Summary Of Miliann Kang's Managed Hand

Miliann Kang’s Managed Hand talks about Korean nail salons and how intersectionality plays a role in domestic service. Intersectionality is the intersections between gender, class, and race. To examine the oppression of the women in the Korean nail salons, you must look at their gender, race, and class. Kang states that “gender, as enacted through the body labor in the feminized niche of nail salon, can both disrupt ideologies of race and immigration as well reinforce discrimination and exclusion” (17). You cannot talk at one of those things without mentioning the others, as they are all interconnected. Domestic service refers to people working in private homes, doing housework and taking care of their children. For example, many upper class white Americans have nannies to take care of their children and clean up around the home.
Body labor according to Kang is “the process of assigning market value to bodies-their appearance, functions, and the forms of contact between them-generates new forms of work” (36). An example of this shows that you can easily just pay for a massage from a place on your way home, instead of just getting one from a family member. Many of these nails salons are in white middle and upper class neighborhoods because they want to cater to them and make more money. The white women that go to these nail salons do not realize what they are doing. “Gendered service practices intersect with dominant representations of the Asian model minority in ways that uphold the racial and class privilege of white middle-class and upper-class customers white reinforcing notions of Asians as a laudable but still marginalized group” (Kang, 30). They say that they go to these nail salons because they assume that Koreans are good and skilled at dealing with nails. They see them as the model minority because they do their job well and they expect a nice attitude from the nail