What is affect, and what is its relation to emotion? While some scholars distinguish affect from emotion in theory, others discuss the two in tandem because they are difficult to separate in practice. Broadly defined, the affect-emotion split refers to affect as unstructured, un-predetermined, and outside of conscious thought, whereas emotion, which is socially structured and culturally embodied, loosely expresses how we feel when affect is triggered. Emotion is a person’s awareness that affect has been triggered.[1] For instance, in response to a shrill cry, we blink with raised eyebrows and widened eyes before looking for its source and, upon recognizing it, become aware of our emotions. However, thinking about affect and emotion as polarized ends limits our understanding of how people experience the two in relation to each other in everyday life. In people’s lived experiences, affects are embodied and animated by ordinary occurrences (Stewart 2007, 3). Since affects and emotions are constantly in play, placing them on a continuum allows us to negotiate them as transitional instead of temporal (Ngai 2005, 27).[2] Being unbound, affect may bleed into emotion. When we name this emotion and assign subjective meanings to it based on our knowledge, we come across a reduced affective experience instead of a complete one (Gould 2009, 21–22). Emotion may also slide sideways, forwards, and backward into affect. For the purposes of this chapter, approaching affect and emotion as a nonpolarized continuum focuses our attention on what affect and emotion do instead of what they are. “Thinking affect,” or thinking “nondualistically,” makes us more attuned to the gaps and silences in our surroundings without first according them subjective meanings (Mazzarella 2009, 291; Sedgwick 2003, 1).
Led by North American scholars in the mid-1990s, the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences generated shifts in critical thinking and renewed interest in affect as an analytic tool (Clough and Halley 1997). Although the turn to affect is often attributed to two essays influenced by Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze respectively—Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect”—it might be more accurate to say there are multitudinous approaches to affect (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 5–6). Tomkinsian scholars emphasize affect as a material vitality or corporeal force (Sedgwick 2003; Sedgwick and Frank 1995). Derived from biology, what Tomkins calls the “affect system”[3] is a sensory feedback mechanism stimulating bodily action through affects, which are innate but not localized in the human body (2008, 12). Deleuzian scholars, on the other hand, stress the relation of affect to social structures and inequalities (Massumi 2002; Mazzarella 2009). Drawing on philosophy, specifically Spinozist thought, Deleuze situates affects in the relations between the human and nonhuman,[4] particularly encounters between bodies and objects, which we can only partially experience (1988, 20).[5] Rather than limiting affect theory to these two strands that reinforce the affect-emotion split, as discussed earlier, scholars have explored ways to negotiate affect and emotion across a nonpolarized continuum, especially in a transnational context (Ahmed 2004; Gould 2009; Ngai 2005).[6]
There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture.
—Brian Masumi
An emergent body of scholarship tracks affect and emotion in East Asia (Yang 2014), especially concerning sexually marginalized subjectivities (Leung 2007; Rofel 2007; Wong 2013; Yue 2012). Aside from cultural and language translation,[7] scholars trying to map contemporary theories of affect onto East Asian contexts face the difficulty of reconciling them with previous literature in East Asia concerned with emotion.[8] By documenting what affects and emotions do for East Asian people in their everyday lived experiences, scholars tend to approach affect as sliding into emotion and vice versa. In the Japanese context, anthropological research has focused on precarity[9] (Allison 2013), happiness (Manzenreiter and Holthus 2017), and affective labor[10] (Galbraith 2013; Lukács 2013; Plourde 2014; Takeyama 2016). Studies on Japanese media have emphasized the production of affect in postwar cinema, especially women’s affective experiences (Saito 2003; Coates 2016), and the television industry’s capitalization of affect and emotion to provide entertainment for (female) audiences (Lukács 2010; White 2014), frequently blurring the boundaries between affect and emotion. The rest of this chapter adds to this conversation by situating affect and emotion in Japanese media culture and discussing a range of audiences’ affective and emotional attachments to LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) celebrities through a case study of the transgender tarento Nishihara Satsuki.
While still relatively underexplored, affect and emotion have been located in consumer desire, fan culture, celebrity identification, and media intimacy. Audiences actively consume and interpret a certain celebrity as their object of desire, and as they transition from consumer to fan, media intimacy increases. In Japanese media, the tarento (talent)[11] system drives and sustains an intimate relationship between celebrity and audience by repetitively circulating images of tarento on television until viewers are able to identify and consume them intertextually across multiple platforms (Lukács 2010, 54). This intensified relationship between fan and fan object—what Lawrence Grossberg calls the “affective sensibility of fandom”—operates through affect and produces ideology and pleasure for fans (1992, 55). Grossberg characterizes affect as the “feeling of life,” or the way certain investments make us feel alive and willing to maintain them (ibid., 56–57). Although Grossberg means to distinguish affect from emotion, an affective sensibility maps affect and emotion onto a spectrum where fans navigate the sliding of affect into emotion and vice versa.[12] Indeed, how fans feel toward their objects of attachment vary from fan to fan and differ from the sentiments they share with other fans, be they fellow cosplayers[13] or online fans (Hills 2001; Lamerichs 2014). Furthermore, fans’ affective investments potentially empower them differently, such as proffering energy, passion, and optimism to differentiate themselves in an everyday life surrounded by commercial media culture and constructing a stable identity through control over an area of their lives, especially one that generates new pleasures and desires (Grossberg 1992, 64–65).
Thinking of affect and emotion in Japanese media culture as a spectrum helps us understand how LGBT people in Japan might make sense of their gender identities and sexual orientations through their attachments to transgender celebrities.[14] While transgender celebrities are certainly not new to the Japanese media, their numbers have exponentially increased in the last decade. Where gay and transgender celebrities were (and still are) made or encouraged to perform their nonnormative ways as spectacle, many artists and idol[15] groups are now choosing to present themselves as openly transgender, some with the objective of enacting social change. One of the most popular transgender celebrities in Japan is male-to-female (MtF) singer and tarento Haruna Ai, who paved the way for younger celebrities to be open about their own gender identities. In the 1990s, Haruna underwent sex reassignment surgery (SRS) and debuted as a “new half.”[16] Today, she appears regularly in the Japanese media, serving as a host and commentator on various television programs, such as Sukkiri!! and Hapikuruu!.
Another example is MtF singer Nakamura Ataru, who debuted in 2006 and came out a few months later in a news article covering her role in a television drama[17] as a male-assigned singer-songwriter struggling with Gender Identity Disorder (sei dōitsusei shōgai; hereafter GID).[18] Similarly, MtF model and tarento Sato Kayo, who began her career in 2008, publicly disclosed in a television program two years later that she was biologically a man suffering from GID.[19] On the one hand, the growing presence of transgender celebrities in mainstream media encourages LGBT audiences to identify with the difficulties they face and exposes these issues for non-LGBT audiences. On the other hand, all three narratives align with stereotypical media representations of transgender individuals as contained within medical discourses, portraying them as “sick” subjects and reinforcing gender binaries of “male” and “female” (Mackie 2008; McLelland 2004; Yuen 2011).
In 2010 and 2012, the rise of female-to-male (FtM) idol groups Girls to Men (GtM) and Secret Guyz respectively marked the beginning of an era previously dominated by MtF celebrities in the Japanese media. While MtF individuals are more visible (even as spectacle) and more likely to be accepted and gain success in the media, FtM people are largely absent and have typically less support from LGBT and non-LGBT audiences alike. Claiming to be the first transgender idol group in Japan, GtM aimed to raise awareness of GID and LGBT people only to disband for unannounced reasons one year after their debut. Armed with similar goals to promote recognition of FtM people, Secret Guyz succeeded where GtM failed and continues to thrive as role models for FtM fans. Indeed, Secret Guyz’s live performances underscore their everyday encounters as transgender people instead of pathologizing their celebrity. Through their fandom and consumption of such idols, we might ask how affect and emotion shape LGBT individuals’ desires, practices, and subjectivities.
Nishihara Satsuki, more commonly known as Satsuki, is a MtF transgender tarento, model, and writer who first rose to fame in the blogosphere when they candidly blogged about their own experience of undergoing SRS in 2013.[21] Assigned male at birth, Satsuki felt out of place about their gender identity throughout their childhood and adolescence. Satsuki started taking feminizing hormones at sixteen and began living as a woman when they entered university. Upon graduation, Satsuki was hired as a female employee—“office lady”—in the advertising industry. After changing their official name in the family registry in 2012, Satsuki decided to undergo SRS in Thailand a year later. Written under the handle and stage name “Satsuki,” or sometimes “Satsukipon,” Satsuki’s blog quickly garnered a large online following and even became known internationally, despite being entirely in Japanese.[22]
In their comments on Satsuki’s blog, many readers came out variously as MtF, having GID, considering SRS, or being uncertain about their gender identity.[23] As these responses and media coverage demonstrate, Satsuki inspires those who are interested in transitioning (Hātonetto TV 2016; Satsuki 2013b). Affects and emotions often slide into each other in these interactions between Satsuki and their affective following, shaping the way fans, especially LGBT individuals, identify with Satsuki and come to terms with their own identities. For instance, many readers confessed that they felt encouraged and less worried about transitioning after reading Satsuki’s blog, expressing their gratitude, support, and perseverance.[24] Affect bleeds into emotion as readers try to articulate how they feel and make sense of their condition based on accessing Satsuki’s thoughts and feelings. What initially began as a personal record of Satsuki’s journey through SRS, now offers readers the strength and courage to be different in a heteronormative society. By being outspoken about their own experience, Satsuki intends for their blog to benefit GID-identified[25] individuals who seek advice on transitioning and wish to undergo SRS (Satsuki 2013d).
Granted, not all of Satsuki’s readers wish to transition; some may be transgender allies or are simply curious about GID. Other than worry and encouragement, readers expressed surprise over the risks of SRS and wrote about shedding tears while vicariously encountering Satsuki’s ordeals.[26] Emotion slides into affect and back into emotion as their concern for Satsuki turns into a visceral reaction of crying, and subsequently a sense of empathy, for transgender-identified individuals. Perhaps this bleeding of affect and emotion into each other is unsurprising given Satsuki’s explicit entries about undergoing SRS, detailing everything from their initial fears, surgery options, extreme pain from recovery, and vaginal dilation, to excitement from obtaining their “new” body. Satsuki refuses to censor or gloss over these harsh conditions, lamenting rose-tinted media representations of SRS and the severe lack of public information on transitioning in Japan (Satsuki 2013d). In fact, this and positive fan responses motivate Satsuki to continue documenting their thoughts and feelings on what has become a virtual learning space on GID and SRS.[27]
Satsuki’s celebrity status is inextricably tied to their first blog,[28] having only debuted as a model and tarento following its success, their recovery from surgery, and relocation to Tokyo. Subsequently, Satsuki started to appear in the media and at events, many of which support sexual minorities, as an openly transgender woman and LGBT-rights activist. While media attention on LGBT has certainly increased in Japan, especially with more celebrities coming out in the last five to ten years, Satsuki remains wary about it being merely a fad (Hātonetto TV 2016; Satsuki Nishihara, interview by author, May 10, 2017). Indeed, greater visibility of gay and transgender celebrities and discussion of LGBT issues in the media do not necessarily equal social change. Yet, to LGBT fans, celebrities such as Satsuki remain important role models, whereas for non-LGBT audiences, their growing presence opens up new (and old) dialogues on sexual minorities. As this case study of Satsuki shows, in their consumption of transgender celebrities, fans experience a range of affects and emotions that are often difficult to separate from one another. On the contrary, I would argue that approaching affect and emotion in relation to each other is productive for thinking about what such attachments mean to and do for LGBT individuals. Particularly in the context of Japanese media culture, a nonpolarized affect-emotion continuum offers the potential of coming into contact with preformed or ambiguously gendered and sexually diverse desires, practices, and subjectivities, which may or may not fit within the confines of LGBT identity.
Notes
- That is, we cannot know the stimulus triggering affect until affect has already been triggered, and by the time we become aware of this, it has become “emotion.” ↑
- In a temporal relationship between affect and emotion, affect precedes emotion and converts into a fixed emotion. ↑
- Unlike Sigmund Freud, who subordinates affect to the libidinal drive, Tomkins considers the affect system more complex than the drive system, another physiological mechanism motivated by affects. However, while the drive system localizes affects in the body, those of the affect system are difficult to trace. The affect system can also generate more affect and be shaped by prior learning and experience (Tomkins 2008, 12–13). ↑
- For Deleuze and Guattari, affects are “nonhuman becomings,” arriving before our awareness of where one thing ends and another begins (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 169). ↑
- Encounters between bodies and objects may result in integration to form superior composites or disintegration into lesser components. Since we only become conscious of these encounters in the middle of things or after they have occurred, we are always in a state of partially experiencing what happens (Deleuze 1988, 19–21). ↑
- Ahmed has argued that establishing the domain of affect with Tomkins and Deleuze, two white, male, Euro-American intellectuals, invites biases in scholarship instead of encouraging different launching and departing points for studying affects and emotions (2014, xxi). ↑
- Some examples include kandō (to be moved) and kanjō (emotion or feeling) in Japanese and han (the affective state of suppressed anger) in Korean (Coates 2016, 13; Min 2014, 200–201). ↑
- Such literature often inclines toward cultural essentialism, or the belief that one affirms and defines their culture or group through a fixed set of shared attributes. One example in the Japanese context is Nihonjinron (theories about the Japanese), a body of discourse promoting “Japanese” cultural identity as unique by privileging particular “Japanese” feelings or emotions (Coates 2016, 13). ↑
- Precarity refers to the specific state of having economic instability, job insecurity, and unpredictable living conditions (Allison 2013, 66). ↑
- Affective labor, a form of “immaterial labor,” is labor that assembles or shapes affects, such as “ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 108). Examples of affective labor documented in the Japanese context include maid cafés, cat cafés, and host clubs. ↑
- Tarento is one category of celebrities in Japan, who, despite the moniker, have no special talent and appeal to audiences by being ordinary (Lukács 2010, 46). ↑
- This resembles what Grossberg calls “mattering maps,” which locate and chart the trajectory of fans’ investments as well as the affects, emotions, and meanings that emerge from them (1992, 57). ↑
- Cosplay is short for “costume play,” and a cosplayer refers to a person who dresses as a fictional character from a favorite anime (Japanese animation) or manga (Japanese comics). ↑
- Transgender celebrities refer to individuals who have begun transitioning but may or may not have undergone sex reassignment surgery (SRS). In Japan, the Gender Identity Disorder (GID) Act, implemented in 2003, allows individuals medically diagnosed with GID to legally change their gender in the family registry after fulfilling many conditions, such as being over twenty years old, unmarried, having undergone “full” SRS, and having no existing or future children (Taniguchi 2013, 109). ↑
- “Idol” is a term that has specific resonances in Japan. Although idol culture coincides with celebrity culture, desire and consumption are much more highly amplified (Galbraith and Karlin 2012, 2). ↑
- While “new half,” wasei eigo (loan word from the English language), is often translated as “transgender woman,” in Japan, it refers more specifically to individuals who live as women and who work in night entertainment and sex-related businesses. ↑
- In Watashi ga watashi de arutameni (In order to be myself), a two-hour drama broadcast by Nippon Television (NTV), the troubles of Nakamura’s character, who befriends the main protagonist, an MtF college student, mirror her own life. For an analysis of the drama, see Mackie 2008. ↑
- Generally, an individual with GID refers to someone who believes they belong to the opposite biological sex and has been diagnosed by two or more doctors with GID (Taniguchi 2013, 109). ↑
- Denying any claims of undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS), Sato bared her body in seminude images when she released her first photo essay in 2012, aptly titled “Re-born” in English. ↑
- Satsuki’s preferred pronoun is “they” (Satsuki Nishihara, interview by author, May 10, 2017). ↑
- Satsuki started their blog on March 16, 2013, shortly before undergoing SRS on March 27. At its height, the blog reached third place on the ameburo (Ameba blog) ranking on April 13 and second place, after Wikipedia, in a Google search for SRS on August 15 in the same year (Satsuki 2013a, 2013c). ↑
- Many readers referred to themselves as similar to Satsuki (onaji GID-san); one even called themself “Satsuki’s junior” (kōhai) in undergoing SRS (Satsuki 2013c). Other readers appear to be still figuring things out and refer to their condition as feeling “distressed” (kurushii) or incongruous about their gender identity (seibetsu ni iwakan ga aru) (ibid.). ↑
- Readers express the term for “perseverance” in different forms, such as “I will work hard” (ganbarimasu), “Keep going!” (ganbattekudasai), and “Let’s persevere together” (otagai ganbarimashō) (Satsuki 2013b, 2013c, 2013d). ↑
- Although GID is also a medical diagnosis, as explained in an earlier footnote, unlike in the United States, it is acceptable in Japan for individuals to self-identify as GID. On the contrary, many individuals may prefer to identify as “GID” instead of “transgender” because they are more familiar or comfortable with the term. ↑
- For instance, one reader, Akina, wrote, “Tears flowed out” (namida ga deteshimaimashita), whereas another reader, Mikan, noted that “tears just couldn’t stop flowing” (namida ga tomarimasendeshita), and Dachiken, a salaryman, wrote “Tears flowed out many times” (nandomo namida ga detekimashita) (Satsuki 2013b, 2013c, 2013d). ↑
- This would later pave the way for Satsuki’s celebrity activism on Twitter and at LGBT-related events. Satsuki describes fans as “dear to me” (daiji) and their number one “driving force” (gendōryoku) (Satsuki Nishihara, interview by author, May 10, 2017). ↑
- Satsuki started a new blog after their debut under “Satsukipon.” For the purposes of this chapter, I have drawn upon Satsuki’s first blog unless otherwise stated (Satsukipon 2014abcd). ↑
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “Foreword: Starting and Startling.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, xx–xxiii. New York: Routledge.
Allison, Anne. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Coates, Jennifer. 2016. Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Clough, Patricia, and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Galbraith, Patrick W. 2013. “Maid Cafés: The Affect of Fictional Characters in Akihabara, Japan.” Asian Anthropology 12, no. 2: 104–25.
Galbraith, Patrick W., and Jason G. Karlin. 2012. “Introduction: The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity.” In Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture, edited by Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, 1–32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. “Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 50–65. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.
Hātonetto TV [Heartnet TV]. 2016. “Ikizurainara kaechaeba? toransujendâ Satsuki” [If it’s hard to live, why don’t you change it? Transgender Satsuki]. Produced by Hayashi Atsushi. Narrated by Chiko. Performed by AI and Kazama Shunsuke. NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai).
Hills, Matthew. 2001. “Virtually Out There: Strategies, Tactics and Affective Spaces in On-line Fandom.” In Technospaces: Inside the New Media, edited by Sally R. Munt, 147–60. New York: Continuum.
Lamerichs, Nicolle. 2014. Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures. Maastricht, the Netherlands: Maastricht University Press.
Leung, Helen Hok‐Sze. 2007. “Archiving Queer Feelings in Hong Kong.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 4: 559–71.
Lukács, Gabriella. 2010. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lukács, Gabriella. 2013. “Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Labor, and Politics in Contemporary Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 1: 44–64.
Mackie, Vera. 2008. “How to Be a Girl: Mainstream Media Portrayals of Transgendered Lives in Japan.” Asian Studies Review 32, no. 3: 411–23.
Manzenreiter, Wolfram, and Barbara Holthus, eds. 2017. Happiness and the Good Life in Japan. New York: Routledge.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mazzarella, William. 2009. “Affect: What is it Good for?” In Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube, 291–309. New York: Routledge.
McLelland, Mark J. 2004. “From the Stage to the Clinic: Changing Transgender Identities in Post-War Japan.” Japan Forum 16, no. 1: 1–20.
Min, Sung Kil. 2014. “The Politics of Haan: Affect and the Domestication of Anger in South Korea.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 198–218. New York: Routledge.
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plourde, Lorraine. 2014. “Cat Cafes, Affective Labor, and the Healing Boom in Japan.” Japanese Studies 34, no. 2: 115–33.
Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Saito Ayako. 2003. “Orchestration of Tears: The Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere.” Senses of Cinema, no. 28 (October). Accessed October 28, 2016. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/orchestration_of_tears/.
Satsukipon. 2013a. “Jutsugo 17kame 1—tai no oshôgatsu” [Day 17 after surgery one: Thailand’s new year]. Satsukipon no seibetsutekigôshujutsu—taikendan MtF tai dairêshon seitenkan [Satsukipon’s sex reassignment surgery: Talk about experience, MtF, Thailand, dilation, sex change] (blog), April 13, 2013. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://ameblo.jp/akipon23/entry-11510491671.html.
Satsukipon. 2013b. “Jutsugo 18kame 2—subete no hitoe no mesēji” [Day 18 after surgery two: Message to everyone]. Satsukipon no seibetsutekigôshujutsu—taikendan MtF tai dairêshon seitenkan [Satsukipon’s sex reassignment surgery: Talk about experience, MtF, Thailand, dilation, sex change] (blog), April 14, 2013. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://ameblo.jp/akipon23/entry-11511327663.html.
Satsukipon. 2013c. “Jutsugo 4kagetsu 19kame—Google kensaku nii ni narimashita” [4 Months and 19 days after surgery: Became number 2 on Google search]. Satsukipon no seibetsutekigôshujutsu—taikendan MtF tai dairêshon seitenkan [Satsukipon’s sex reassignment surgery: Talk about experience, MtF, Thailand, dilation, sex change] (blog), August 15, 2013. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://ameblo.jp/akipon23/entry-11593344921.html.
Satsukipon. 2013d. “Watashijishinto, yume ni tsuite—Googlekensaku nii ni narimashita” [About myself and my dream]. Satsukipon no seibetsutekigôshujutsu—taikendan MtF tai dairêshon seitenkan [Satsukipon’s sex reassignment surgery: Talk about experience, MtF, Thailand, dilation, sex change] (blog), December 19, 2013. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://ameblo.jp/akipon23/entry-11732516951.html.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Takeyama, Akiko. 2016. Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Taniguchi, Hiroyuki. 2013. “Japan’s 2003 Gender Identity Disorder Act: The Sex Reassignment Surgery, No Marriage, and No Child Requirements as Perpetuations of Gender Norms in Japan.” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 14, no. 2: 108–17.
Tomkins, Silvan S. 2008. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. New York: Springer.
White, Daniel. 2014. “Tears, Capital, Ethics: Television and the Public Sphere in Japan.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 99–115. New York: Routledge.
Wong, Lily. 2013. “Sinophone Erotohistories: The Shaw Brothers’ Queering of a Transforming ‘Chinese Dream’ in Ainu Fantasies.” In Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, 84–105. New York: Routledge.
Yang, Jie, ed. 2014. The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia. New York: Routledge.
Yue, Audrey. 2012. “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 1: 95–108.
Yuen, Shu Min. 2011. “Last Friends, Beyond Friends: Articulating Non-normative Gender and Sexuality on Mainstream Japanese Television.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, no. 3: 383–400.