Involuntary Consent: Contract Making in Japan’s Adult Video Industry

• Autores: Akiko Takeyama
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 6, 2023, págs. 621-639
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Building on feminist debates of sexual labor, anthropological studies of contracts, and critical approaches to liberalism, this article pries open the sociolegal ambiguity of involuntary consent to examine contract making in Japan’s adult video (AV) industry. While the dominant knowledge production surrounding “forced performance” in AV has cast it as a political issue of violence against women, the assumption that the victims are young, naive women has left the experience of the majority of female sex workers—who have given consent—unaddressed. On the basis of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2015 through 2018, I demonstrate how AV performers, once they give consent, end up binding themselves to contractual terms no matter how uncertain they may feel while signing contracts. Nevertheless, the juridical assumptions underlying such contract negotiations acknowledge neither the temporospatial complexities of pre- and extracontractual contexts nor the structural vulnerabilities of the socioeconomically marginalized. I argue that the contract, which is based on a bourgeois, masculinist premise of individual autonomy, free choice, and equality, renders structural violence invisible while enabling the powerful to exploit others legally. I call for anthropological studies of contract making to reveal the inner workings of liberal assumptions that uphold the have-not’s submission by choice.