ABSTRACT
Women’s sexual labour in South Korea and Japan’s capitalist consumer cultures today is offered as part of a wide variety of commodified services – erotic dancing,
bar hostessing, and barbershop massage, not to mention outright prostitution. As such, it deserves more scholarly attention as quintessentially gendered customary care labour in the masculinist sexual culture. Its economic contribution to the gross domestic product has yet to be comprehensively acknowledged in accounts of the proverbial “economic miracles” of postwar Japan and postliberation Korea. It is remarkable that scholarly works on the relationship between gender and work in East Asian economic development – including those written by female researchers (such as Brinton 1993) – have routinely ignored the contribution of women’s public sexual labour to these countries’ economies.
