[Commlist] New book: Invisibility by Design

*Invisibility by Design***

Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy

*Gabriella Lukács***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478006480/invisibility-by-design/_*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLS2020*

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online 
content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan 
as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the 
chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered 
Japan’s digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net 
idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some 
women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most 
did not. In /Invisibility by Design/ Gabriella Lukács traces how these 
women’s unpaid labor became the engine of Japan’s digital economy. 
Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in 
the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid 
labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing 
workers, thereby rendering women’s labor invisible. By drawing out the 
ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective 
labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more 
democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production.

*Gabriella Lukács*is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the 
University of Pittsburgh and author of /Scripted Affects, Branded 
Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan/, also 
published by Duke University Press.


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