Gender NormsBooks

Starting from the Limit is a correspondence dialogue between Japanese feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno and former AV actress and writer Suzumi Suzuki. Two generations of women engage in candid dialogue on topics including body, sexuality, work, love, and mother-daughter relationships, presenting the collision and conversation between feminist thought and the lived reality of young women.

Angela Chen uses asexual people’s accounts to question sexual attraction as a measure of adulthood, love and normality, reframing freedom through refusal and relationship differences.

Convenience Store Woman is an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel by Japanese author Sayaka Murata. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, is a 36-year-old woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years and has no interest in society's expectations for women - marriage, children, a 'real' career. With dark humor, the novel sharply questions society's definition of 'normal' and its oppression of women who don't conform.

Training for a bout at Madison Square Garden, Thomas Page McBee asks how violence, privilege, vulnerability, and care are made into masculinity.

Cho Nam-joo traces Kim Jiyoung’s life from childhood to motherhood, showing how gender bias accumulates across family, education, work, and care while testing the limits of a case-file narrative.

A source-informed reading of NHK's reporting on poverty in Japan: how education debt, insecure work and childcare constraints can compound, without treating selected interviews as population statistics.

Ho and Tsang use Hong Kong experiences to question expert authority, sexual hierarchies and research language, treating everyday accounts of desire as knowledge.

Misogyny is a major work by Japanese sociologist and feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno. The book deeply analyzes the pervasive phenomenon of misogyny in Japanese society, revealing how it exists in various hidden forms within families, workplaces, romantic relationships, and even within women's own consciousness. It is essential reading for understanding the mechanisms of misogyny in East Asian patriarchal societies.

This groundbreaking book introduces the concept of 'emotional labor' through an examination of how service workers, particularly flight attendants, are required to manage their emotions as part of their job. Hochschild explores how capitalism commercializes human feelings and the gendered implications of emotional work in the modern economy.