Assignment 4 (March 26)

In Miliann Kang’s article The Managed Hand focuses on Korean immigrant manicurists and their relations with racially and socioeconomically diverse female customers in New York City nail salons (284), with the study focusing on emotional and embodied labor. This topic is very interesting because it goes beyond looking at the emotional work we read about in Hochschild’s article The Managed Heart of women being nice and pleasant at all times, and adds on to it to encompass the emotional aspect of work that these immigrant women do on bodies. The type of work taken place in the nail salons reflects emotional labor involving women serving women, opposed to mainly women serving men (285). The article on Chicana women and their domestic services also reflects a relationship of women serving women because as domestic workers it is predominantly women who they deal with hiring them and overseeing the work they do in the home. Kang’s framework brings to our attention the various differences in how women have to adapt their work to their customer’s race, class, and gender. For example, “…white middle class customers at this salon place great importance on emotional attentiveness…” (289).

Therefore, it gets more complex as you take into account Korean immigrant women serving customers that are white, black, Latino and from different socioeconomical backgrounds, as well as in other types of work like Chicana women employed by other types of women to clean their homes. “Body labor not only demands that the service worker present and comport her body in an appropriate fashion but also that she induces customers’ positive feelings about their own bodies” (285). This is a great example of the type of labor along with emotional labor that are a part of working women whose jobs include physical contact with their customers. I feel it can even be applied to how housekeepers have the demand of doing things in a certain manner to accommodate to cleaning in a way that satisfies their employer. Especially when dealing with unemployed women who were perceived as picky and not willing to relinquish control (302). It all comes down to women recognizing their role, what is expected of them, and how they can live up to their customers or employers expectations while also creating an ideal work environment.

Work & Home:Seperate Spheres? Unit 7/Assignment 3

This week’s challenge the notion of separate spheres because so much is intertwined when looking at the spheres of work life and home life. Each sphere has its role in someone’s life as well as interacts with each other. It particularly affects women because a lot of methods that can improve the life of working women would occur because of overlapping both spheres. Crittenden’s article mentions “child-rearing is the most important job in the world”, which is a statement we all have heard at some point, yet many actions taken by employers do not recognize the importance of child-rearing. If employers recognized this things such as providing working women with child care options would provide women with the opportunity and ability to work without worrying about how to pay for or find adequate childcare. Raising a family is no longer just a private matter, because of the importance of the role community resources play.

Nina Simone Dudnik’s article “sex and the single (woman) biologist”, also points out the negative ways in which work and home have been issues that overlap each other. As high status professionals in the field of science, Dudnik and her peers face challenges with balancing both. By balancing, I mean having to put their focus in one area and sacrificing success in another. “He and his wife went to graduate school together; now he runs the lab, and she’s sort of a part-time lab manager”, “I know of one professor who runs the lab while her husband works for her. The downside: She has no kids and never stops working” (Dudnik, 110-111). Both are examples how these women have had to sacrifice a personal life or a successful career because of the ways in which being a professional in their field has been stereotyped for men. Therefore, they have had to work twice as hard to accomplish their level of success.