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- Convenors:
-
Claudia Liebelt
(FU Berlin)
Anne Kukuczka (University of Zurich)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel examines embodied and multisensorial aesthetics in the global service sector. Drawing on ethnographies of workers' experiences of navigating labour markets, it seeks to highlight the role of bodily transformations and aesthetic labour for investigating power dynamics and labour chains.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines the role of aesthetics in the making of personnel for the global service economy. Rather than based on an increase in knowledge and technological growth, as posited by mainstream economics, the tertiarization of the global economy is linked to an undoing of sustainable ecologies and local livelihoods. Scholars have examined processes of commercialisation and professionalisation in intimate services that are tied to postcolonial, gendered, and racialized inequalities. In urban centres, intimate and representational service work, such as (hotel) housekeeping, beauty service, domestic, sex or retail work are often carried out by migrant workers or those from disadvantaged social strata. To compete for these jobs, prospective labourers are commonly required to transform their self-representation and appearance to project the “right” kind of subjectivity before, during, and after recruitment. Recruitment itself might form part of comprehensive labour chains and migration infrastructures that extract further value from workers with the promise of enhancing competitiveness. Along these chains, multiple actors participate in the reshaping of bodies and the creation of desirable subjects, based on projections of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism. How do prospective workers experience and navigate this terrain to fulfil dreams, improve their lives, and gain access to service sector jobs? We invite contributions that explore the multisensorial aesthetic labour which forms part of these jobs and global labour chains, proposing that the production of affective body images is integral to the understanding (and undoing) of power dynamics in the global economy.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Urbee Bhowmik (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad)
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights the intimate labour that paid domestic workers in Kolkata must perform to ‘maintain’ a desirable appearance. It shows how women in this work are compelled to perform unpaid labour to cater to demands of moral and aesthetic hygiene in their workplaces.
Paper long abstract:
Paid domestic work, within the context of India, has been ubiquitous yet deprived of the necessary attention in discussions on labour. The very nature of the work and its setting add greater invisibility to the work, already obscured by women’s domination of the workforce. This paper aims to highlight the intimate labour expected of the woman’s body in this work, in the context of Kolkata, a city that sees high prevalence of domestic work. As part of an ongoing doctoral project, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork being carried out for over a year among paid domestic workers in Kolkata.
Findings from the study point out that the body of the domestic worker is central to the performance of the work. In the context of caste inequality, the body of the domestic worker represents the ‘dirty’ deprived caste body who represents a threat to the moral hygiene of the upper caste household. The body of the domestic worker, then, must be ‘maintained’ such that the threat to hygiene can be removed as much as possible. Towards this, the domestic worker is compelled to expend considerable labour towards keeping up a clean appearance. This is the hidden labour that the woman must perform like washing clothes regularly and keeping her body free of odours. The domestic worker, then, is subject to a regime of visual and sensorial hygiene that draws out unpaid labour from her, for the successful performance of her paid labour.
Anne Kukuczka (University of Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the promise, ambiguity and limits of aesthetic labour which young Nepali women who train in private cabin crew training institutes with the dream of working for an international airline must navigate when participating in airline recruitment events in the capital Kathmandu.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research, this paper examines aesthetic labour as it is experienced by young Nepali women who join private cabin crew training institutes with the dream of working for an international airline. Training institutes operate on the promise that the acquisition of proper skills as well as multisensorial bodily and personal transformations significantly increase trainees’ success chances for recruitment into (inter)national airlines. Trainees’ journeys towards flying, framed by institutes as “glamorous dream jobs” regardless of the prospective airline and destination country, however, are characterised by high levels of uncertainty. One reason for this is that lengthy and laborious recruitment processes are often mediated by intermediaries including training institutes and international recruitment agencies which form part of an extensive “migration infrastructure” (Xiang & Lindquist 2014) such as between Nepal and the Gulf countries.
For trainees, Nepal’s position within global labour chains, becomes palpable not only through a perceived lack of information and inconsistent physical requirements, but also their supposedly failed embodiment of international airline standards. In this paper, I use the concept of aesthetic labour – it’s promise, ambiguity and limits – as a means to scrutinize frictions within migration infrastructures as they pertain to and are made visible by young women’s experiences of embodied and multisensorial aesthetics. Specifically, I highlight how variously positioned trainees made sense of and came to terms with being (un)successful in a series of recruitment events for airlines based in the Gulf countries which were hosted in Kathmandu in 2022 and 2023.
Hareem Khan (California State University, San Bernardino)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from interviews with Ayurvedic practitioners and beauty entrepreneurs, this paper examines ethnicized traditions, practices, and commodities and the ways they confront Western liberal discourses of multiculturalism as well as aesthetic productions of a global India sanctioned by the state.
Paper long abstract:
Ayurveda is marketed as one of the oldest indigenous medical systems of the Indian subcontinent, dating back thousands of years. It includes a set of aesthetic practices, commodities, applications, and traditions geared toward longevity and holistic health that can be seen by the burgeoning of Ayurvedic wellness and beauty industries in Los Angeles represented by spas, clinics, retreat centers, credentialing courses, and skincare and makeup lines. In this paper, I explore this growing industry, set within and against the backdrop of “multicultural” Los Angeles, where Ayurveda circulates as a challenge to the identity politics some participants believe is endemic to Americanness through claiming Ayurveda as holistic, universal, and spiritually-bound. At the same time, Ayurveda gets firmly lodged into the mechanics of the market and gets tethered to the desires of neoliberal autonomy and neoliberal multiculturalism. This is evidenced by the recent growth of Ayurveda beauty companies founded by South Asian and South Asian American entrepreneurs who utilize the lexicon of diversity and representation to authenticate their businesses as grounded in "realness" and embedded in a racial or ethnic genealogy tracing back to India. Drawing from interviews with South Asian and South Asian American Ayurvedic practitioners and beauty industry representatives based in and out of Los Angeles, I examine these entangled racial formations that draw on representation, belonging, and authenticity to either extend or challenge Western liberal discourses of multiculturalism as well as productions of a global India sanctioned by the Indian state.
Suchismita Chattopadhyay (BML Munjal University)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnography of image consultants in Delhi, catering to the aspirational youth and the moneyed elite, this paper will demonstrate how an aesthetic and cultural ‘fit’ is fashioned through the work on appearance.
Paper long abstract:
The new economic reforms of 1991 led to the emergence of a consumption-driven economy and a booming service industry, producing new aspirations and sensibilities. Delhi’s new ‘world-class’ spaces of employment, pleasure and consumption demand new modes of belonging. At the level of the workforce in the service industry, belonging is mediated by proficiency in English and soft skills. Similarly, the clients also must demonstrate a knowledge of taste and distinction that goes beyond possessing the monetary means to consume. However, neither of these dispositions and skills are naturally given. To nourish the aspirations of belonging to a globalised economy, grooming schools have become very popular in Delhi. They range from English lessons to finishing schools to image managers. This paper is concerned with the curation of the perfect image hinging on the labour of appearance. Through an ethnography of image consultants in Delhi, catering to the aspirational youth and the moneyed elite, this paper will demonstrate how an aesthetic and cultural ‘fit’ is fashioned through the work on appearance. Since appearance is intangible and abstract, I invoke a specific category of the ‘ungroomed other’ derived from the field to argue how appearance and taste that are ostensibly ‘global’ and ‘urbane’ are mediated by the aesthetics of caste and class.
Rano Turaeva (Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich)
Paper short abstract:
The paper will bring various forms of post-Soviet body politics in post-Soviet Central Asia such as correcting bodies, governing bodies and politics of perfect bodies which goes back to Soviet and also socialist ideologies of healthy lifestyle and healthy bodies.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will bring various forms of post-Soviet body politics in post-Soviet Central Asia such as correcting bodies, governing bodies and politics of perfect bodies which goes back to Soviet and also socialist ideologies of healthy lifestyle and healthy bodies. The contribution will include diverse case studies from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan namely invisible lives of disabled, banning beauty salons, and other examples of politics of perfect bodies. Gendered bodies, governed bodies are largely part of authoritarian body regimes conducted in Central Asia. The examples also include present realities of disabled individuals and those with no perfect bodies and their lives in Central Asia. Two autobiographies of women from a village in Turkmenistan and a city in Uzbekistan as well as recent ban of new Turkmen president who announced various rules for women such as ban on beauty procedures and criminalising artificial beauty. Theoretically the paper will deal with the question of agency and spaces where individual lives take place outside the public, in the shadow of invisibility and often behind the walls of institutions following Moor`s concept of “lived anatomy” or bodily praxis. Individual lives from the perspective of bodily experiences are embedded in the past and present ideological regimes of Soviet ideal bodies which was promoted through propaganda, media and other sources as part of Soviet project of creating ideal Homo Sovietikus throughout its territory (also in Central Asia) and beyond. Multiple spheres where physical body was in focus created a kind of body regimes to control and promote Soviet bodies creating a certain kind of values and requirements to human bodies where there was no place for other bodies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the ideals and demands for perfect bodies did not dissolve in Central Asia. Soviet/socialist ideals of human body still define social acceptance of other bodies leading to dramatic situations for disabled and others. The contribution is based on a decade long (since 2005) ethnographic research in Central Asia.