[특강소식] Nail Salons as Transnational Body Labor: Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurship, Labor Rights and Diasporic Politics


주제:  Nail Salons as Transnational Body Labor: Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurship, Labor Rights and Diasporic Politics

강연자: Miliann Kang, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

일시: 12/11(수) 3:30 pm 

장소: 국제교육관(IEB) 902호


 

In the summer of 2015, the New York Times (Times) published an explosive front page series by Sara Maslin Nir on the “The Price of Nice Nails” and “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers.”  This series shined much-needed light on labor rights violations, toxic chemical exposures, and occupational health risk in New York City nail salons. Nir’s language and arguments, however, particularly her focus on a “rigid racial and ethnic caste system,” placed most of the blame on Korean immigrant small business owners for labor conditions they alone did not create and by themselves cannot fix. This framing of the story not only oversimplified a sense of Korean owners as villains, but it presented Latina and other Asian workers as victims, ignoring their active participation in efforts to reform the industry. Substandard working conditions in nail salons are widespread, and nail salon owners must be held responsible for unfair and discriminatory labor practices and labor rights violations. But by focusing on ethnic relations within the salons, this coverage neglected to give sufficient attention to the systemic economic, social and political forces outside of the salons.

Bio: Miliann Kang is Associate Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in Sociology and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar affiliated with Ewha Womans University, where she is researching work and family issues for Asian and Asian American women in a transnational context. Her book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work (2010, University of California Press) addresses gendered processes and relations in immigrant women’s work focusing on Asian-owned nail salons. It won four awards from the American Sociological Association (Sections on Racial and Ethnic Minorities; Sex and Gender; Race, Gender, and Class; and Asia/Asian America) and the Sara Whaley book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Her second book, Mother Other: Race and Reproductive Politics in Asian America is under contract with the University of California Press. Her writing has been published in Gender and Society, Contexts, Newsweek, Women’s Review of BooksHuffington Post,  Daily Hampshire Gazette and Korea Times.
 
 




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