UCLA

Through a case study of women moonlighting as karaoke hostess girls in Los AngelesKoreatown’s underground nightlife, I investigate the colonial connections between the historical racialization and fetishization of women and feminized labors in the context of U.S. militarization, colonialization, and Orientalism and how these frameworks have directly impacted women participating in contemporary forms of feminized labor in ethnic economies such as Los Angeles Koreatown. Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews of women working as karaoke hostess girls in Los Angeles Koreatown’s Korean karaoke bars, I trace their (in)formal social networks and capital building, aesthetics, performativity, and affective labors within and outside the workplace, examining how hostesses, both unknowingly and knowingly, build kinships and feminist solidarities across ethnic and socioeconomic borders despite the historical and colonial genealogical impact that pervade their labor environment and work dynamics, providing a more nuanced understanding of feminized labor within transnational ethnic service economies. Past studies on hostessing work have focused primarily on the experiences of lower-class Korean and Japanese migrant women partaking in hostessing work, centering the workplace and highlighting hostess work as a form of precarious labor and conflated the labor to that of utilized solely for upward socio-economic mobility. In my research, the objective is to comprehensively explore the experiences of multi-ethnic women hailing from diverse cultural backgrounds and seeks to transcend the conventional focus on Korean and Japanese migrant women commonly associated with hostessing work. I aim to uplift the experiences and voices of my co-conspirators, searching for insights into the challenges, opportunities, informal and formal networks, and social dynamics of this highly feminized and contentious form of labor. This act of re-centering of experiences of hostesses through prioritizing their perspectives, stories, and experiences holds the power to illuminate nuances of the workers themselves instead of sensationalizing them and their labor. This deliberate shift not only provides a direct counter-narrative to prevailing masculine and patriarchal narratives pervasive in both the global workplace and everyday existence.