The worst kinds of escapes are those that turn out to be traps. When people leave dangerous situations, or voice their frustration and try to improve things, power structures might very well reassert themselves. Generations of scholars have described these dynamics, from Paul Willis writing about the reproduction of social class in England to Yuko Ogasawara narrating how office ladies inadvertently reinforced misogynistic stereotypes in their efforts to push back against abusive supervisors. Posing such questions about Japan's gendered labor market, Gabriella Lukács's stunning new book, Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy, examines online spaces that promise opportunities for women in particular.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Japanese digital economies seemed to offer possibilities for recognition, wealth, and creative expression for women who had been marginalized by the gendered norms of the labor market. Becoming a net idol, writing a blog, or publishing a cell phone novel all seem like paths to success for anyone willing to put in the necessary hours. Through rich ethnography across multiple contexts, Lukács delineates the invisible affective labor required in the digital economy and, ultimately, the dead ends that such opportunities become for many women. Moreover, she convincingly argues that these digital platforms justify and reinforce deregulation that reduces steady employment opportunities for everyone.
Chapter 1, “Disidentifications,” examines the work of, and social commentary about, young women photographers who grew popular in the early 2000s and used digital cameras to capture domestic, familial, or deeply personal images. Critics labeled their creations “girlie” photographs (onna no ko shashin) and suggested that such images were the result of emotional instincts rather than true artistic talent. Drawing from their published reflections, her own interviews with the artists, and analysis of their photographs, Lukács argues instead that these are powerful works of disidentification, namely, attempts to change cultural logics without either loud refusal or quiet assimilation. For instance, in Ume Kayo's photograph of her grandfather playfully holding a magnifying glass up to his face so that his smile is unnaturally large, Lukács suggests a possible challenge to patriarchal family norms, a cheerful intergenerational relationship that sidelines the nuclear family. Lukács argues that more than dismissing this art as narcissistically childish, critics mistakenly highlight feminized affective labor rather than the intellectual labor actually necessary. In this, Lukács brilliantly identifies invisible labor and the dynamics that construct such invisibility in the first place.
Chapter 2, “The Labor of Cute,” explores the labor required to be a “net idol,” an online, aspirational celebrity akin to the contemporary “influencer” category. Staring in the late 1990s, and buoyed by the increasing availability of high-speed internet, net idols were young women who posted self-portraits and diaries online. Attracting and retaining fans required labor that was unremunerated and largely invisible; successful net idols responded to fans with personal messages and emails. Lukács convincingly argues that we should understand “cute” not only in the realm of play, as previous scholarships has, but also as extractive labor practices that seem like play. Noting the semiotic flexibility surrounding cute—almost anything can be cute, or made to be cute—helps us understand why it is so hard to see such processes as labor.
Chapter 3, “Career Porn,” analyzes blogging, which became popular after net idols waned. Booming from 2004 to 2006, bloggers wrote about how an online presence could create a personal brand that would, in turn, boost women's career opportunities. As Lukács expertly narrates, many blogs sold advice on how to create a blog and how blogs would help the author reach her goals. As Lukács sums up, “Bloggers propose that blogging can be monetized by writing blog tutorials and holding seminars about blogging” (p. 89). Although male bloggers were more likely to become recognized experts able to earn money from their online work, blogging was, overall, a women's activity. And it was a pyramid scheme facilitated by women's very real inability to find meaningful work for a livable wage, while (male) internet entrepreneurs profited by selling blogging platforms. Arguing for self-branding through an online presence, bloggers were accepting labor precarity and deregulation as a new fact of life. In this neoliberal bargain, bloggers disparaged the corporate straightjacket required by regular employment in favor of the freedom and inevitable risk of irregular work.
Chapter 4, “Work without Sweating,” examines amateur online day trading, which boomed in the mid-2000s. Unlike professional traders, who are mostly men, amateur day trading was marketed to women as yet another opportunity created by the digital economy, as a path around the gender restrictions of the labor market. In fact, as Lukács makes clear, the legion of female amateurs reinforced the gendered binaries between professional/amateur and public/private. In contrast with the common rhetoric, amateur traders were rarely able to earn substantial income, let alone move into the professional ranks; like the bloggers described in the previous chapter, most of their earnings seemed to come from creating “how to” guides rather than trading itself. Financial risk was described as a normal, natural, and an inevitable fact of life, preferable to the rigid (or unavailable) opportunities for regular employment. Once again, the promise and possibility of freedom manifests for only a small minority of people, while all responsibility for failure becomes personal.
In chapter 5, “Dreamwork,” Lukács turns to cell phone novels, works of fiction supposedly written on cell phones and published so that they could easily be read on phones as well. Written with vocabulary and grammar below the high school average, the stories are melodramas featuring romance, trauma, sexual violence, and death. For instance, the first famous cell phone novel, Deep Love, serialized beginning in 2000 and published as a book in 2002, “told the story of a teenager who contracted AIDS in the course of sex work, which she turned to so she could pay for her boyfriend's heart surgery” (p. 135). Unlike that novel, most are written by young women from lower-middle-class or working-class backgrounds and living in rural Japan. This genre falls into the general pattern outlined in earlier chapters: digital labor promises new possibilities for young women excluded from regular labor but ultimately creates wealth for only a select few, including those (older men) who own the digital platforms.
Invisibility by Design is both compelling and frustrating to read because the rich examples and textured analysis describe an exploitative system that many imagine to offer real possibility. Although the dynamics described within it focus on Japan, this book will be of interest to scholars working in many fields, including gender studies, labor, and communications.
