Biography
Dr. Nana Okura Gagné is Associate Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an anthropologist whose research explores how global capitalism impinges upon local ideologies and existing social relations, including gender relations, family relations, and socio-economic (class) relations in Japan and the USA.
Her current projects focus on 1) an ethnographic study of new formations of family and infertility in Japan with a focus on the experiences of women and men pursuing fertility treatments, including heterosexual couples who are navigating work and intimate lives and non-heteronormative couples who are navigating biological, social and legal constraints to create families, and 2) an ethnographic study on “overwork” and “work-and-life balance” to explore how the private spheres of working men and women are affected by the increasing neoliberalization of the Japanese economy.
She is the author of Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism Japan (Cornell University Press, 2020), and she has published in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Ethnography, Journal of Contemporary Asia, etc.
Publications
Book & Book Chapters
• Gagné Okura, N. (2020) Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism. Cornell University Press.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2017) Neoliberal Ideology and Shifting Salarymen Identities under Corporate Restructuring in Japan. In Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities, edited by Jonathon Louth. University of Chester Press.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2016) Feeling like a ‘Man’: Managing Gender, Sexuality, and Corporate Life in After-Hours Tokyo. In Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, edited by Tiantian Zheng. University of Hawaii Press.
Referred Journal Articles
• Gagné Okura, N. (2020) From Employment Security to Managerial Precarity: Japan’s Changing Welfare-Work Nexus and its Impacts on Mid-Career Workers. Pacific Affairs, 93(2): 379-400.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2019) Neoliberalism at Work: Corporate Reforms, Subjectivity, and Post-Toyotist Affect in Japan. Anthropological Theory, 20 (4):455-483.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2018) “Correcting Capitalism”: Changing Metrics and Meanings of Work among Japanese Employees. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 48(1): 67-87.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2014) Romance and Sexuality in Japanese Latin Dance Clubs. Ethnography, 15(4): 446-468.
• Gagné Okura, N. (2011) Eating Local in a U.S. City: Reconstructing “Community” —a Third Place— in a Global Neoliberal Economy. American Ethnologist, 38(2): 281-293.
