Abstract
Rhacel Parreñas’ timely book, Illicit Flirtations, takes to task U.S. policies that attempt to curb and eradicate the sexual trafficking of women. Based on an in-depth ethnography of Filipina hostesses who migrate to Japan, Parreñas draws her readers into the all-night work shifts of Filipina entertainers to refute their classification as trafficked victims, and more insidiously, to prove that the laws set out to “help” these women generate the very vulnerable labor conditions they set out to eradicate. While various feminists have made this argument, this is the first book-length study to do so from the perspective of how states laws across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan affect women’s labor conditions. Rather than dismantle highly-coveted gendered migration streams for poor and transgender entertainers, what is needed, she concludes, is better protection of these women who face conditions of indentured servitude. For this reason, the author redefines women’s labor migration from trafficking to what she labels, “indentured mobility,” to highlight the constraints caused by middlemen (authorized by state laws) who facilitate women’s travel and employment and secure high profits by holding onto migrants’ passports and wages until the completion of six-month term contracts in hostess clubs in Japan. That middlemen force women to remain in sometimes exploitative labor conditions in clubs that cater to Japanese male clients across a range of sexualized activities—including flirtation, erotic performance, fellatio, hand jobs, and sex—situates her argument in murky terrain that may discomfort some readers. Especially frustrating to read are occasions where some women have little recourse to deny clients’ sexual overtures if they want to hold onto coveted contracts with Japanese clubs, and if they hope to earn enough of a wage to pay off debts and arrive home with a little extra. Yet, it is precisely within the grey zones that the book gains its strength, unabashedly escorting readers into a contentious zone that unsettles Western liberal expectations defining exploitation, choice, freedom, and authentic love.
There is much to learn here about the diversity of Filipina entertainers whose “moral compasses” vary across gender, class, and religion. Rather than assume all poor Filipina entertainers make the same desperate choices, or that all have equitable access to agency, her analysis gains traction through the structural and personal conditions that contribute to, and diminish, labor exploitation. It is Parreñas’ attention to the role of various state laws, middlemen, and the creative maneuvering of migrants that offers the most complex critical perspective. There are no hard-and-fast rules here, nor morally easy places to reside. Some women, especially transgender migrants, enjoy the opportunities to be treated as “real women” working in the bars and sometimes marrying Japanese clients in Japan, while others return home after disastrous marriages or until their cash runs out only to have to return to humiliating sexualized labor with some Japanese clients who grope them in dehumanizing ways that confirm a global hierarchy of gendered labor between the Philippines and Japan.
Highly commendable in Illicit Flirtations is the author’s breadth of interviews with female and transgender migrant entertainers. It is clear by the quality and range of intimate stories that the author gained the trust and admiration of her subjects who confide a great deal about the pleasures and hardships of the stigmatized work they engage. Parreñas worked herself as a hostess for a week to gain hands-on experience as a hostess and to better relate to the industry from migrant women’s perspectives, rather than as an outsider who might morally condemn the sexualized labor performed by women. The eight chapters of the book skillfully unravel multiple dimensions of hostess work, helping the author identify how varied forms of exploitation demand a more nuanced approach to improving women’s conditions rather than a unified moral campaign against sex trafficking that treats all women as victims of sexual exploitation.
In order to address the underlying conflicts over sex trafficking and labor exploitation, the author boldly opens up discussions that are eclipsed by the either/or framework of exploitation versus freedom and choice. For example, she expands the conditions of servitude in Japan as both exploitative and as opening up material and pleasurable opportunities unavailable for many in the Philippines. While she continues to argue that migrants make the “autonomous” decision to swap a life of poverty for labor conditions of servitude, lurking behind these arguments is an insistence on the need for better labor conditions in Japan (and I would add in the Philippines) to expand the range of choices facing women. She redefines freedom as more complicated than “the absence of restraints” (p. 42) and questions for whom one defines freedom. For example, that women are expected to perform femininity and provide a highly-charged erotic atmosphere for Japanese men hoping to enhance their sense of masculinity has the effect of causing some women strong sentiments of disgust, while others form deep bonds with clients. And for some transgender male-to-female hostesses who migrate to Japan specifically to be made to feel like a “real woman,” these fantasies, as well as their desires to be entertainers with financial stability, are also sometimes fulfilled. While the author’s lack of Japanese language prevented her from interviewing Japanese men, the amount of money male clients spend, many married, to feel like men opens up questions about the effects of women’s “freely” chosen labor which appears to similarly cascade into a range of humiliating and dehumanizing roles.
The next several chapters document in great detail the kinds of exploitation faced by women working in Japanese bars that bind them to strict monthly sales quotas. Client demands result in an array of price differentiation over the varied “entertainment” provided by women off-stage. Rather than define women’s labor as prostitution, or the exchange of erotic acts for money, we find intimacy, love, repulsion, and humor. Women creatively use their bodies and flirtation skills to keep clients returning, especially when many entertainers discover that giving in to a client’s request for a night of passionate sex may actually financially hurt them and the club as clients often do not return after fantasies are fulfilled. Flirtation and conversation skills prove more advantageous—although even the bounds of flirtation—kissing, talking, groping, or rubbing—are constantly negotiated depending on women’s language and personal skills.
Chapters Six to Eight support the argument that sex shapes how migrant entertainers access labor, money, and especially visas and citizenship. In solidarity with other feminist scholars who argue that love cannot be disentangled from economic concerns, Parreñas provides a stimulating depiction of love that intensifies with the Japanese client’s increasingly handsome gifts of cash and luxury items. The dance of romance for transgender hostesses seeking biological men or female-to-male partners is accentuated by both the desire to feel “like real women” (p. 209), as well as financial gain. The state never falls from view, even influencing how subjects enact intimacy and perform gender roles. Given that same sex biological couples cannot marry, they turn to creative recourse—such as marrying a male partner’s mother—to be with their ideal partners, garnering visas along the way. Thus the desire for heteronormative structures is part of their creative engagement with the state rather than a conservative desire for conventional gender roles, complicating how we imagine and theorize the subversion and performance of gender. The book tempers happy endings, as each avenue that migrant hostesses choose, leaves them in precarious situations along a range of access to “sexual citizenship”—wives are vulnerable to domestic violence, undocumented workers to employer and coethnic abuse, and contract workers to labor peonage (p. 23). It is here that the book offers engaging insight into the need for a nuanced approach to ameliorating sexualized labor conditions for all migrants.