Starting in July I start my internship in Flushing. I have been looking for a way to change the subject of my study from the markets in Sunset Park to the ones on Flushing Main Street. However, the difference between Sunset Park and Flushing communities prevents this change. To my knowledge, Flushing is more ethnically diverse compared to Sunset Park; the Asian community in Sunset Park is mostly Fuzhounese while Flushing has a flourishing Korean population, people from various Chinese provinces, and people all across Asia.
Nostalgia might be guiding my judgment but Sunset Park reads and is set up as a tight-knit community. The streets are tighter while Flushing’s streets are wide, giving it a sense of increased mobility. Something about the fact that the physical space is tighter in Sunset Park enforces proximity among the inhabitants. Proximity enhances the probability of networking and relationship-building in Sunset Park. To this day my family still benefits from the relationships that they’ve maintained in Sunset Park. This sense of closeness, in architectural and metaphorical manners, makes Sunset Park unique.
One thing that remains common across both places is that women are at the checkouts while men stock the shelves. This gendered division of labor isn’t uncommon as Martin Tolich and Celia Briar’s research details how women are often confined to stationary and customer service-related jobs while men are tasked with labor jobs that require little to no customer service. In one of their case studies a store manager believed that women were better equipped than men to handle the emotional labor of customer service. The prevalence of gender norms, expectations, and performance influence how certain supermarkets run. This structure tends to be more present and rigid within larger or corporate supermarkets whereas smaller venues are more likely to have people regardless of gender in different roles.
My initial feeling of these markets as family operations stems from the performance of both age and gender. Through the reenactment of their gender and age-based jobs, each laborer performs a specific set of gender norms and expectations. Thinking of work families in supermarkets as a performance of family marks another shift in my research since it can be easily discredited by the fact that some businesses are simply family-owned. The next step in my research is for me to go shopping and to pay special attention to who is handling my food, who is registering it, and who is tending to it.
