Anxious Intimacy: Negotiating Gender, Value and Belonging among Japanese Retirees in Malaysia

Abstract

This is a study of Japanese retirees who have elected to retire in Malaysia. I arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 2014 to study sensory responses of Japanese retirees to the Malaysian landscape, but discovered instead that the gender differences in the experiences of their overseas move into retirement were dominating everyday discussions among the retirees. Retired baby boomers had lived through Japan’s high growth period in which family and firm were strictly demarcated into a normative division of labour between women and men. Men’s retirement seemed to have unsettled many taken-for-granted categories including gender and intergenerational norms. I observed that their movement to Malaysia led retirees to reimagine and restructure relations between themselves and their spouses, with their children, and the wider Japanese state.

The thesis focuses on three aspects of their lives: (1) their partial refashioning of retirement as affective labour; (2) their reconstitution of relationships with wives, children and other retirees; and (3) the sense of anxiety they felt around these transitions, and how that shaped the new relationships. I engage with a growing body of literature in feminist economic anthropology that looks at how economic transformations shape people’s intimate lives and how their lives in turn shape wider economic practices. The anxiety around belonging felt by those who were outside the productivist scheme was a kind of experience profoundly entwined with a contemporary global economy. The distinctiveness of the Malaysian field site provided a unique place from which my thesis addresses larger debates over the politics of intimacy and productivity. I move outward from their sense of anxieties to theorise how intimate relations are both shaped by, and shaping, the operations of society’s multiple regulatory forms in global capitalism today. Show more