SOSS Seminar | Marriage-hunting: Markets, Morals, and Marriageability in Japan

Marriage-hunting: Markets, Morals, and Marriageability in Japan

Whereas sociologists tend to conceptualize the “marriage market” as a pool of individuals searching for a partner, emergent dating platforms turn these social arenas into genuine “markets” in the economic sense. This talk examines the role of market intermediaries in the Japanese “marriage-hunting” industry —a new dating economy focused squarely on marriage. Given that marriage is widely considered a precondition for reproduction in Japan, the national government has supported marriage-hunting to address the country’s unfolding demographic crisis. Through an ethnographic study of the “marriage-hunting” market, including nearly 130 interviews with market professionals and their clients, participant observation in marriage-hunting events, and archival research, I demonstrate the different modes of mediation through which intermediaries cater to clients unevenly versed in market rules and how these different degrees of mediation correspond to perceptions of social desirability. I show how by acclimating market participants to different types of interactions, intermediaries have the potential to contribute to market stratification.

SPEAKER

Anna Woźny

Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan

Anna Woźny is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. She received her MA in Sociology from the University of Michigan and her BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Tokyo. She also completed two years of coursework in Japanese Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Poland, where she’s from originally. Her research concerns cultural processes reproducing social inequality around gender, sexuality, and class. Her doctoral dissertation examines how market and state institutions shape intimate relationships in the new Japanese dating industry known as “marriage-hunting.” Her sole-authored and collaborative research has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology. It has received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association and departments of Sociology, Gender Studies, and Japanese studies at the University of Michigan.

MODERATOR

Forrest Zhang

Associate Professor of Sociology, SMU
Associate Dean (Research)

Qian Forrest Zhang joined Singapore Management University in 2005 after obtaining a PhD in sociology from Yale University. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Associate Dean for Research at the School of Social Sciences. His research focuses on China’s agrarian political economy and rural development but extends to a range of other issues in contemporary China, including self-employment, stratification and inequality, social mobility, and family relations. His recent works have investigated agricultural cooperatives, industrial pig farming, the agrarian capitalist class, and land politics. He is the recipient of the 2015 Bernstein & Byres Prize in agrarian change.

Remarks: Due to limited seats, registration is on a first come first served basis.