ABSTRACT
Many people have assumed that I study this topic because I am interested in beauty and the beauty industry, but if you take one look at my nails, it’s pretty obvious that this is not the case! In fact, I was interested in studying Asian immigrant women’s work, and this happened to be the niche in which they were heavily concentrated in New York City, where I was attending graduate school. I stumbled upon these salons as I was wandering the streets of various neighborhoods, and I was struck not just by how many were owned by Asians, particularly Koreans, but also how they off ered very diff erent
services depending on the clientele. I was especially interested in salons in predominantly Black neighborhoods, both because of the innovative nail art that they off ered as well as because of what, at least at fi rst glance, were largely cordial relations. Before starting grad school, I had worked on various Korean American community issues, most immediately with the Korean Immigrant Workers’ Advocate in Los Angeles in the aft ermath of the 1992 civil uprising in which over 2,000 Korean stores had been looted and burned. I had also followed the boycott of the Red Apple Market in Brooklyn, which was publicized in highly racialized terms as a confl ict between Koreans and Blacks. Th us, it was fascinating to me that many of these nail salons operated in similar circumstances-that is, Korean immigrants serving Black, working-class communities-yet did not experience overt tensions at the individual or community level. Th is is where the gender piece of it became more central, as I believed that part of what distinguished these nail businesses was that they involved women serving women, but I also knew enough to be suspicious of any kind of essentialist argument that women “naturally” know how to get along better. So, this is where the project became really interesting to me, trying to fi gure out the various intersections with gender that shaped relations between diverse women in these salons.
