The Managed Hand Summary

In “The Managed Hand”, occurrences of manicuring services framed complicated emotional and embodied interactions between different women. Two women sit across each other in a nail salon, but are differentiated by class and race. The manicurist is engaged in Kang’s analysis based on “body labor” which includes physical labor of managing the bodily appearance of the customer through touching, manicuring, and emotional labor of exhibiting feelings that encourage delightful feelings in the customers about themselves as a whole (20). It demands workers to control how they feel about their job, that shows they care about their customer. Kang analyzes different structures of service provisions that are shaped by racial and class inequalities …show more content…
Korea service providers learn to answer to white middle and upper class customers emotional, pampering and physical pleasure, consequently reinforcing the hidden sense of privilege held by customers. The expressive execution of creating artful nails and fixing likely complications with black working class customers, while regulating relationship, serves to stress racial significance in these interactions and impose a feeling of differentiation. The routinized style of body labor indicates the collective state of women whose bodies are privileged nor diseased, but plainly handled with routine …show more content…
For example, Sandy in the upscale nail salon while everyone was working on improving their English, instead rather hindered talking and used it as means to refuse the character of submissive model minority and not picking obvious cues such as when the customer wanted to change her polish and Sally instead said “oh dry you want dry, go over there”. (153). Also through simple refusal to perform a certain work such as in the cross town nail salon a customer wanted to mix two nail polish and the manicurist simply just refused not to do what she wanted because it was not possible (107). Consequently, they resist the inequality by mocking the customer’s crucial expenses in their nails, subverting the authority of their white middle class customers. Such as when there are no customers they just sit and paint each others nails and act like the customers, turning the situation into a comical one (156). Also, some “internalize” the service principles and empathize with top-level of their customers, occasionally gaining a feeling of standing through relationship. (157). The Korean owners of Downtown nails learnt to show respect for their black working class customers and ventured to improve their interaction and reject the Korean-black dispute ideology