Abstract
Interdisciplinary work has become a popular goal throughout the academy but, in many ways, it can remain more aspirational than actual. For many reasons—not the least being structures of hiring and promotion—disciplinary vocabularies, methodologies, and boundaries continue to shape much scholarly work. In my experience, scholarly exchange is similarly bisected by geopolitical and linguistic borders. Moving between Japan and the United States, I am struck by the real effort many of us exert to sustain conversations between scholars of different backgrounds. Beyond the necessary linguistic skills, these exchanges rely on participants’ willingness to explain what they find obvious, interesting, or worth researching, and why.
This volume, Asian Women and Intimate Work, demonstrates a serious attempt by scholars mostly based in Asia to translate their work and make it available to a larger audience. Edited by Emiko Ochiai and Kaoru Aoyama, two sociologists based in Japan, the collection considers how Asian women “have been linked and constructed with intimate work, and how they have lived (or not lived) within that construction” (p. 2). The eleven chapters describe a wide range of intimate labors, mostly focusing on domestic work within women’s own families, with a few chapters considering paid domestic service and transnational sex work. Culturally, the chapters describe the experiences of women in or from Japan, China, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Although such breadth offers interesting comparisons, ultimately I found the collection weakened by the broad definition of “intimate work,” the range of time periods analyzed, and the disparate cultural contexts included. I deeply appreciate this volume as an attempt to translate and share research being done (mostly) by Asian scholars, but I was left with a sense of the diversity within Asia rather than an understanding of how these chapters come together to create more than a sum of their parts.
The volume begins with an introduction by Emiko Ochiai, who has previously published an extremely helpful macroanalysis of gender patterns in Japan. In this introduction, she argues that to consider the broad category of “intimate work” we need to be aware of the subcategories within it, including housework, reproductive labor, care and emotional labor, and unpaid work and housewifization—the last term describing women’s labor as an unremunerated resource that can seem as natural as air or water. The introduction also engages the large literature on intimacy and intimate labor, while offering some historical context for the other chapters. It is a very big task to describe both the legacies of Japanese colonialism and the Chinese socialist state on patterns of intimate labor, but the introduction sets up historical dynamics that are described in greater detail in the volume’s chapters.
The volume’s first part, titled “Imagining Intimate Work” includes two chapters that directly explore the creation and experiences of housewives. Despite the volume’s regional focus, Ayami Nakatani’s chapter “Housewives’ Work/Mothers’ Work” analyzes how work for those two categories of women have changed over time in the Netherlands, starting from the seventeenth century. I was confused by the inclusion of a chapter with this, non-Asian, cultural focus. Of course, the Dutch colonial expansion influenced the social dynamics and family forms throughout Asia, but this chapter doesn’t explicitly make that case. In Fumiko Oshikawa’s chapter “The ‘Housewife’ and Housework in the Indian Urban Middle Class,” she frames her work around extended case studies of how wives and mothers imagine the “defining work of a housewife” (p. 85). What, she asks, actually counts as “housework” and to whom? She concludes that families are in a transformation period and that although women’s earlier senses of what housewives should be responsible for continues to exert an influence, daily needs of aging relatives or demands for paid labor outside the home are equally important.
The volume’s second part, “Multiple Faces of the Good Wife/Wise Mother,” takes its name from a prominent ideology concerning women in modern Asia. Popularized throughout East Asia, although with important regional differences, this ideal suggests that women should all work to become good wives and wise mothers, supporting their spouses while raising the future generation. Suh Ji Young’s chapter “Troubles of the ‘New Women’ in the Emergence of Modern Korea” analyzes how gender and nation have been intertwined from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. She provides a history of gender ideals, as they were influenced by Japanese colonization and Korean independence movements. Considering a similar time period, Yongmei Wu’s chapter “Selling Modernity” explores “calendar posters” (yuefenpai) in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Including many beautiful illustrations of the posters, this chapter argues that women were represented as modern through styles of dress, consumption, and maternity, always with an “appropriate” Chinese-ness in relation to serious foreign threats. Connecting with these themes, but moving the analysis to the contemporary moment, Zheng Yang’s chapter “The Gender Norms of Chinese Women in the Transitional Market Economy” explores the possible relationship between economic independence and actual, or real independence. In Socialist ideology, women were no longer “members of the household” but instead were to be “members of society,” meaning their social responsibilities extended beyond their immediate family’s needs. Yang argues that recent years have created a reverse pressure, and Chinese women are increasingly likely to want to focus primarily on family. Doing interviews with a wide variety of women, she finds that most women feel “torn” (p. 161) between their responsibilities to family and to society. Khuat Thu Hong, Bui Thu Huong, and Le Bach Duong explore similar questions in their chapter about the “Dilemma of Vietnamese ‘Modern’ Women.” Women in contemporary Vietnam, too, struggle with how to balance responsibilities. This chapter provides fascinating data about how women imagine masculinity to be extremely fragile, so much so that asking men to do domestic labor as anything more than a “helper” assisting a female relative will threaten their very manhood (p. 178). They conclude by saying that, despite a common opinion that domestic labor is evidence of patriarchal oppression, both women and men in Vietnam are likely to understand housework as a woman’s “natural proclivity” (p. 185).
The final section of this volume, “Wives and Workers Crossing Borders,” explores domestic labor in the context of various transnational flows. Daniele Belanger, Tran Giang Linh, Le Bach Duong, and Khuat Thu Hong’s chapter “From Farmer’s Daughters to Foreign Wives” analyzes how gender is imagined and experienced in the sending communities of Vietnamese emigrants. They found that young women have unusually significant influence in their native community when they are sending remittances. Hongfang Hao’s chapter on “Commercially Arranged Marriage Migration” of Chinese women details how they decide to broker a marriage to a non-Chinese husband, and gives the reader a sense of what trade-offs the women feel they are making. A foreign husband might bring prestige or shame, and this chapter traces examples of how women decide. Kayoko Ueno’s chapter “Strategies of Resistance among Filipina and Indonesian Domestic Workers in Singapore” expands on James Scott’s theory of “weapons of the weak” to explore how domestic workers attempt to sabotage their employers or resist the strict rules under which they are forced to live. The chapter includes a litany of methods of resistance, such as how one worker hid her wedding ring in her underwear to get the forbidden object into the country. Kaoru Aoyama’s chapter “Moving from Modernization to Globalization” considers foreign sex workers in contemporary Japan. She is interested in “the interaction and inter-determination between the individual experiences of the migrant women involved in the sex industry and macro-social transformation” (p. 269). Including perspectives on both, the chapter narrates voices from women themselves and ends with a significant list of recommendations for policy changes in Japan. In the final chapter, “The Role of Multicultural Families in South Korean Immigration Policy,” Hye-Kyung Lee examines recent immigration policies that have shifted from trainee programs to an employee permit system. Since the 1990s, South Korean men are increasingly likely to marry foreign women, and this shift in the type of “international” families in South Korea has pushed changes to immigration policy.
Overall, as this brief summary has demonstrated, this volume contains a diversity of topics, questions, and cultural contexts. I can imagine the volume will be of particular interest for scholars in gender studies, sociology, Asian Studies, and those focusing on aspects of intimate labor and domestic work. Although I remain convinced of the value of translating scholarship to broad audiences, some of the actual translations in this volume obscured its points. A few of the chapters with credited translators suffer from especially difficult English, and I hope this doesn’t limit the volume’s audience. The topics included certainly deserve attention.