"With chapters exploring how Filipina female and transgender hostesses manage love, flirtation, and morality in Japan, Parreñas deepens the reader''s understanding of the socially constructed nature of these phenomena. Comparing the situations of female and transgender hostesses also provides an excellent intersectional analysis of hostessing as, for example, transgender hostesses reported much more satisfaction with their work conditions than did female hostesses overall."-- Bernadette Barton, American Journal of Sociology "With insight, brio, and compelling empirical evidence, Rhacel Parreñas offers a novel interpretation of Filipino hostesses working in Japan. Boldly departing from standard accounts that treat all migrant hostesses as equal victims of sexual trafficking, Illicit Flirtations presents a nuanced portrayal of the women''s multiple labor and sentimental experiences. Scholars and policy-makers should take note."--Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University, author of Purchase of Intimacy and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy "In this superb new study, Parreñas takes her rapt readers into the lives of scantily clad Filipina hostesses in Tokyo nightclubs and into the work of the professional flirter. Caught between money-gouging middlemen, club owners, and anti-trafficking laws, these women live in a labile moral world.
They mix business, body, and heart in complex ways, each making peace with her own mix in her own way. A brilliant work, a must-read."--Arlie Hochschild, author of Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work " Illicit Flirtations brings together riveting ethnography, conceptual innovation, and significant policy implications. Parreñas breathes new life into gender and labor migration scholarship with an analytic focus on sexuality, morality, and money to challenge simplistic notions of trafficked victims. This book prompts us to rethink what we thought we knew about citizenship, intimacy, and work in transnational contexts."--Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California, author of Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "This book is a triumph from a leading scholar of migrant-female labor. In this work of daring ethnography and thinking, Rhacel Parreñas challenges conventional views about sex work and sex trafficking, revealing sex work as not solely prostitution but a continuum of practices, along which issues of volition, morality, and law collide and converge in complex dynamics."--Mae Ngai, Columbia University, author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America " Illicit Flirtations draws on ethnographic immersion to illuminate the little understood reality of Filipina hostesses in Japan.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas''s courageous, nuanced ethnography and provocative analysis of ''indentured mobility'' make vital contributions to our understanding of the social realities of migration and to the debate on the policies that regulate it."--Robert C. Smith, Baruch College, CUNY, author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants "Avoiding broad-brushstroke mischaracterizations of sex-work, Rhacel Parreñas makes an important contribution to transnational feminist scholarship by productively reworking multiple binaries--motion and stasis, fixity and freedom, opportunity and risk--through her concept of ''indentured mobility.'' She refuses to view her subjects as victims in need of rescue by Euro-American feminists, while simultaneously enables a useful analysis of the vulnerability to human rights violations all these women experience."--Susan Stryker, Indiana University-Bloomington, editor of The Transgender Studies Reader " Illicit Flirtations is a daring rethinking of the conditions of trafficking, the nature of sex work, the meaning of citizenship, and the moral classifications given by the worker.