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.