Today at Brown

Clad in skintight dresses and cheap sandals, Rhacel Parreñas spent three months working in a Tokyo nightclub owned by the Yakuza — the Japanese mafia. She was working as a “hostess” — entertaining customers by eating and drinking and singing and dancing. To many, it may sound risqué. To her, it was fieldwork.

Parreñas was getting to know dozens of migrant Filipina women who come to Tokyo to work as “entertainers or hostesses.” Her ethnographic work is being compiled for a book, Trafficked (forthcoming from Harvard University Press), which will be one of the few first-hand accounts of a group labeled by the U.S. Department of State as “severely trafficked persons.” She says these women are not trafficked in the way most people think they are.

“We may think their work is sexual in nature, but it’s more nuanced than that. Many of these women simply become indentured,” Parreñas said. “The definition of trafficking is very morally driven in the United States. It needs to be redefined.”

Much of Parreñas’ work is focused on Filipino migration, motivated by her personal background — her parents came to the United States as political refugees. Parreñas received her Ph.D. in ethnic studies and B.A. in peace and conflict studies from the University of California–Berkeley. She previously taught at the University of California–Davis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and was a distinguished visiting professor at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. Her writings, which include three books and more than 30 journal articles, review essays, and book chapters, have been translated and published in five different languages.

Using multi-sited ethnographic research, Parreñas’ other work examines women’s labor, migration, family, and globalization. She has conducted comparative research on Filipino domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, which led to a subsequent project — finding out what happens to the children of those domestic workers who grow up without their migrant mothers or fathers. Another current project, called “Intimate Labor,” brings together the “often discretely examined” labors of care, sex, and domestic work.

“I want to call attention to the new forms of women labor that are emerging in the global society and identify the links between them,” Parreñas said.