Universidade de So Paulo Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Cincias Humanas Programa de Ps-Graduao em Sociologia

COLQUIO INTERNACIONAL O QUE O CARE?

EMOES, DIVISO DO TRABALHO, MIGRAES

THE CARE WORK OF HOSTESSES

Rhacel Salazar PARREAS University of Southern California

Universidade de So Paulo 26 e 27 de agosto de 2010

THE CARE WORK OF HOSTESSESi

Rhacel Salazar PARREAS

Department of Sociology University of Southern California

Abstract My talk describes the care work performed by migrant Filipina hostesses in Tokyos nightlife industry. It describes the quotidian rituals of hostess work to illustrate how hostesses buttress the masculinity of customers with the demonstration of care. Care is demonstrated with the display of affection and flirtation, servility and servitude, and creative performance. Fitting traditional understandings of care, the work of hostesses entails face-to-face interaction, results in the enhanced well-being of the customer, and lastly improves the human capabilities of the recipient with its enforcement of the customers masculinity. While hostess work conforms to traditional notions of care work, its recognition as care work also expands our conventional views. It does so by including sexual labor in the category of care work and placing care work in the public sphere. By insisting on viewing hostess work as care work, I emphasize that indeed care is often performed by women and moreover its performance reifies unequal gender relations between men and women.

In the nightlife industry of Japan, a variety of businesses offer a range of sexual services to its mostly male customers.ii Men go to image clubs for sexual stimulation via role play, pink salons for fellatio or masturbation, soap lands for a full service bath with the option of sex, lingerie clubs or no-panty bars for sexual excitement, and then hostess clubs for flirtation. The nightlife industry, referred to as mizu shobai in Japan, meaning water business, offers an elaborate range of services for the sexual titillation of male customers. Among these various services, commercial flirtation in a hostess club is arguably the

meekest of services offered in Japans nightlife industry. Still, in its examination of the sex industry of Japan, the U.S. Department of State labeled hostesses and only hostesses as sex trafficked persons. Moreover, the U.S. Department of State focused on the plight of Filipina hostesses among all the various groups of migrant hostesses who work in Japan, a group that includes Thai, Russian, Korean, and Taiwanese migrants.iii This is perhaps because Filipinos have historically comprised the largest group of migrant workers in this occupational niche.iv Yet, it is puzzling that the U.S. Department of State targeted hostesses and not other kinds of sexual laborers as the focus of its anti-trafficking crusade in Japans nightlife industry. This is because unlike other forms of sexual laborers in the nightlife industry of Japan, hostesses are not expected to provide sex. In fact, they do nothing more but flirt with customers at hostess clubs. Granted that some admittedly engage in brazen sexual flirtations, for instance the discrete performance of a hand-job is not unheard of among hostesses, acts of prostitution are for the most part considered illicit and violate club policies. My paper takes us inside the world of migrant Filipina hostesses and provides a thorough account of the labor of flirtation. I wish to argue that hostesses provide a particular form of caring labor when performing commercial flirtation. In so doing, I look at hostess work as a springboard for addressing the question of what is care. I begin with an overview of prevailing definitions of care work, specifically distinguishing between care work and reproductive labor. Then, I provide a thorough account of hostess work. I end with a discussion of genders constitution in the care work of hostesses, which in so doing emphasizes our need to examine care work as a social process that constitutes in its performance not only gender but also race, class, sexuality and nation.

DEFINITIONS OF CARE WORK Sociologist Paula England and economist Nancy Folbre define caring labor or care work as service to someone with whom he or she is in personal (usually face-to-face) contact; the worker responds to a need or desire that is directly expressed by the recipient; and, perhaps to a lesser extent develops the human capabilities of the recipient.v In other words, care work is not only personal, i.e., face-to-face, but it also transpires on an individual level and lastly its enactment sustains the recipient. If we are to follow the definition offered by England and Folbre, we arguably reduce our formulation of care work to the provision of what one could call direct personal services. This in turn would disregard plenty of other work that sustains individuals but need not involve direct interaction. Housecleaning for instance would fall outside the purview of what is care, as such work does not necessarily involve face-to-face interaction. Yet, plenty of scholars would insist that housecleaning or domestic work in general is a form of care work. Domestic work and the labor of washing plates, sweeping the floor, doing the laundry, and making the bed is labor that sustains the well being of the recipient. However, tasks we place under the rubric of domestic work would not fit traditional definitions of care work, as such forms of labor are not provided directly to the recipient. They are instead mediated by objects. In housecleaning, the focus of care would not be the person but instead material objects.vi So as to develop a more inclusive definition of care work, one that for instance includes the duties of housecleaners, I would propose to expand our formulation of care work to entail all work that develops the human capabilities of the recipient. This type of work would for instance include the labor of home health aides who spend a good portion

of their time doing non-face-to-face care work, such as cleaning, cooking and straightening up a household, tasks that are essential to enabling an elderly or disabled person live with dignity in their home. The more expansive definition of care work that I am advocating for falls in line with what we have come to know as reproductive labor. According to sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn, social reproduction encompasses the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally. She defines reproductive labor to include activities such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties.vii If we are to follow a more expansive definition, care work would refer to the labor of developing our human faculties and this labor would come in varied forms. It can be performed up close or even from a distance. Migrant remittances for instance could arguably be considered a form of care work as remitted funds usually sustain the day-today lives of individuals and families in poor sending countries of migration. Care work is performed directly (e.g. feeding of a child) or indirectly (e.g. making a bed, migrant remittances, etc.). Care work operates not only on an individual level but also an institutional level. Care institutions would include marriage systems and health care systems. The infrastructural development of health care systems for instance insures the overall care of populations, while marriage laws offer protection to individuals, protection that ensures the care of individuals as it legally makes parties accountable to the well being of another person.

Care work usually reflects relations of inequality in society; the provision of care is not only unequal with some receiving more care than others but givers of care tend to have lesser resources than those who receive care. It is for this reason that most care workers are women. Care work usually is assumed to be the unpaid responsibility of women, and consequently, it is often considered to be a nonmarket activity or an activity of low economic value. If the latter, it is then usually performed by poor women or women of color. For this reason, it is important that we keep in mind that care work is a social process that reflects relations of inequality in society. Keeping in mind that the provision of care is a social process, studies of care work should therefore document how its performance maintains inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet, at the same time, it is important we not always reduce care work to a form of labor. Instead, care work could also be situated in other types of relations such as friendship or kinship bonds. In these cases, the performance of care work would ascribe to particular cultural obligations and moral imperatives that fall outside rational reductions. Yet, care work in its maintenance of inequality could also involve non-rational relational dynamics. This would be the case for instance when a daughter instead of a son provides care for their terminally ill mother. The daughters performance of care would undeniably reinforce gender divisions of caring work in society but at the same time reaffirm moral imperatives of kinship.

HOSTESS WORK AS CARE WORK In this section, I will describe the care work of hostesses, keeping in mind while I do so that hostess work is a social process that is embedded in unequal relations of race,

class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Hostess work is nothing but commercial flirtation. Yet, the provision of flirtation and its meanings are socially situated. Flirtation in the context of Philippine hostess clubs reflects not only the unequal relations between men and women but also geopolitical inequities between Japan and the Philippines. In hostess clubs, flirtation comes in the form of extreme servitude, which in its performance cannot be removed from unequal relation of race, class, gender and nation between the Filipinas who flirt and the Japanese men who receive their flirtations. Although migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan do nothing more but flirt with customers in a hostess club, stories of forced prostitution clouds our view of their labor. The eminent migration scholar Saskia Sassen, for instance, describes: The rapid increase in the number of women migrating as entertainers can be traced to the more than five hundred entertainment brokers that now operate in the Philippines outside the state umbrella. These brokers provide women for the Japanese sex industry, which is basically controlled by organized gangs rather than through the government-sponsored program for the entry of entertainers. Recruited for singing and entertaining, these women are frequently forced into prostitution as well.viii The origins of claims of human trafficking of migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan are largely unknown. They are for instance not based on empirically grounded research. According to journalist Anthony DeStefano (2007), allegations of trafficking including those made in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report are usually unfounded and based on mere speculation.ix However, regardless of their questionable origins, stories of the human trafficking of Filipina hostesses in Japan circulate as the truth and are reproduced without

question. Not surprisingly then, claims of trafficking made by scholars such as Saskia Sassen are mirrored in the Trafficking in Persons Report that the U.S. Department of State releases annually. This report likewise claims that migrant Filipina entertainers are forced into sexual exploitation. As asserted in the 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report,

On arrival at their destination, victims are stripped of their passports and travel documents and forced into situations of sexual exploitation or bonded servitude... For example, it is reported that Japan issued 55,000 entertainer visas to women from the Philippines in 2003, many of whom are suspected of having become trafficked victims.x The identification of migrant Filipina entertainers as sex trafficked persons has affected the flow of their migration to Japan. Since then, we have seen a drastic decline in their numbers, which decreased by around 90 percent from 82,741 to 8,607 in 2006.xi Yet, as I noted, claims of forced prostitution is a far cry from the realities of hostesses, as most do not even engage in prostitution. I base my assertion on empirical evidence, more specifically 56 open-ended interviews I conducted in 2005 with migrant Filipina entertainers in Tokyo as well as three months of participant observation that I gathered while working as an unpaid hostess in a working class club that solely employs Filipino women in Tokyo during the same period. The bar where I worked had been owned by the yakuza, meaning organized crime syndicate, which is a situation I had not sought but only learned of in the midst of working there. I could argue then that if trafficking or forced prostitution as so claimed by various pundits does occur then I did field work in the space where it is likely to take place. To enhance my research, I supplemented my

primary data with interviews with government officials in both Japan and the Philippines, club owners in Japan, and migrant brokers in the Philippines. Returning to claims of the supposed forced prostitution of Filipina migrant hostesses, prostitution refers to the act or practice of engaging in promiscuous sexual relations especially for money.xii Following this definition, one could argue that to flirt is in itself a promiscuous activity and hence the act of flirting for money would constitute of prostitution. Yet, most hostesses would disagree with this assertion, as they make a marked distinction between flirting for money and having sex for money with the latter being what constitutes of prostitution in their perspective. At the same time, they would qualify that to have sex for money does not automatically constitute of prostitution. The context and dynamic of the exchange would distinguish its meaning with those who receive money from their boyfriends considered not to be prostitutes and those who do from strangers for one time encounters perceived to be so. Regardless of these distinctions, most hostesses do not engage in sex with their customers. When flirting, most offer customers nothing more than the lure of sex or the promise of sex, which often times remains an unfulfilled promise. Some clubs are even known to ban sexual relations between hostesses and customers. After all, people know to patronize establishments other than hostess clubs to solicit for sex in Japan. While most clubs do not promote the formation of sexual relations between hostesses and customers, they usually turn a blind-eye to such activities when they do occur outside the club. From spending time with hostesses inside and outside of clubs, I did learn that many of them do not have sex with customers. From circling Philippine clubs in Tokyo, I also noticed that customer-hostess interactions could sometimes remain platonic throughout

the evening, but in other times they become sexually charged immediately. In some clubs, I observed customers freely touch the bodies of hostesses but in many others I noticed that hostesses and customers barely made any physical contact while flirting across the table from one another. These different gradations of sexual intimacy tell us that the sexual dynamics of flirtation are quite varied in hostess clubs, thereby encouraging us to develop a more nuanced picture of hostess work that counters the one-dimensional portrayal of their forced prostitution. Claims not just of forced prostitution but the reduction of their work to prostitution offends most hostesses. Marie, a Filipina hostess who has worked in Tokyo since 1991, complains about the negative image of hostesses and insists that they are generally not forced into prostitution. She states, The opinion of hostesses is so low. But the reality of hostessing is, you are the one who does your job. You are the one who sets your boundaries between you and your customers. When asked to describe their job, hostesses are often quick to clarify that it does not entail prostitution, which is an assumption they know most outsiders have of their occupation. Contesting the assumption that hostess work involves prostitution, Amanda, another experienced hostess in Tokyo, instead describes hostess work as the job of soothing and comforting customers:

Comfort. It is called comfort work. We are to comfort them. We are there for someone to lean on, so they have a friend. Here in Japan, everyone is working and staying alone. They are not with their mothers. So, if they go to the o-mise of the Filipino, they think that they have their friends there, their family. In the

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Philippines, it is different. If the men go to the club, they get sex. But that is not the case in Japan. It is different. It is not a brothel.xiii Agreeing with Amanda is Irene, another hostess who I met in Tokyo. Unable to mask her irritation over the assumption that she and other hostesses engage in prostitution, she explains that her work is to help customers relax and unwind. Her description of hostess work mirrors the words of Amanda.

The culture of Japan is that after work they need to relax and unwind. What we do for them is we are there to make them laugh. We are there to amuse them. How does that make us bad? It is not like we go out to do you know what I am talking about. Our work is not like that. That is why I can say that I never saw anything bad that I can say is bad. If hostess work is not prostitution, what is it then? To be a hostess does require one to wear scanty attire, but as the hostesses Amanda and Irene claim, it does not require prostitution. While flirtation is the basic premise of the job, hostesses flirt via their provision of what I have identified as various forms of care work. They include table service work, sexual work (which does not necessarily entail the provision of sex), entertainment work, and lastly boundary work. In this section, I provide a detailed description of these basic tenets of hostess work. Table service work means having to pay attention to all of the needs of the customer: serving his drinks, lighting his cigarettes, and feeding him. Hostesses usually do these tasks, which reflect the duties of a waitress, while constantly singing the praises of the customer in order to make him feel special or to make him feel like a man. At hostess

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clubs, service work is as personalized as it is routinized.xiv At the club where I worked, a hostess assigned to a table must welcome the customer by kneeling and bowing her head in front of him. Then she would proceed to wipe the customers hands clean with a moist oshiburi, meaning washcloth. Afterwards, she is expected to prepare the drink of the customer, requesting if he wishes to mix his alcohol with water or tea. After mixing the drink to his liking, she then offers him the beverage with her head bowed down. As our boss repeatedly demonstrated to me, we had to take care of the needs of the customer while establishing a feminine and submissive demeanor. For instance, I had to mix drinks with my head slightly tilted to one side, my face set in an idiot grin, and my legs slightly crossed with one leg placed in front of the other. Then, if the customer offered me a beverage, I would have to wait for him to drink his before drinking mine. Before taking a sip of my drink, I would also have to remember to thank the customer for his generosity and demonstrate my subservience by sharing a toast, not only with my head bowed down but also with my glass lower than his. This is because, as one experienced hostess told me, You are below a customer. So your glass must always be below his. Extreme servitude manifests not only in these displays of subservience but also in the ways that hostesses must continuously stay attuned to the needs of the customer. Describes the arubaito Jane:

Our Master [meaning boss or club owner] tells us to improve our work. (Pauses.) What our master likes is the ashtray is replaced right away when it is full and when a customer smokes it is lit right away. When the glass is empty, you refill it right away. When they want to sing, you immediately get the [song] book or you

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program the song in the karaoke machine. The master is happy when he sees you are attentive to the needs of the customer. That is it. Demonstrations of extreme subservience heighten the masculinity of customers. Because the construction of masculinity always occurs in relation to femininity and vice versa,xv the demonstration of feminine subservience in the performance of servility by hostesses such as Jane ensures that customers feel masculine or like a king as many of my informants expressed to me. In addition to table service work, hostesses must also do entertainment work at the club. By entertainment work, I refer to the task of sexually arousing customers as well as amusing customers in order to pass time at the hostess club. This work frequently entails the provision of a variety show performance in which hostesses would have to perform sexually provocative dances. Yet, hostesses entertain customers not only by singing and dancing on stage, but they also entertain by providing lively conversation in the hybrid language of English-Tagalog-Japanese at the table or by playing silly games to pass time at the table.xvi Giving us an example of entertainment work that hostesses do at the table is the hostess Maki, who describes, I just amuse them. I try to make them happy. I invite them. I play games like paper, scissors, and stones. I play different games like that. I massage them inside club (She laughs.) It is just like that. It is just shallow amusements they want. In contrast to the platonic style of Maki, lively conversation for most other hostesses at the club is usually of a sexual nature. My co-workers pointing their customers attention to their breasts, describing how they masturbate everyday, and mentioning the sex acts they like is the type of lively conversation that I often overheard them initiate with customers. If not quite able to keep the customers interests that way, my co-workers would

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then resort to singing and dancing. I could never quite talk about sex so openly with customers, which explains why the mama-san rarely ever assigned me to a table by myself. I was often just the designated helper, an extra body whose job it had been to do the dirty work of cleaning the table but whose presence was an added cost to the customers food and drink bill. So as not to be a complete dead weight, I did help and keep busy by cleaning ashtrays, refilling drinks, and singing to the karaoke machine while a co-worker would entertain the guest with lively conversation. Thus, instead of performing entertainment work, I mostly did table service work. In addition to table service work and entertainment work, hostesses also perform some form of sexual labor, which need not entail the provision of sex. Instead, sexual labor involves sexually titillating customers. This occurs inside and outside the club. To sexually titillate customers, hostesses often initiate regular communication outside the club in which they demonstrate affection so as to manufacture customer loyalty. My co-worker Teresa, for instance, has made a habit of calling her customers everyday. Explaining her actions, Teresa describes her phone calls as displays of sweetness: Here in Japan, even if you are married, I realize that if you have been together for a long time, they lose their sweetness. So, that is what I give them, sweetness. They become very, very happy that you worry about them and remember them. They are happy with a simple goodnight and sweet dreams. By caring for customers, Teresa does not only make them feel special but she also heightens their feelings of sexual desirability. Notably, I did also assist in the sexual work expected of us. At the club, hostesses perform sexual work by intimating a relationship of sexual intimacy with the customer. She does this by physically holding his hands, massaging his hands or shoulders, holding his

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thigh or allowing him to put his arm around her shoulder, or verbally by vocalizing her physical attraction for him, whether real or not. I gradually grew accustomed to the suggestion of physical intimacy between customers and myself, because intimacy at a hostess club is usually nothing more than the insinuation of sex. Not long after working as a hostess, I learned to share the attitude carried by most of my co-workers that nothing will be lost from me (walang mawawala sa akin) if I sometimes let customers touch my thigh and put his arm around my shoulders. As one interviewee succinctly put it, I will not get pregnant from a hug. Indeed, the Filipino saying, walang mawawala sa akin was often uttered to me by hostesses when describing the extent of sexual intimacy that they maintain with customers. In making such a claim, hostesses suggest that they do not actually engage in sex with customers. Indeed, the extent of sexual intimacy that hostesses maintain with customers usually involves no more than kissing and petting with perhaps some engaging in mutual masturbation inside or outside the club. When describing the types of sexual work performed by hostesses, it is difficult to make a blanket statement about the activities they do, as the extent of sexual intimacy they maintain with customers is far from uniform. As many told me, intimacy depends on the situation and differs according to the type of social tie they maintain with the customer. For instance, the sexual intimacies that one maintains with a club boyfriend, meaning a frequent customer at the club, would be different from a real boyfriend with sex more likely to occur with the real boyfriend because of the feelings of affection they actually hold for him. At the same time, the degree of intimacy that hostesses maintain with club

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boyfriends is not uniform with material provisions, good looks, and kindness increasing the likelihood of sex. By maintaining different levels of sexual relations with customers, hostesses do a wide range of what Viviana Zelizer calls relational work, meaning the process of differentiating meaningful social relations.xvii Hostesses actively determine their boundaries of intimacy with customers, resulting in variegated levels of intimacy and multiple social relations with customers. Most maintain platonic social relations with the majority of customers and distinguish a select few as a boyfriend whose designation as one makes him a candidate for sexual intimacy. By earmarking customers according to level of intimacy, hostesses must ensure that customers abide by the parameters they establish. This effort requires their performance of boundary work, which refers to efforts they make to limit the extent of their sexual intimacy with customers. Boundary work is necessary because hostesses cannot reject a customer directly. Instead, they can only reject customers indirectly. In other words, they can only reject customers via deflection. At the club, customers constantly extend sexual advances to hostesses, usually expecting hostesses not to concede to these advances but to coyly deflect them. A common sight in hostess clubs, for instance, is to see hostesses ward off customers who try to rub their groin against them while dancing. One cannot directly tell a customer to stop, but instead one must rely on creative ways to avoid the sexual overtures of customers. As such, one often sees hostesses force customers to twirl them around the dance floor or hostesses with protruding behinds when slow dancing with customers in hopes of minimizing the physical contact between them. Explaining the skills required in physical deflection, the self-identified comfort worker Amanda describes:

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You entertain the customer at the o-mise, but really it is illegal for them to touch you on the breast or anywhere. You can fight the customer if they do that. That is the exception because that is a sign of disrespect. That is not part of the rules but that just happens because Japanese men like to do that. So of course you have to learn how to protect yourself in a way that you do not hurt the feeling of the person you are resisting The play there is if someone touches you, you have to know how to react. You have to flirt for example, and say in a coy voice, Oh stop it. I am ticklish there. No. You do that. You have to do it in a way that you do not hurt the feelings of the customers. You need to learn how to do that. It is psychologicalreversal. You cannot react mad. You cannot avoid that kind of harassment because they drink alcohol. Your job is to entertain, not to have someone feel up your body. But that is up to the person. We cannot avoid them touching us because they are drunk. So what we do, we need to trick the drunken man... Your job is not to let them touch you. You do not have to give them sex, but you have to entertain the customer. Many hostesses describe having to deal with men who grope you and try to kiss you as one of the worst aspects of their job. My co-worker Teresa struggles for instance with the sexual harassment that goes with the job. As she states: Here in Japan, you cannot say that you will not tolerate these acts of disrespect. You cannot say that you will refuse to entertain him Even if your customer is sexually harassing you, you cannot do anything about it. You still have to entertain them because they are paying.

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When performing boundary work, hostesses walk the fine line of deflecting the advances of customers without blatantly rejecting them. They must flirt while doing boundary work. This requires the development of skills, styles, and strategies of rejection. Even first timers soon learn creative means of doing boundary work. Cindy, for instance, will hold onto the hands of the customer to prevent him from groping her, but if she lets her guard down and he manages to touch her inappropriately, she will then pretend to scold him, mockingly spanking his hands while saying in Filipino, Ikaw, ang likot likot mo talaga, meaning you, you really are quite unruly. Afterwards, Cindy will pretend to laugh to further hide her annoyance. In performing boundary work, hostesses have to hide negative emotions such as disgust and irritation. Once I had to hide my annoyance when a customer caught me off guard and grabbed my breast. Out of courtesy to the proprietors of the club, I had to laugh it off so as not to lose his business. What is the permissible extent of boundary work? To what extent can hostesses reject the advances of customers? The hostesses I interviewed often responded by saying, nasa kanya, meaning it depends on the person. Some hostesses allow more physical intimacy with their customers than others; some choose to participate in the direct purchase of sex and some do not; lastly some refuse to sit next to customers at the club. The different boundaries hostesses maintain at work does not only problematize the flat depiction of their job as one of forced prostitution but it also challenges us to recognize the intricacies of their caring labor. Some choose to care with the provision of sex but most notably do not.

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DISCUSSION In this section, I wish to examine the social meanings of commercial flirtation in hostess clubs. The provision of flirtation as a form of care work occurs in the structural context of social relations between female hostesses and male customers. As such, inequalities of gender and nation get reenacted in the caring work of hostesses when they flirt and do the work of serving customers at the table. These inequalities emerge clearly if we take into account the social meanings of the display of extreme servitude that customers have come to expect from hostesses. Such displays become a gender performance that reinscribes the unequal relation between men and women. Explaining why customers visit hostess clubs, anthropologist Anne Allison perceptively describes hostess clubs as a place of male ritual.xviii Men patronize hostess clubs so as to bond with other men and hostesses merely function as an object for strengthening this bond. Hostess clubs is where men make business deals, build trust, and together enforce gender hierarchies. Whether customers visit clubs in a group or alone, displays of masculinity are part of the daily rituals in hostess clubs. In this context, we see how the extreme displays of subservience that hostesses perform at a club magnifies the masculinity of customers. Additionally the inequality that defines the geopolitical relationship of Japan and the Philippines are magnified in the space of the hostess club. Interactions between Filipina hostesses and Japanese customers emerge from the context of their unequal relations not only of gender and class, but also of the marked differences in opportunities available to them from their political economic locations of being from either a downtrodden country such as the Philippines or an advanced capitalist nation such as Japan. When flirting with

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customers, hostesses strategically underscore the disparity in their economic position so as to invoke feeling of awa, or pity, from their customers, which is a feeling that elicits other emotions among customers including benevolence and magnanimity. This in turn further emphasizes the masculinity of customers. When flirting with customers, hostesses frequently remind them of their class disparity. For instance, they often share stories of their life of abject poverty in the Philippines. The strategy of evoking pity is one that men from richer nations seem to fetishize in their sexual desires for women from poorer countries. In her reading of gonzo pornography produced by white male sex tourists in Asia, feminist film critic Celine Parreas Shimizu identifies as central to their eroticism not only the poverty of sex workers but also their third world status. As she powerfully describes, Her third world status not only positions her in a way that eroticizes her poverty within national underdevelopment but also naturalizes her a torrid tropical construction.xix As such, scenes of the squalor of third world countries serve as the frequent backdrop of sex tourism video productions. In the case of hostesses, displays of emotional attachments must usually coincide with their demonstrations of economic need. Like the Asian sex workers documented by tourists in gonzo pornography, hostesses utilize their poverty to generate feelings of chivalry and magnanimity among customers. In so doing, they heighten the masculinity of customers without the provision of sex.

CONCLUSION Hostesses perform care work via the provision of flirtation. The notion of flirtation as care work does not disagree with conventional views on care as flirtation involves face-

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to-face interaction, responds directly to the desires of a recipient and lastly enhances the well being of the recipient. In this case, the need of customers for sexual titillation, which arguably enhances their emotional well being and overall health, is satisfied by hostesses. In the performance of flirtation, hostesses notably reenact inequalities of gender and nation, as the demonstration of servitude is the norm in the provision of flirtation by hostesses and its demonstration heightens the masculinity of customers. Yet, caring via flirtation is not necessarily an oppressive duty for hostesses. Reeling in customers who become emotionally attached and dependent on the feelings of masculinity that hostesses successfully engender is a triumph for hostesses that indicates to them that they have become quite skilled in the craft of flirtation.

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i This essay draws from previous published articles including Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreas, Introduction, in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies and the Politics of Care, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Rhacel Salazar Parreas, Hostess Work: Negotiating the Morals of Money and Sex, in Economic Sociology and Work, Vol. 19 of Research in the Sociology of Work, edited by Nina Bandelj (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2008). ii See David Leheny, Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). iii United States Department of State, 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004). iv Nana Oishi, Women on the Move (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). v Paula England and Nancy Folbre, The Cost of Caring: Emotional Labor in the Service Economy, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 561(1999): 39-51, see pg. 40; Paula England, Michelle Budig, and Nancy Folbre, Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work, Social Problems 49:4(2002): 455-473, see pg. 455. vi Gender and technology studies scholars are pioneering discussions on the cultivation of objects as a form of care work. They call attention to transformations of care brought by changes in technology. The care of objects to care for persons is one such transformation. As Ariel Ducey explains, Care can be extended to things, just as people can be treated like tools or commodities. Although objects are not usually considered the focus of concern in institutions and relationships that provide care, the objects that figure in such institutions can arguably become the source of intimate and caring relationships in their own right See Ariel Ducey, Technologies of Caring Labor: From Objects to Affect, 18-32 in Intimate Labors, eds. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), pg. 20. vii Evelyn Nakano Glenn, From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor, Signs 18(1992): 1-43, see pg. 1. viii See Saskia Sassen, Global Cities and Survival Circuits, 254-273 in Global Woman, eds. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), pp. 271-272. ix Anthony Destefano, The War on Human Trafficking (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Silvia Scarpa, Trafficking in Human Beings: Modern Slavery (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Todays Slaves (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). Existing studies are neither extensive nor based on grounded empirical research. For example, see the works of Kevin Bales (2007), who considers his week-long visits to various known trafficking sites as giving him sufficient data. According to Scarpa (2008), even the U.S. Government Accountability Office questions the reliability of claims in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report. x United States Department of State, 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004, p. 14. xi See Philippine Overseas Employment Administration website on the number of deployed overseas workers at http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistic.html. Last verified on May 13, 2009. Also see a report issued by Human Rights Osaka, http://wwww.hurights.or.jp/news/0702/b01_e.html. Last verified on May 13, 2009. xii See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prostitution. Verified on December 9, 2009. xiii The term comfort women generally refers to the Filipino and Korean women who were held as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Seemingly unaware of the politically charged use of the term comfort women, Amanda used this term in English to describe her work as a hostess. xiv Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). xv R. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995). xvi To my surprise, many of our regular customers spoke a little bit of Tagalog. This is because many have frequented Philippine pubs for more than a decade and some have married Filipino women. xvii Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), see pg. 28.

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xviii Anne Allison, Night Work: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). xix Celine Parreas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). See pg. 186.

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