Gabriella Lukacs

I am a media anthropologist whose research focuses on Japan and Hungary. I take a political-economic approach to my research on analog and digital media, but I also derive inspiration from theories of infrastructure to think about materiality beyond its Marxist conceptualization as economic structures that set events in motion. I am the author of three books. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan (Duke University Press 2010) analyzes how gender structures labor relations in the production of television programs and how these power relations shape the content of primetime entertainment in Japan. Invisibility by Design: Women and Work in Japan’s Digital Economy (Duke University Press 2020) examines how venture capitalists built the digital economy in Japan by harnessing young women’s pursuit of DIY careers. Finally, The Left of Hope: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary (forthcoming from Cornell University Press) investigates how women and LGBTQIA+ activists harness analog and digital media to fight illiberal authoritarianism, which was consolidated in Hungary based on gender-based exclusion. I am currently developing two new book projects about low-birth society in Japan and Hungary. The first is tentatively titled Techno-Utopian Responses to the End of Familial Productivism in Japan, while the second is entitled Family-Friendly Hungary: Grassroots Pronatalism and Reproductive Justice Activism.

Research Description

My first book, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan (Duke University Press, 2010), analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to developments in digital media technologies and concomitant market fragmentation. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, the book suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment (signification) to producing lifestyle-oriented programming (affect). It argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

 

Introduction is available here: 

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0648-0_601.pdf

I also edited a special issue for Positions: Asia Critique titled Youth, Labor, and Politics in East Asia that investigates youth unemployment and underemployment—a prominent effect of the deregulation of national economies during the 1990s and 2000s in the region. As opposed to understanding youth unemployment and underemployment as social anomalies, this volume analyzes these trends as the new faces of labor. The contributors ask what it means for youth to become part of the workforce in a context in which young people are encouraged to think about work as a source of fulfillment, while the employment available to them is increasingly precarious.  

My most recent book, The Left of Hope: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary, which is forthcoming from Cornell University Press, examines how Orbán Viktor’s Fidesz-KDNP government harnesses analog media to cement illiberalism in Hungary, and how the opposition engages digital media to fight illiberalism and rebuild the commons Orbán’s government enclosed or devastated. The manuscript documents how women and LGBTQIA+ activists have spearheaded anti-government activism in post-2010 Hungary, when the Fidesz-KDNP party coalition rose to power. The genres of media activism I analyze include: counter-billboard projects, which produce new political commons by calling out the government for its racist anti-immigration propaganda; street art, which gives visibility to the ways that social exclusion is infrastructurally reproduced; Internet memes, which enable women to enter the political domain and fight its patriarchal culture; independent theater, which fosters new cultural commons by reclaiming the category of “national culture” from an ethnonationalist government; and political podcasters, who innovate new models of community-funded media that also redefine the meaning of “public” in public service media. These case studies demonstrate that when one type of commons is produced, the idea of commoning is more easily transferred to other areas. In dialogue with materialist approaches to the commons, this manuscript develops the notion of commoning as a political strategy to build more inclusive communities in contexts in which far-right parties forge a sense of collectivity based on acts of exclusion.

I also started working on a fourth book project tentatively titled Techno-Utopian Responses to the End of Familial Productivism in Japan, which will theorize the end of what I conceptualize as familial productivism and investigate how the technology sector has responded to young people’s tendency to forgo marriage and childbirth in Japan. It investigates the technology sector (software and robotics developers) that design AI-driven smart-home devices (Gatebox), robotic companions (Aibo, Lovot), and dating apps for young people who live alone. What interests me in these case studies is the idea of social engineering via processes of capital accumulation. I will examine how the technology sector responds to demographic trends such as declining marriages and birthrates, and how technologists shape these trends by promoting their own technology-informed ideas about the future of Japan, its economy, and society.

 

My fifth book, Family-Friendly Hungary: Grassroots Pronatalism and Reproductive Justice Activism, project investigates the relationship between pronatalism and illiberalism in Hungary. It starts from the premise that pronatalism is not a top-down ideology that a government imposes on a defiant population. It examines support for and contestation of pronatalism at the grassroots level. Specifically, I will explore pro-life interest groups and gender conservatism among young Hungarians who would like to have more children than they can support. I will also interview young Hungarians who opt out of establishing families, and feminist NGOs that address the adverse effects of pronatalism.

Courses

Japanese Society

Undergraduate Lecture. This course introduces students to cultural practices and social institutions in postwar and contemporary Japan. It will give students a range of different exposures—using scholarly books, essays, and film to look at various conditions and aspects of Japanese culture and everyday life: high economic growth, middle class society, recession, social precarity, gender relations, education, consumer culture, and popular culture. We will examine discussions about the uniqueness and homogeneity of Japanese culture and ask what compels and shapes these ideas and how they are confirmed or contested in contemporary Japan. The special focus of this course is media culture (anime, otaku subculture, and Internet culture). We will discuss media culture in Japan and examine the reasons for its popularity abroad.

Gender and Globalization

Gender is a key structuring principle of difference and inequality in society, while globalization is a condition characterized by time-space compression and expanding connections across national boundaries. Globalization emerged out of such (and often violent) practices of contact as capitalism, colonialism, socialism, the Cold War, and neoliberalism. This course will explore the intersection of gender and globalization asking how gender shapes processes of globalization and how the role of gender is shifting as national regulatory systems no longer control what is “normative” in the contexts of gender roles and gendered division of labor. This course will examine various facets of the relationship between gender and globalization in such contexts as cross-border marriages, sex and colonialism, state violence, decoloniality, socialist welfare states, labor migration, the global sex industry, digital labor, and political activism that critically reflects on the role of globalization in intensifying gender discrimination both locally and globally.

Cybercultures

Undergraduate Seminar. In this course, we will draw on scholarly essays, journalism, documentaries, and TED lectures to discuss whether the architecture of the Internet is designed to foster more equitable communities, new opportunities to earn a living, freedom, and creativity. We will discuss various forms of hacking as key terrains where battles over the regulation of the Internet and struggles over intellectual property rights are waged. We will learn about surveillance capitalism, the platform economy, and data mining—a corporate practice that extracts value by transforming into data-commodities the traces we leave behind in cyberspace. By reading about entrepreneurial individuals who develop DIY careers in the digital economy and by considering how the Internet operates as an apparatus that captures unpaid labor, we will explore how digital technologies transform the world of work. To understand the ways in which digital media are conducive to the formation of new communities and the ways in which these communities enable individuals to improve their status in society, we will end the semester by discussing influencer culture.

Gender and Work in Cross-Cultural Perspective

This course inquires why we find it difficult to abandon deep-seated beliefs that men and women are not equally suited to pursue certain professions. We ask whether women belong in the army, the cockpits of airplanes and space shuttles, or whether men make good nurses and babysitters. In this course, we will read scholarly texts and watch documentary films to analyze the relationship between gender and work in various social contexts. We will ask how the realm of work operates as a site where gender differences and hierarchies are reinforced. We will examine how our beliefs about gender-appropriate occupational identities are culturally conditioned and how employers perpetuate gender biases in their hiring practices as they prioritize growth and profit over ideals of gender equity. We will read about flight attendants who were able to negotiate less sexist weight standards only in 1991, women in factories who are hired for their nimble fingers, sex workers, hostesses, hosts, and exotic dancers who are expected to perform gender at work. This class takes a cross-cultural perspective in analyzing the relationship between gender and work. We will ask how neoliberal globalization intersects with local gender divisions of labor in diverse social contexts.

Precarity and Politics

Graduate Seminar. Crisis seems to have become the normalized condition in which we live our lives and make sense of the world around us. Each new iteration of this condition, caused by financial meltdowns, wars, natural disasters, and recently the Covid-19 pandemic, further cement our perception that crisis has become permanent. This perception is further fueled by neoliberal globalization that builds on what Naomi Klein conceptualized as disaster capitalism. Governments that adopt neoliberal economic policies, Klein notes, tend to exploit crises to introduce structural adjustment plans during times when populations are too beaten down to mount an efficient opposition. By doing so, neoliberalism intensifies our sense of crisis as it grinds down our sense of security. Whereas critical scholarship on neoliberalism focus on the role of the economy in generating conditions of precarity, in recent years, scholars also started examining the social lives and cultures of this condition. Furthermore, they began exploring how conditions of precarity give us hope and galvanize our desire to reform our lives, reach out to others, and build new communities. This course will introduce students to theories and ethnographies of precarity, as well as works that analyze transformations in the ways we participate in the political domain to fight locally specific conditions of precarity.

Gender and the State

Graduate Seminar. This course will introduce students to scholarship that theorizes the increasingly complex ways in which the state harnesses gender to cement its political, economic, and cultural legitimacy. We will discuss such topics as pronatalism and reproductive rights as new centers of gravity in conservative forms of governance, low birth society, the state’s involvement in regulating sexuality including commercial sex, alternative economic practices that are often spearheaded by women, women’s role in maintaining various forms of the commons, women’s systemic mobilization to various forms of reproductive labor, and the reproductive justice movement. The course inquires whether we could think of declining fertility rates in the advanced capitalist world as both an effect and an expression of an enduring crisis in familial productivism, the social factory, and the prevalent system of wage labor, which no longer serves as a fair mechanism of redistribution. We will examine governmental responses to these developments and feminist strategies to intervene in them. We will discuss how invisible labor is increasingly integrated into formal processes of capitalist accumulation via extracting surplus value from the unremunerated labor of communication and sociality in the service industries or “the labor of love” in the context of familial reproduction. We will explore what forms of feminist activism and feminist politics emerge in the wake of chronic care deficit and women’s growing unwillingness to assume the responsibility for filling in the void created by the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and, more recently, failures in the delivery of public services in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Publications

The Left of Hope: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary (forthcoming from Cornell University Press)

“The Affective Labor of Commoning: Street Art in Illiberal Hungary,” Anthropology of Work Review, 45(1): 14-28 (2024). http://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12266

“The Gender of the Meme: Women and Protest Media in Populist Hungary,” Feminist Media Studies, 23(3): 803-818 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.2018007

“Internet Memes as Protest Media in Populist Hungary,” Visual Anthropology Review, 37(1): 52-76 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12232

Lukacs, G. (2020) Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Lukacs, G. ed. (2015) Youth, Labor, and Politics in East Asia, Positions: Asia Critique, Volume 23, Issue 3.

Lukacs, G. (2015) “Cool Japan, Soft Power, and Cultural Globalization,” in Towards New Humanities in the Era of Ubiquitous Media, Ishida Hidetaka, Yoshimi Shunya, and Mike Featherstone, eds. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 195-218 (in Japanese). 

Lukacs, G. (2015) “Unraveling Visions: Women’s Photography in Recessionary Japan,” Boundary 2, vol. 42, no. 3, 171-184.

Lukacs, G. (2015) “Labor Games: Youth, Work, and Politics in East Asia,” Positions: Asia Critique, Volume 23, Issue 3, 487-513

Lukacs, G. (2015) “The Labor of Cute: Net Idols, Cute Culture, and the Digital Economy in Contemporary Japan,” Positions: Asia Critique, Volume 23, Issue 3, 381-409.

Lukacs, G. (2013) “Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Labor, and Politics in Contemporary Japan,” Cultural Anthropology, 28(1):44-64.

Lukacs, G. (2012) “Workplace Dramas and Labor Fantasies in 1990s Japan,” in Global Futures in East Asia, Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai, and Hai Ren, eds. Stanford University Press, 222-247.

Lukacs, G. (2010) “Iron Chef Around the World: Japanese Food Television, Soft Power, and Cultural Globalization,” International Journal of Cultural Studies Volume 13(4): 409-426.

Lukacs, G. (2010) “Dream Labor in Dream Factory: Japanese Television in the Era of Market Fragmentation,” in Television, Japan, Globalization, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Eva Tsai, and JungBong Choi, eds. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 173-194.

Lukacs, G. (2010) Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.