Hand-in-Hand Across the Counter: The Counter-Geography of the Transnational Vietnamese Nail Industry
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Abstract
How do Vietnamese nail technicians navigate and respond to the global demand for beauty labor, and how does the nail industry function as a physical and figurative mobility infrastructure? Vietnamese women without formal higher education credentials comprise over 80% of nail salon workers in the United States and heavily contribute to the $14 billion in annual remittances to Vietnam (UCLA Labor Center 2018; World Bank Open Data 2023). Despite their felt impacts on their sending and receiving countries, the women behind this intimate labor are largely unseen and unheard. My research addresses a critical gap in the existing literature on the making and transnationalization of the Vietnamese nail niche. By focusing on Hồ Chí Minh City—a pre-migratory site—I uncover the upstream dynamics of the international nail industry through the institutions and narratives left behind. Inspired by sociologist Saskia Sassen, I conceptualize the Vietnamese/American pipeline as a countergeography of globalization, particularly as a cross-border labor market emerging outside of and alongside formal systems of global corporate capital. Through a mixed-methods approach combining interviews, global information systems mapping, and social media content analysis, I evaluate the global circuits of capital and care underlying nail work, specifically how nail academies cultivate a global labor market with migration as their main selling point and how Vietnamese women understand their participation in and contributions to the transnational personal service sector as a responsibility beyond themselves. All in all, my Independent Study Project argues that the transnational nail industry is an emerging countergeography of globalization, and Vietnamese women strategically mobilize this infrastructure of survival, care, and mobility.
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Citation
Nguyen, Rachel, "Hand-in-Hand Across the Counter: The Counter-Geography of the Transnational Vietnamese Nail Industry" (2025). Vietnam: Culture, Social Change, and Development. 5.
https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/vnr2/5