Akiko Takeyama

Akiko Takeyama is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and the director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas. As an interdisciplinary, feminist scholar, trained as a cultural anthropologist, her scholarship focuses on changing gender, sexuality, and class dynamics in the context of (neo)liberal globalization. Her work provides fine-grained ethnography to better understand how social inequalities are perpetuated in the name of individual choice. She uses Japan as a window into asking enduring questions about patriarchal nation-building, capitalistic profit-seeking, and political philosophy of liberalism.