Undoing gender, doing intimacy: Rewriting gendered scripts through rezu fūzoku

This article examines rezu fūzoku , a sector of Japan’s sex industry in which female providers offer sexual services exclusively to women. Drawing on an ethnographic approach based on observations and in-depth interviews with sex workers and their clients, and on the concepts of gender performativity and ‘undoing gender’, I argue that when women engage in commodified female/female intimacy, they disrupt normative gender scripts and relational expectations. These practices constitute what I define as implicit feminism : unintentional feminist action that emerges through everyday acts of self-determination and resistance against heteronormative structures. Rather than relying on ideological identification, implicit feminism manifests through the pursuit of emotional fulfilment, bodily autonomy, and alternative relational modes.