Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores how the exposure to the life-styles of global consumerism are scripting a new worker-subjectivity amongst underclass female service workers in Kolkata. india.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the fashioning of a new labour-subjectivity amongst underclass female workers associated with the emerging service industries in Kolkata, India. Through ethnography on entry-level female workers, I suggest, how the female workforce is utilized in creating the appropriate 'atmospheres' of shopping malls or upscale cafés as symbolic of the city's current regeneration. Work in these spheres necessitates the complete reconfiguration of the workers' subjectivities. Their bodily comportments, voice inflections, affective potentials and speech patterns are trained to communicate the embodied thrills of cosmopolitan life-styles to customers, while downplaying the workers' own marginality.

Embodied cosmopolitanism in work environments, however, does not translate into actual possession of the capitalist 'good life' for the women employees. A void persists between the dream worlds of commodities that saturate their everyday lives and the realities of low wages, sexual exploitation and lack of state protection. The lives of young workers thus alternate between the extremes of desire and frustration, exuberance and precariousness. I argue in this paper that the exposure of this underclass female workforce to the habitus of consumer citizenship in metropolitan India today is giving rise to new idioms of gendered aspirations and practices of inhabiting the city that forces us to re-conceptualize the nineteenth century 'Women's Question', with its binaries of inner/outer, for the contemporary period. Not only do these 'New Women' stand in contravention to the class and gender hegemonies of an older female bourgeoisie or Bhadramahilas in Kolkata but also signify unforeseen forms of agency and exploitation.