from innovative explorations of how and why freer markets leave so many of society’s most vulnerable citizens behind.
Patricia Maclachlan
University of Texas, Austin