How can we assess the impact of transnational practices on gender hierarchies?

To evaluate the impact of transnational practices on gender hierarchies, one would need to examine comparatively the lives of those who maintain a transnational movement and those who do not. Alternatively, one may examine the narratives of change for those who are transnationally situated. This is not to imply that there is a significant temporal division that separates the before and after of migration; rather, it is to place the notion of “impact” in the interpretive hands of migrants so that we may understand the concrete effects of gender hierarchies in this context. In this essay, I will be drawing examples from the work of Rhacel Salazar Parreñas in Illicit Flirtations, in which Parreñas examines the lives of Filipino labor migrants working as hostesses in Japan.

I argue that the transnational narratives of the Filipino hostesses in Japan shed light on the different ways gender hierarchies function, and how they morph—from the perspectives of both cisgender and transgender hostesses—from one space to another between the Philipines and Japan. Importantly, this assessment can be achieved by examining the gendered roles labor migrants like the hostesses are assigned and take on in these different contexts, and how their agency functions in these situations.

In her earlier work, Parreñas (2008) outlines Filipino conceptions of gender roles and family construction in a paper that examines transnational fathering. The gender binary, in this instance, is rigid role assignments in which mothers are nurturing emotional providers and fathers are disciplinarian financial providers.

This division is rather significant for the case of the migrant hostesses, whose work partially entails emotion-based labor of flirtation and ego-massaging (Allison 1994) while being sexualized subjects under the male gaze. By generating emotions and sexuality that are supposed to be respectively reserved for the children and the husband, women who choose to pursue hostess work as a career are performing transgressive labor that leads to a “moral contamination” because it is an intersection “of intimate social relations and economic transaction” (Parreñas 2011:9). Parreñas also cites Zelizer’s concept of a “hostile worlds view” that hostesses cannot seem to escape: it is a “rigid moral boundaries between market and intimate domains” (2011:9), precisely demonstrating the boundaries that mark such “contamination.” Willing to risk crossing this line in both sense of moralized labor and familial gender roles, Filipino migrants are driven by various disparate circumstances to seek to work as hostesses in Japan.

One of the motivations for the cisgender female hostesses is to escape “abject poverty in the Phillippines as well as to pursue their passion for singing and dancing.” (Parreñas 2011:18) Most of them are “members of the working poor” (2011:18) who tend to have graduated from high school and did not attend universities. Even for the few who have completed university degrees, they choose to work as hostesses in Japan because of the income. All of those whom Parreñas had spoken to became breadwinners of their households back in the Philippines. Thus the transnational movements of the hostesses flips the traditional gender roles and challenges the hierarchy of men authorized by the status of an financial provider. Parreñas describes in part of the family dynamics in the Philippines, “Men’s material contributions to the family singularly determine their masculinity” (2008:1064), which implies that for a women to become the breadwinner of the household is to reduce the masculinity of the male members of the household, whether father, brother, husband, or otherwise. Transnational movement, in this case, provides liberation from familial gendered script assigned to labor migrants that might otherwise have little alternative escapes.

However, the nature of the work of hostesses is not a fully subversive one in regards to the gender hierarchy. The predominant customers of hostess clubs are Japanese men (Allison 1994) who can afford to purchase sexual flirtation as a commodity by paying for the time of the hostesses and buying overpriced alcoholic drinks. Although the gender-reversed equivalent of hostess clubs exists, namely host clubs (Takeyama 2016), neither of these forms of business subvert the gender hierarchy. In fact, women pay the hosts in order to be pampered like princesses, and hosts often pursue this career in order to give a shot at earning luxuriously within a short few years. For the men who frequent hostess clubs, the understanding that whatever they say will be agreed to and their masculine egos will be massaged unconditionally upon pay underlies all the exchanges that happen within between them and the hostesses. (Allison 1994) Another way of viewing this activity is to see that the work of the hostesses is to see it as the literal commodified performance of idealized feminine submission that men cannot obtain elsewhere. In a way, then, their work becomes an established system built to reaffirm the Japanese gender hierarchy. The fact that this is all paid performances complicates the direct power differentiations (the hostess clubs can always refuse certain customers who overstep their boundaries), but the rituals that take place within the club largely reaffirms male superiority bolstered by financial capital, something not unlike the traditional roles of Filipino fathers within the household.

In this way, although the Filipino hostesses gain certain degrees of financial freedom that provide them with more life choices that may have resistant implications against the gender hierarchy, the means to their end—hostess work—is still bounded by the script of gendered hierarchical performances.

From the perspectives of the hostesses upon migration in order to become hostesses, then, the shape of the gender hierarchy has not disappeared but simply changed its shape from one to another, from Filipino fathers to Japanese businessmen. It is important to note that, however, behind the choices to become hostesses are informed decisions to choose one way of life other another.

 The hostesses understand the stigma associated with their work, as evidenced by the gatekeeping Parreñas encountered when she tried to recruit informants at first: none of the hostesses want to speak with her because they assumed that Parreñas would be falsely informed of their work situations as forced prostitution, as most people are. (2011:16) Most of the hostesses have no intent to become prostitutes when they come to Japan and are often informed and recruited by “older kin, neighbors, and friends” who are in Japan already employed as hostesses—those who are able to provide accurate on-the-ground information to them. (2011:18) This is a crucial process that should be highlighted as part of the drive for their transnational movement.

For the transgender hostesses, the situation of their work and their motivation for transnational labor migration is quite different. Most of Parreñas’ transgender hostess informants were highly educated in the Philipines, graduating from some of the best schools in the country. However, the perception of them as bakla (an umbrella term that transgender women are included under in the Philipines alongside “homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, cross-dressers, and effeminate men”) keeps them away from professional jobs that reflect their education. (2011:20) Because of the gender hierarchy that places bakla at the bottom beneath the cisgender binary, finding work is difficult. As one hostess states: “‘Who would hire a man who dresses like a woman and has boobs? No one.’ (2011:21)” Many of them refer to Japan as “paradise of the bakla”, because of more public tolerance for their presence (thus less public sexual harassment) and they “appreciated the anonymity of their life in Japan” because “outside” of the club, they were not objects of spectacle.” (2011:22) In other words, their presence is comparatively more normalized, indicating a system of gender hierarchy that is perhaps less rigid for transgender individuals in Japan. Thus in committing to migrating to Japan and pursuing a career as hostesses, the pressure of harassment for transgender Filipinos is lessened, and prospects of employment increase. I suspect that the nature of hostess career that entails paradigmatic feminine performances places them within the gender binary, thus moving them further up the gender hierarchy, and thus possibly more accepted by the mainstream Japanese society.

The cases of both cisgender and transgender Filipino hostesses working in Japan show how gender hierarchy is not a monolithic structure but rather a type of flexible hegemony that takes on different shapes in different contexts. For the cisgender female hostesses, the gender hierarchy that places men above them through financial capital is legible in both the Filipino and the Japanese contexts; however, the key lies in their agency to choose this career path and migrational trajectory because these choices enable greater financial freedom from which their entire family benefits. For the transgender hostesses, the move to Japan to become hostesses is an act to change their environment from a less to a more tolerant one, one that shifts their position within the gender hierarchy of the Philipines to the less rigid one of Japan, at least for transgender individuals. To study this highly gendered profession from both the perspectives of the cisgender female hostesses and the transgender hostesses, we are able to observe the different ways labor migrants navigate the gender hierarchy and to see its complex nature across nation-state borders.

Bibliography

Allison, Anne. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Ebook Central. Chicago and London: 1994.

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Ebook Central. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. "Transnational Fathering: Gendered Conflicts, Distant Disciplining and Emotional Gaps." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 7 (2008): 1057-072.

Takeyama, Akiko. Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club. Stanford, California, 2016.