I. Affective Labor

A. Kuan on affect and childrearing in China: rich in human capital, attuned to others and environment, flexible, resilient, and responsible for self
B. Affect serves interests of nations and corporations
C. Middle classes develop feelings of ease and satisfaction, excitement and passion

1. As with 17 arch bridge, positive affect must be produced
2. Immaterial labor in service economy produces feelings, not things

D. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1986): flight attendants

1. Uncompensated emotional performances because essentialized
2. Authentic versus real emotions

E. Contemporary global outsourcing of affective labor

 

II. Call Centers

A. Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta: call center workers in Bangalore, India perform intimate labor involving personal information and feelings
B. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) began in 1990s

1. Communication technologies
2. Data entry and transcription
3. Today: finance, secretarial work, and human relations services

C. Mankekar and Gupta build upon Hochschild's concept of emotional labor

1. Question true versus false emotions
2. Doing work creates workers as particular kinds of laboring subjects
3. Workspace as intense: "the intense concentration woven into the tightness of a young woman's body as she leaned forward in her chair to persuade a customer to clinch a deal, the determined smile of another young woman as she attempted to coax her customer to divulge information demanded by the client company, the sagging shoulders of a young man as he realized that his customer was being 'noncompliant'" (25).
4. Agents produce brand value through emotion
5. Customer satisfaction = primary metric to measure effectiveness of labor

D. Effects on workers

1. Work performed at night disrupted bodily rhythms
2. Relationships, including sexual, with coworkers
3. Harassment by callers

E. "Theories of affective labor enable us to examine the relationship between capitalism and embodiment by foregrounding the corporeal body whose bodily processes are being reshaped by the logics of capital and technology, in short, not just the laboring body but the feeling body" (38).
F. Professional acts of sympathy generate workers' senses of self

 

III. What is call center work actually like?

A. Physical, mental, or emotional toll? Opportunities for friendships and fun
B. Padios: "Indeed, call center workers must contend with callers' demands--often delivered with irritation and insults--as well as management's panoptic measures of their productivity" (39).
C. Distorted economic growth: little investment in agricultural productivity, call center workers earn more than CPAs or college professors

 

IV. Sex Work

A. Hoang: sex work = part of global hierarchies of masculinity, fundamentally reshaped by 2008 global economic crisis and emergence of East Asia as an economic center
B. "(1) what corresponding masculinities are produced in relation to current shifts in global capital markets, and (2) how do different groups of men use women's labor to assert their superiority in relation to other men and to affirm or contest Western superiority?" (508)
C. Hostess clubs: "sex workers in bars catering to elite Vietnamese men act as informal brokers of social capital in spaces of leisure and entertainment, serving to ease tensions between party officials, private entrepreneurs, and foreign investors" (508).
D. Main argument: "Although scholars have paid much attention to these financial shifts, we know very little about how global economic insecurity coupled with new intra-Asia flows of capital influence interpersonal relations in general and masculinities in particular. Foreign direct investments (FDI) are not disembodied flows of economic capital; rather, FDI is embodied in relations that reshape how men in less-developed Asian countries imagine their path toward modern nationhood. Moreover, these transformations also influence how Western men affirm their masculinity abroad as they come to terms with capital flight to Asia" (510).
E. Vietnam's economic situation

1. Annual growth of 8% since joining World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2006
2. Foreign Direct Investment = US$ 11 billion in 2010
3. Sources of Foreign Direct Investment, 2010 (Hoang 2014, 511)

F. Four types of clubs: foster business, new world order in which Western masculinity is no longer dominant, Western men "displace their status anxieties onto women's bodies" (512)

1. Western budget travelers (Naughty Girls)

a. Backpacker part of town
b. Workers = darker skinned, lots of makeup: exotic beauty
c. Cater to Western men's traditional gender expectations on a budget
d. Western men at backpacker bars depict Asian men as less masculine
e. Beer costs $1-2

2. Western men investing in small-scale projects (Secrets)

a. Help negotiate Western men's lower status
b. View backpacker bars as seedier, lower class
c. Experiences of economic failure in NY or London--> marginalization in global financescape
d. Speak Vietnamese, engage in long-term relationships
e. "Instead of contesting hierarchies of race, nation, and class in the global imaginary, these men actively affirmed First World and Western superiority" (520).

3. Overseas Vietnamese men who are nostalgic (Lavender Bar)

a. Prior to 2006, overseas Vietnamese had been most lavish spenders on sex work
b. Women deferential to reflect Asia's rise; perform traditional femininity to cater to clients' nostalgia
c. Western men largely denied access
d. Bottle service at $150-200 apiece
e. Men see themselves as treated better than in US

4. Elite Vietnamese clients trying to get Asian investment (Khong Sao)

a. Hostesses and workers project confidence to fuel direct investment and capitalist speculation
b. US$250 or more on bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label
c. Conspicuous tipping to display status
d. Deferential behavior, including clinking glasses
e. Elaborate bill paying
f. "These dramatic performances within the bars alluded to men's economic performance in the new global economy; thus, masculinity is not always performed in relation to femininity. Rather, men also achieve their masculinity, albeit in gendered spaces, vis-a-vis other men through displays of wealth. Hostess bars provided Vietnamese men with the space necessary to engage in male rituals, constructing themselves as Vietnamese of a certain class who were succeeding in the midst of rapid economic restructuring and a turbulent global economy" (525).
g. Customers with less money might grab women, be embarrassed about inability to compete

G. New global financial order is created in clubs: "[T]he world of high finance and business is never divorced from intimate life. Transnational capital flows and intimate life are linked in a circle of performative displays of consumerist distinction, hypermasculinity, and stylized femininity. Men's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex. Men are purchasing status and dignity, and working to protect their precarious positions in the global order. As male clients and female sex workers interact, they reproduce hierarchies of desire and desirability outside macro-level institutions such as nation-states, from the bottom up through the relations between individuals in the mundane discourses and practices that construct new hierarchies in everyday life" (527).

 

V. Prostitution as Moral Barometer (Robert)

A. Prostitute = figure of moral panic
B. "The appeal to morality and the shaming of women at the forefront of the new commodification of economic and personal relations can be understood as a disavowal of new desires -- for money, power, and sex, but also perhaps for liberation from social norms and patriarchal gender roles" (54).