In
August 2016, when conducting fieldwork for research on women’s
employment in services in Delhi, I walked into a café for a break. As I
stepped into its air-conditioned premises, two workers behind the till
greeted me with big smiles—“Good morning, ma’am”1;
Sheela and Prachi became two of my early and key interlocutors. We
started hanging out at food stalls and in markets after working hours,
when possible. Sheela and Prachi would change out of their work uniforms
and into jeans and tops for these outings, more than once commenting on
how they disliked “traditional” Indian clothing. Although most of their
income went into household expenses, they could save some pocket money
and buy Western wear, modeling themselves after the urban, modern, and
professional image of the “New Indian Woman.” In tandem, both asserted
that they are in employment because they want to be. But as our
relationship outgrew that of customer and workers, they also started
expressing dissatisfaction with their work environment. After Prachi
quit her job over an argument with the café manager, she remarked that
she really disliked having to “keep a plastic smile on the whole day.”
In
this paper, I engage with corporeal changes—including clothing, makeup,
and body language—among young women workers in the new service economy
of Delhi, India, emphasizing workers’ appraisals of these changes.
Globally, the emergence of new forms of service work has generated a new
workforce—young, female, aspirational—to meet the needs of middle- and
upper-class consumers (Freeman 2000; Otis 2011; Radhakrishnan 2011).
The bodies of these neophyte workers require molding to fit into the
urban, consumption-driven, middle-/upper-class milieu of their
workplaces, ranging from hotels, cafés, and shopping malls to call
centers and offices. To what extent do workers willingly, and even
enthusiastically, comply with these requirements, perhaps initiating
body projects as signs of aspiration and upward mobility (Baas and Cayla 2020)?
Conversely, to what extent do workers critically reflect on, and
perhaps even resist, the compulsion to become bodies for consumption in
service work (Casanova and Jafar 2016)?
What do these negotiations reveal about the changing pressures on
women’s bodies in relation to new labor practices? Based on my research
with young lower-middle-class women working across cafés, malls, and
offices in Delhi, I show that young women workers are conscious of and
reflexive about “new body rules” (Otis 2016,
156) as emerging labor practices in urban India. That is, they do not
comply with bodily changes in a straightforward manner. Rather they
recognize, instrumentalize, as well as criticize changes to their bodies
in accordance with their settings.
I draw upon my interlocutor
Prachi’s formulation “plastic smile” to develop the analytic of “plastic
bodies” to understand young women’s reflections on their sartorial
choices and modifications to their comportment and deportment in the
context of socioeconomic change in urban India. The term plastic
has, of course, been widely used in reference to bodies and bodily
practices, particularly those of women. Popular discussions about
plastic surgery, for example, demonstrate the entanglement of women’s
bodies, consumer choices, and modernity (Edmonds and Sanabria 2014; Jordan 2004; Taeyon Kim 2003). The “plasticity” of women’s bodies is also reflected in the evolving images of the “Modern Girl” (Weinbaum et al. 2008) and the “New Woman” (Dhawan 2010; Lau 2010; Oza 2006),
figures that represent ideals of modernization and globalization.
Historically, a key aspect of these constructions has been women’s
“professionalization,” including most recently their entry into new
service work, or what has come to be known as “pink-collar work.”
Whereas emotional labor (Hochschild 2003) is commonly identified as a key characteristic of such pink-collar work (Freeman 2000),
in this paper, I draw attention to the requirement for malleability of
women’s bodies to meet the needs of middle- and upper-class consumption (Otis 2011).
Wolkowitz (2006)
cautions against the tendency to view bodies as infinitely malleable,
highlighting the exhaustion and injuries incurred by bodies at work. In
this paper, I suggest “plastic bodies” as a wider conceptualization to
account for (1) body malleability, (2) its limits, and (3) workers’
appraisal of the same. This wider conceptualization, then, encapsulates
“the mechanisms through which the body expresses its social,
organizational, and historical location as well as the agency of the
body and its material capacities” (Otis 2011, 15). In the way Prachi uses the word plastic,
she refers to the synthetic nature of the ever-present material
plastic. For Prachi, the “plastic smile” was laborious not only because
it involved a modification in her appearance but also, and especially,
because it was a forced modification—that is, she had to smile even
though she did not feel like smiling. Similarly, other
modifications—makeup, clothing, body language—which may enable entry
into service work but not necessarily into better working conditions or
better lives, indicate the synthetic or plastic nature of processes of
modernity and globalization in urban India. I draw upon the philosopher Malabou (2010) (also see Dalton 2019; Malabou and Butler 2011; Sanabria 2016)
to understand plasticity as a simultaneous possibility of construction
and destruction: “plasticity is as much a resistance to change as it is
an openness to it” (Crockett, foreword to Malabou 2010,
xiv). On one hand, plasticity of form offers potential for being
changed as well as effecting change. On the other hand, it generates
fear of being “found out” as plastic, threatening status and
respectability. Conceptualizing “plastic bodies” as both malleable and
synthetic, I draw attention to the ways in which women service workers
negotiate body projects in urban India.
The paper is structured as
follows: I first explore the role of bodies in service work, focusing
on how the expectation of malleability from women’s bodies is a
specifically gendered mechanism of labor discipline. Next, I provide an
overview of the expansion of service work in post-1990 India,
highlighting the uneven terrain of socioeconomic change, and elaborate
on the position of the “New Indian Woman” in services. I then present
findings from my research with young lower-middle-class women in Delhi,
highlighting how they deploy plastic bodies to establish themselves as
respectable professionals, deriving pleasure and confidence from the
process. However, changes to their bodily comportment are continually
under threat of being read as promiscuous and/or inauthentic, thus
generating anxiety. In the conclusion to the paper, I discuss an
expanded concept of plastic bodies drawing upon workers’ appraisal of
emerging body rules in service work in urban India.
Malleable Bodies at Work
The
global expansion of service work has led to new conceptualizations of
the relationship between bodies and work. On one hand, researchers note
the emergence of “emotional labor” or exchange of emotions, made visible
through facial expressions and body language, for wages (Hochschild 2003),
as reflected through Prachi’s comment on having to maintain a “plastic
smile” at the café. On the other hand, researchers explore the expansion
of “body work” or working on others’ bodies (Cohen 2011; Gimlin 2007; Kang 2010),
for example, in nail bars, salons, spas, nursing, care work, and sex
work. Drawing together the various approaches to the body in service
work—whether an instrument for emotions, or a resource for working on
others’ bodies, or on display for consumers—Wolkowitz (2006,
1) proposes the broader framework of “bodies at work” to highlight that
“the body/work nexus is crucial to the organization and experience of
work relations, and, conversely, that people’s experience of embodiment
is deeply embedded in their experiences of paid employment.” By being
attentive to this dialectical relationship between bodies and work, we
can understand how social hierarchies of gender, race, class, and caste
manifest and are negotiated through bodies at work.
Women’s bodies, traversing the world beyond the domestic, have been variously considered “out of place,” even dangerous (Patel 2010), inefficient, and in need of management (Edmonds and Sanabria 2014).
The historical contestations over the embodied figure of the “working
woman,” constructed in conjunction with class, caste, and race, have
served to (re)produce inequalities. The incorporation of women into
factory work was dominated by the discourse of “nimble fingers”—that
women (and specifically “Oriental” women) are naturally inclined toward
labor-intensive tasks, which do not merit higher wages because these are
“natural” rather than “skilled” work (Elson and Pearson 1981). The discourse of nimble fingers, as such, went hand in hand with understanding women as cheap and docile workforce (Reddy 2007; Vodopivec 2010).
In contemporary service work, working-/lower-middle-class workers are
expected to mold their “habitus” to the “dominant symbolic” (Bourdieu 1977; Skeggs 2004)
of the middle- and upper-class service users, compelling a “nimble”
body as a product in itself. The body may be molded through substantive
changes, such as surgical and hormonal interventions (Edmonds and Sanabria 2014; Sanabria 2016)
as well as through transient modifications, such as makeup, clothing,
and body language. While all forms of body plasticity are implicated in a
complex web of emerging labor, gender, and class relations and
aspirations, arguably the latter provide an insight into the nimble
adaptation of the body to the varied settings of work, family, and
neighborhoods, opening a window into the flux of body rules.
In her study of a luxury hotel in Beijing, Otis (2011,
4) notes that “migrant service workers . . . use cosmetics and other
accoutrements in abundance to counter urban stereotypes of rural people
as unclean and backward.” Similarly, in the context of urban India,
employability training at skills training centers in low-income
neighborhoods offers “personality development” courses (Gooptu 2009; Nambiar 2013), which teach workers to adopt the “correct” body postures and body language. Otis (2011,
4) argues that the “aspirational urbanism” of rural workers is destined
for failure: “The systematic attempts to conceal their rural roots at
work . . . only accentuate their rural roots.” A consequence of this
failure is that “Female staff members struggle to defend their dignity
among managers, who view them as backwards, and customers, who, assuming
they are sex workers, frequently touch and proposition them” (Otis 2011,
157). In other words, for women seeking to secure professionalism
through body plasticity (makeup, body language, cosmetic interventions),
even if plasticity is not always already a complete failure, it faces
the constant threat of being read as promiscuity. Requiring
self-management, especially through the outward manifestations of the
body, the need to be respectable is a form of discipline in itself (Otis 2016),
which may be exploited by employers to retain control over workers.
However, workers may negotiate variously with “appropriate corporeality”
or the station assigned to their bodies at work (Casanova 2013)
by both adopting and criticizing, even rejecting, body plasticity. Such
appraisal of plasticity has been paid relatively little attention in
the emerging literature on bodies and service work.
The New Indian Woman and Service Work
In
the three decades following the adoption of economic liberalization in
the early 1990s, India’s service sector has become the largest
contributor to the country’s Gross Domestic Product, as well as one of
the fastest growing service sectors in the world (Economic Survey
2017–18 2018).
Work in relatively new urban workplaces—such as shopping malls, cafés,
call centers, telecoms, and e-retail companies—is distinct from older
forms of service work in terms of its ethic and practices. The tenets of
professionalism, entrepreneurialism, and consumerism characterize such
new service work, which may be particularly attractive for women workers
seeking “respectability” through employment. This is reflected in the
concentration of women in service work in urban areas even as the
overall female labor force participation rate is low.2
These workers engage with the subjective construction of the New Indian
Woman who is no longer only family oriented but is also seeking
empowerment through work (Dhawan 2010; Lau 2010; Oza 2006).
As market demand draws young women into work, their public presence
becomes desirable as a symbol of modern and global India (Ganguly-Scrase2003; also see Hanser 2005).
While
a number of studies explore middle-class women’s entry into information
technology and related services (see, for example, Radhakrishnan 2011; Upadhya 2011),
particularly in emerging urban IT hubs (such as Bangalore), there is
relatively limited scholarship on women from working-/lower-middle-class
backgrounds largely employed in the low end of emerging service work.
Constituting a young, malleable, and relatively inexpensive workforce,
these neophyte workers seek training to become service professionals.
Responding to the class gap in the backgrounds of workers and the new
requirements of work, training centers offering employability skills
courses have mushroomed in urban settings. Fernandes (2000,
92) notes that these courses “prepare students to engage with a
distinctive class culture that characterizes corporate settings . . .
[through] acquisition of manners, taste and style, ‘the symbolic
capital’ (Bourdieu 1984)
perceived as necessary for an upwardly mobile middle class individual.”
In popular discourse, these workers make up an emerging “New Middle
Class.” However, as various scholars have noted, with low pay, insecure
contracts, and limited bargaining power in private service work, workers
encounter significant discrepancies between the discursive construction
and the realities of the New Middle Class (Dickey 2012; Fernandes 2000; Lukose 2009; Upadhya 2011).
In
this context of changing market demand and relatively unchanging
conditions of life, young women must navigate body rules at multiple
stations. Through her study of women call center workers in Mumbai, Patel (2010,
4) points out that “As global customer service workers, women must now
traverse the nightscape” and, therefore, negotiate judgment, disdain,
and violence as women “out of place” (also see Ong 2010, 179-94). Similarly, in Vijayakumar’s (2013,
778) study, women working at a small-town BPO (business process
outsourcing) center near Bangalore in India, distance themselves from
both “old-fashioned housewives and promiscuous urban call center girls.”
These studies highlight the gendered experiences of the new economy in
urban India, where women are desirable as resource and symbol, but are
also a source of moral threat. As the service sector continues to expand
in urban India, it provides a rich context in which to examine the role
women’s bodies and appearances play in both reinforcing and challenging
social hierarchies at work (Talukdar and Linders 2013). I use the analytic of body plasticity to further elaborate on gender and class inequalities in urban India.
Methods, Participants, and Settings
This
paper is based on ethnographic research with young women working in new
services in Delhi; the project explores changing gender and class
relations in the context of socioeconomic change in post-1990 India. The
first stretch of the ethnography was conducted between August 2016 and
May 2017, with follow-up visits in December 2017 and July 2018.
Following the conclusion of the project, I have maintained contact with
the interlocutors through WhatsApp, thus continuing long-term
ethnographic engagement. The selection of Delhi as a site for this
research was determined by multiple factors: (1) As the capital and a
“worlding” city (Roy and Ong 2011),
Delhi is emblematic of urban transformations, characterized by
discourses of growth, development, and modernization, in post-1990
India; (2) in recent years, particularly following the gang rape of a
young woman, Jyoti, in 2012, Delhi has also been the site of extensive
discourse on gender and class (Roychowdhry 2013);
and (3) although I was not previously intimate with Delhi, I had the
advantage of shared language—Hindi—that eased my access to and in the
city. The study was conducted primarily in South Delhi—the diverse
landscape of the area, featuring several expansive malls, high-end
markets, and office buildings, along with posh residential areas as well
as low-income neighborhoods, provides an interesting site for the
exploration of uneven urban development.
The study of women’s work
in contemporary India has been informed largely by surveys, subject to
macro-data analysis, with relatively rare use of ethnographic method (John 2021,
xxix). To understand the complexities of women’s decision making about
work, experiences of paid work, and movement between paid and unpaid
work, I conducted an ethnography of women’s lives situated in the
context of socioeconomic change. I found interlocutors through two main
avenues: (1) by spending time in a café, initially as a customer and
eventually introducing myself as a researcher to the café employees, and
(2) through several non-government organizations (NGOs) and skills
training centers providing education and employability training to young
people. Although I had initially hoped to situate myself in a
workplace, as is conventional with ethnographies of work (Smith 2001),
my early observations revealed that women circulated among various
kinds of short-term jobs in cafes, shopping malls, call centers, and
offices. I therefore decided to follow their working lives rather than paid work in isolation (Islam 2021, 2022).
The
initial contacts I gained through the café, NGOs, and skills training
centers introduced me to their friends, including colleagues, neighbors,
and old school friends. In some cases, a “friend” was all of these
together, indicating networks through which women shared resources and
found work (Andrew and Montague 1998; Green 1998).
Having established an ethnographic group in this way, I spent time with
the interlocutors at their workplaces, in public places such as
shopping malls, street side food stalls, and parks, and occasionally at
their homes, thus encompassing sites of work, leisure, and family. I
prepared field notes based on informal conversations and observations
with the interlocutors, their colleagues and managers, and their
families. These were supplemented by 38 semi-structured interviews,
which were distributed as follows: (1) 18 interviews with women between
the ages of 19 and 23 years (all unmarried) employed in private service
work who formed the core ethnographic group; (2) 17 interviews with
women between 24 and 35 years (8 married, 9 unmarried) employed by NGOs;
and (3) 3 with managers of skills training centers. By keeping the
ethnographic group small, I was able to foster trusting and long-lasting
relationships with the interlocutors, leading to the production of rich
ethnographic data, including on sensitive topics of familial control,
intimate relationships, and sexual harassment. Although a larger number
of interlocutors could have enabled comparisons of age, marital status,
religion, and so on, it would have been at the cost of ethnographic
depth.
In this paper, I draw primarily on the ethnographic
research and interviews conducted with young unmarried women between 19
and 23 years of age and living with their families in one-bedroom flats
in the adjoining low-income neighborhoods of Dakshinpuri and Khanpur.
The interlocutors were either employed or had been employed in the last 6
months, across call centers, cafés, malls, and offices. They earned
between Rs. 8000 and Rs. 12,000 (GBP 80–120) per month, close to the
minimum wage for semi-skilled workers in Delhi in 2016–2017. The
interlocutors identified as “urban” women, having grown up in Delhi.
They highlighted their urbanity to distinguish themselves from dehaati
or rural people primarily on the basis of their education, appearance,
and attitudes. All the interlocutors had completed school to Class XII
(pre-university level), and most were enrolled in undergraduate degree
distance learning programs offered by Delhi University (DU) and the
Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). This is a higher level
of education than attained by the previous generation in their families,
which has become necessary to gain a competitive edge in the demanding
world of service work in Delhi. Although unlike women who migrate from
rural to urban areas for service employment (as is the case in the study
by Otis 2011),
they did not have to counter stereotypes of rural people, they
nevertheless tried to shed their class backgrounds. They described
themselves as “middle” in terms of class, using the term to reflect
their in-between position between the poor and the securely middle
class. While I could claim affinity of gender, nationality, and language
with my interlocutors, our class difference was obvious. On some
occasions, it provided fertile ground for discussions of class—some
interlocutors described me as “high class,” evident through my manners,
appearance, and my residence in the United Kingdom. All of them
addressed me as “Ma’am.” Rather than obliterate this difference in favor
of establishing an insider position as a woman, I engaged in and
encouraged these discussions. This approach is also reflected in my
analysis, where I rely on these young women’s interpretations of their
own lives, rather than impose unfamiliar categories or frameworks on
their narratives (Oakley 2016; Sosulski, Buchanan, and Donnell 2010).
Plastic Bodies in and Beyond Workplaces
Pants, Shirts, and B-grade Work
In
initial days of fieldwork, I got in touch with an NGO that runs
literacy and education programs for young girls who have dropped out of
formal/school education. At the time, they had a center in Khanpur,
which I started attending to gain a sense of the neighborhood. Over
time, I got to know Aradhna, who was the teacher in charge of the
Khanpur center, and I developed some familiarity with the students who
attended the center regularly. On one occasion, Aradhna offered me an
opportunity to speak to her students about my research. I started by
describing my interest in women’s participation in new service work and
mentioned that I would like to meet women who are employed in malls,
cafés, offices, and the like. One of the students said that her elder
sister, Jahanvi, works in Select Citywalk mall, an imposing and
well-known mall in the heart of South Delhi. Another one admiringly
quipped “She wears pants and shirt to work, right?” The job in the mall,
all the girls agreed, requires quite a makeover; women of Khanpur and
Dakshinpuri change their bodily comportment to become professional working women.
After
the class, I accompanied Aradhna to a food stall, and we had a
wide-ranging discussion about Khanpur, women’s work, and gender
equality. Aradhna had been working in Khanpur and Dakshinpuri for almost
6 months by that time. Part of her job was to encourage families in the
area to send their daughters who had dropped out of school to literacy
classes. Through this door-to-door mobilization, Aradhna had gained
extensive knowledge of the neighborhood. She told me that men in the
area are mostly self-employed as electricians, plumbers, and auto
drivers, while women work as domestic help and cooks in private
households. The average family income is around Rs. 15,000 (GBP 150) per
month. This job profile for women seems to be changing though, she
added, with younger women choosing new professions. Aradhna said that
one can tell by the way young women dress up that they work in a mall.
They wear Western clothes and makeup to look sophisticated. It is common
for them to enroll in personality development classes at local training
centers to learn to be “professional.” One of my interlocutors, Priya,
who had previously worked for a call center and attempted job interviews
at McDonald’s and an insurance company, told me that her general
employment training course at one such center included instructions on
body language: “They told us how to behave when we go [for interviews],
you have to wish good morning or good afternoon, you have to maintain eye contact and look straight ahead, don’t move your arms, stand perfectly, shoulders should be straight.” These changes to comportment, Aradhna said, are hyper-visible in the neighborhoods due to their “newness.”
Aradhna
also told me she had a friend who used to work in event management,
putting on shows at malls. Such events often hire women to promote
products and services. These women, Aradhna said, are used as bodies:
They are dolled up with lots of makeup and wear dresses that are rented
out by the event management company. They are not paid per hour but
according to who performs best by attracting the most customers, so they
could earn anything from very little to a substantial amount for a few
hours. Aradhna was critical of this work; she said she does not like the
idea of women’s bodies being used to sell products/services. One of my
interlocutors, Chandni, who had experience of doing ad hoc events and
promotions work, also told me that she is wary of such work. On one
occasion, she was offered an events job for a few days, but when she
turned up at the venue, she disliked the environment. She discovered
that it was a “B-grade event” and they had employed “B-grade girls,”
implying that it was not respectable work; Chandni decided not to return
to that work.
These varied reflections by Aradhna, Priya,
Chandni, and the young students in Khanpur on emerging forms of work,
particularly where women are desirable, are emblematic of the pressures
women’s bodies are subjected to in the new economy. On one hand, the
bodily modifications necessitated by employment in malls, cafes,
offices, and the like—changed appearance and body language—demonstrate
respectable professionalism. On the other hand, the explicit use
of women’s bodies for profit is frowned upon. Indeed, the precarity of
women’s employment is betrayed by the fineness of the line between
professionalism and promiscuity. For young women, it then becomes
necessary to negotiate an “appropriate corporeality” (Casanova 2013) by decoding and carefully engaging with emerging body rules in order to preserve respectability (Radhakrishnan 2009; Vijayakumar 2013).
I elaborate on the analytic of “plastic bodies” in the following
sections as an expansion of possibilities, as further constraints
generated through these very possibilities, and as critical reflection
on these possibilities and constraints.
Plastic Possibilities
I
was introduced to Jahanvi through her younger sister, who used to
attend the Khanpur literacy classes. In our early conversations, Jahanvi
came across as a confident young woman, but as I got to know her,
visiting her both at home and at her workplace, she told me she has not
always been this confident. In initial days of searching for work,
against her father’s wishes, Jahanvi had felt unprepared. At an
interview, when she was asked to talk about herself in English,
she told her prospective employer about her family. The employer
reminded her that she has to talk about herself, but Jahanvi said
“Nobody had ever told me how to do it in the interview, like you don’t
talk about your father and sisters, you have to talk about yourself.”
She realized that she had to change her strategy by focusing on her
appearance:
Then the next day, I went in a black dress. I asked for vacancies, the girls there said there was nothing going, but there was a sir at the back. He asked me to come in. He said there are no vacancies, but you have a very nice face, very attractive, maybe we can keep you . . . Then he said go to our Okhla office and do the interview there, don’t take tension, they’ll select you, I’ll call them. So, I went there and they selected me.
Through
her failure at the last interview, Jahanvi had managed to gather
intelligence about the nature and requirements of work at the mall. She
decided to wear a black dress, which was not a small change of clothes,
but a deliberate change of comportment that could signal her suitability
for service work. Although Jahanvi was aware that she was relying on
her attractiveness to secure a job, this was her way of getting her foot
in the door without having to spend time becoming fluent in English.
Although Jahanvi’s father was initially opposed to her working in the
mall, once she secured this job and started contributing a regular
income to the household, his attitude about work, makeup, and “Western”
clothes changed. Jahanvi thought that this was a response to her not
doing anything “wrong” while working at the mall:
He [my father] used to tell me off for my clothes before, he’d say wear suit salwar [tunic and trousers]. Now he himself tells me to wear pants to work. Before he’d tell me off for even putting on lip balm, now I don’t take off makeup when I come home from work.
Whereas
Jahanvi had to choose her outfit every day, something that she enjoyed
doing, some workplaces required workers to wear uniforms. The café
Prachi and Sheela worked at provided branded uniforms, including
t-shirts, pants, and caps. Interestingly, contrary to the understanding
that uniforms make the bodies of workers invisible (Holliday and Thompson 2001),
young women experienced their bodies as hyper-visible through their
uniforms. Indeed, in India, uniforms have previously been associated
with jobs done predominantly by men, such as drivers and security
guards. For these young women, uniforms thus signal distinction,
especially that of gender, by professionalizing their appearance.
Chandni,
who was doing ad hoc events work at the time, told me that she only
started paying attention to her appearance once she started working. At
school, she used to have oiled and plaited hair and she did not use any
makeup—an image of a simple rural girl. But once she had her own income,
a substantial part of which went into household expenses, she started
buying makeup out of her pocket money:
With
these events jobs, I can save my money and in one year, it could get to
Rs.1 lakh (GBP 1000). I know, as a girl, I don’t have many expenses. Cosmetics, makeup, perfume etc., I can buy in a month, and it costs quite a bit but I use it all for the next three to four months. I don’t compromise on quality with these things though, for my face; I want to use good brands . . .
In
this conversation, Chandni expressed excitement about using makeup and
explained that she does so conscientiously, thus signaling that she is
not wasteful, but that she is also not “cheap.” For Chandni, this
makeover was prompted by her desire to fit into a world that she did not
completely belong in. She told me that her boyfriend, who came from a
better-off family, had made her conscious about her appearance:
He [my boyfriend] just comments on my look a bit, he says I wear bad color combinations, he wants me to wear better clothes . . . I saw all of these girls in his college, you know, I can’t believe, I saw their shorts, their legs, their face, they’re so cute!
Chandni’s
critical reflection on her appearance, although prompted by her entry
into work, extended to life beyond work, suggesting that subjectivities
formulated at work through seemingly surface transformations are
embedded in broader changes in gender and class relations (Johri and Menon 2014).
In part, Chandni modified her appearance to appeal to her boyfriend’s
aesthetic sensibility. But her body work was less about being desirable
to men, and more about attempting to belong in certain classed spaces.
By wearing makeup, Chandni could emulate the young women in her
boyfriend’s college, even if she did not have the resources to enter
“regular” college education like them. Further, her boyfriend’s remarks,
she believed, were only well-meaning and conducive for her future
aspirations: “after marriage too, he wants me to work. And I really like
that.” In this way, Chandni articulated a mutual relationship between
her changed appearance and work: Her income provided her access to this
new self, and this new self in turn helped her become a professional
woman.
Women’s appearance—including makeup and fashion—is an
underexplored topic in academic scholarship, often dismissed as women’s
participation in or compliance with their own sexual objectification.
However, for these young women, their changed appearances are connected
specifically to their participation in the new economy (Hatcher 2019).
Contesting the oppression/agency dichotomy, the need to assert oneself
through appearances that signal “belonging” has been noted in the
context of “race” in the workplace, whereby for Black women “wearing
makeup is a necessary part of being respected as women of color in a
racist world” (Dellinger and Williams 1997).
Similarly, for these young women, body plasticity offers them the
capacity to fit into service work, expand their future prospects, and to
a certain extent, effect changes in attitudes among their families and
others in close proximity to them, shaping processes of modernization in
urban India.
Limits to Plasticity
Prachi’s
reflection on her “plastic smile,” Priya’s list of correct body
postures, Jahanvi’s decision to wear a black dress, and Chandni’s
indulgence in makeup are all deliberate actions that young women
adopt for and through their employment in service work. This
self-management is significant because it sparks reflection on these
changes to the body, which in turn implies that young women contend with
this plasticity being plastic or synthetic. While the young
girls at the literacy classes in Khanpur admiringly noted that women who
work at the mall wear pants and shirts, such changes were constantly at
threat of being read as promiscuous rather than professional by
families and neighbors as well as by (male) colleagues, managers, and
customers at work.
Many young women reported community scrutiny of
their changed appearance, particularly adoption of Western clothes and
makeup. Neha, who worked as a sales assistant at a shop in the mall,
described the unease that her neighbors caused her:
That happens a lot. You get dressed, you go out in jeans and top, see the girl is roaming around . . . Nobody looks at themselves. If our parents don’t have a problem, then why do you have a problem? But then I don’t care either . . . Like when I used to come here for the job. People would say their girl is going out, she’s started doing a job, she comes back so late at night, wonder what the area is like, she comes through lonely roads . . . all of these comments would start. And even when we’d shower and get ready, for a party or something, even a little makeup, they’d say their girls are going out like this.
Although
Neha asserted that she does not care, such scrutiny about their new
appearances made women and their families anxious. Often the result was
that families restricted women’s employment to workplaces that were
close to their homes and offered morning shifts, thus limiting their
opportunities. Women also had to carefully manage their appearance when
traveling from home to work (and vice versa). When I hung out with
Prachi and Sheela after they finished work, both changed out of their
uniforms and dressed up in jeans and t-shirt in the café toilet (there
were no changing or staff rooms). They did so to avoid walking in their
own neighborhoods in work clothes that, while affording them
professional appearance, may nevertheless invite judgment from
neighbors.
Women workers also had to carefully toe the line
between professionalism and promiscuity to ward off sexual harassment
from colleagues, managers, and customers. Deepti, who worked for a
multinational café chain, had gone through training and transformation
processes as other interlocutors—learning new body vocabulary, gaining
fluency in English, and putting on makeup. In the café, she said she was
wary of “old sleazy men” and “druggies” who try to touch the girls when
they serve them. She described managing this by establishing distance
from them literally by positioning her body in a way that they couldn’t
reach her. This management of sexual harassment was more difficult when
perpetrated by managers and colleagues. Some workers reported leaving
work because they did not want to make a “big issue” out of it, fearing
that their parents would stop them from going to work completely. Others
negotiated this threat by distinguishing themselves from their female
colleagues. Jahanvi, for example, noted:
Sir comments on them [girls in the café], especially on Poonam. Poonam is a hot kind of girl, she’s quite an item.
Sir would say, “Poonam, your back looks amazing, wow!” I don’t
understand how girls tolerate this. She’d just say, “Oh sir, please
don’t say all this.” I don’t think you should tolerate so much. I told
her, “Poonam, don’t think you won’t get another job, if you don’t like
it you can quit.” But she’s still working there. If I heard so much,
there must be other stuff he says to her. But I’m not that kind of girl.
Jahanvi
also reported that her male colleagues spoke suggestively about women
workers, evaluating their (sexual) worth in money, but Jahanvi asserted
that she was spared these insults because she behaved responsibly at
work. While sexual harassment appeared to be a common reason for women
leaving work, which has implications for their progression, my
interlocutors did not necessarily name it as such. Instead, they
reflected on how their bodies could send the wrong signals by virtue of
being working women and how they had to be responsible for managing this
themselves.
Young women reflected on deficiencies in their
attempts to professionalize their bodies as well as on the failure of
workplaces to maintain the professed professionalism in service
employment. They expressed anxiety about either not passing as or
passing too well as upper/middle class. Chandni suggested that her
appearance differentiated her from other girls in the neighborhood; she
worried that she could be perceived as dressing up to deceive people.
She felt the need to come clean about her origins to her boyfriend at
the time, who was from a better-off family (as is partly indicated by
his family’s ownership of a car):
I told him
[my boyfriend] everything about me, where I come from, where I belong to
. . . I thought he might think the girl looks smart, her father might have a lot of money. I told him not to go by my looks. He used to take me out in his car and all . . .
Similarly,
although changing the way she dressed had helped Jahanvi secure a
previous job, she was not entirely confident that she was doing it
right. She was only too aware of the fragility of the reliance on her
appearance to stay in work. She emphasized that she actually worked
really hard, and that it was not just her good looks but also her charm
that helped her to build relationships with customers, ensuring that
they returned to the café. She also added that it helps that there are
no other women workers at the café, joking that she enjoys the exclusive
attention of male colleagues and customers. Her navigation between
enjoying the attention of men and keeping them at a distance to avoid
sexual harassment reflects the tensions inherent in body plasticity.
Finally,
young women also identified and reflected on the deficiencies in their
attempts to professionalize their bodies as well as on the failure of
workplaces to maintain the professed professionalism of service work.
This is demonstrated by Prachi’s remark on the compulsion to maintain a
“plastic smile” in the café, even when the conditions of work were not
exactly conducive to smiling. Prachi had undergone 10 days of training
before starting work at the café. This training, she suggested, created a
make-believe world, not consistent with the standards at the café:
It was so formal in the training. Shirt, pant, black shoes, socks, belt . . . I was like what the hell are you trying to do. It’s only Rs.7000 [GBP 70] salary anyway. Chandni also said it’s so professional in the training, neighbors think we’re going to a good job, then we go back to our aukat [status] . . . On the job, nobody even speaks English . . .
Prachi
experienced this dissonance in terms of class: Although employers
required her to be a “professional,” to speak English, and to dress
formally, as one would be expected to do in a white-collar job, once at
the café, the illusion of professionalism was exposed. During their
interactions with managers, colleagues, customers, as well as friends,
boyfriends, and extended families, the women recognized discrepancies
between who they really are versus who they are becoming.
The process of acquiring and exercising plasticity, as such, is limited
by the deliberation it elicits. While engaging with emerging body rules
for workers in the service economy, including body language, appearance,
and attractiveness, young women also assess these rules, in terms of the meanings attached to their malleability at the sites of family, neighborhood, and work.
Conclusion: Plasticity, Bodies, Selves
In
this paper, I explore the body/work nexus in the context of young
lower-middle-class women’s participation in the new service economy of
urban India. This new economy demands a new kind of worker in the
service of upper- and middle-class consumption. In this context, young
lower-middle-class women emerge as an “in-between” class, which can be
conveniently transformed into a cheap and malleable workforce for
emerging services through the promise of upward mobility. I identify
body plasticity as an important feature of women workers’ experiences as
they seek to establish themselves as respectable professionals. They
engage with body rules at the sites of work, family, and neighborhood,
highlighting discrepancies between the shifting requirements of the
market and the relatively unchanging expectations of family and
community for young women (Fantone 2007).
In the case of young lower-middle-class women workers, then, plasticity
is understood in three main ways: the capacity to modify their bodies,
the expression of agency through these modifications, as well as fear
and anxiety regarding such modifications.
As neophyte workers in
the service economy, young women undertake body work, altering their
appearance through makeup, clothing, and body language. While these
changes are necessitated by their work, they are adopted by the workers
beyond work too, reiterating the significant dialectical relationship
between paid employment and experiences of embodiment. These changes,
seemingly outward and transient, are experienced by workers as more than
just skin-deep. Indeed, in effecting these changes, young women engage
with the tensions between traditional respectability and modernity,
freedom, and mobility, encapsulated in the figure of the New Indian
Woman. Through their participation in service employment, young women
assert themselves as professionals. Some interlocutors discussed how
employment had changed their parents’ attitudes toward dressing up,
using makeup, and going out to parties, which symbolized a
transformation of the self. This embodied self, not contained in the
workplace, is then expressed as agentic and assertive, highlighting how
plasticity of form can be experienced as enabling—through their capacity
to change themselves, young women were, to a certain extent, also able
to effect change in their surrounding environments.
Although
plasticity is commonly understood as boundless malleability, I show that
bodily plasticity is inherently limited and limiting. At threat of
being read as “promiscuous,” rather than “professional,” young women may
experience this plasticity as a mechanism of labor discipline. The use
of makeup, new body language, and Western clothing is accompanied by
policing of behavior by families, neighbors, and the women themselves.
This policing includes leaving from and coming back home at appropriate
times, maintaining a respectable appearance in the neighborhood, and
carefully navigating sexual harassment at work. Furthermore, the
deliberate and concerted manner in which workers have to take up body
projects invites reflection on the inauthenticity of belonging in the
new economy. That is, young women are conscious that their makeup,
clothing, and even body language is at risk of being found out as not
authentic and at times feels synthetic or plastic. This understanding of
plasticity—not quite artifice but synthetic—adds an important dimension to the concept of plasticity by demonstrating how plasticity is contained by its own functioning.
With
this paper, I open up an examination of emerging body rules as a form
of labor discipline in the new service economy of urban India and
beyond. In particular, I demonstrate the importance of analyzing these
body rules from the lenses of gender and class in the context of uneven
socioeconomic change: Who are the body rules for, what does compliance with body rules offer, and indeed who can access
them and to what extent? For young women from disadvantaged or
marginalized backgrounds, who are part of the global service workforce,
the realization of the plasticity of their body is integral to becoming
professionals. Rather than suggesting that these workers are
aspirational subjects who unquestioningly adopt body plasticity to
participate in service employment, I present workers’ narratives to
sketch a nuanced picture of multifarious engagements with body
plasticity. Finally, I extend the concept of plasticity beyond its
potential for simultaneous construction and destruction by offering an
analysis of reflections that emerge through the collision of such
construction and destruction. The concept of “plastic bodies” can be
used for further studies of body/work rules, social inequalities, and
socioeconomic change in varied contexts.
Author’s Note:
Thank
you to Beverley Skeggs, who first suggested the concept of plasticity
for this work. Thank you also to editors Barbara J. Risman and Smitha
Radhakrishnan and the reviewers for their constructive comments on
earlier versions of the paper. This research was funded by the Gates
Cambridge scholarship (2015–19) and fieldwork funding from the
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge (2016–17).
ORCID iD
Asiya Islam 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1983-9944
Notes
1.All
the conversations and interviews were conducted in Hindi, sometimes
interspersed with English words and phrases. I translated and
transcribed the interviews in English and maintained field notes about
observations and informal conversations. The original use of English
phrases and sentences is marked by underlining here. I retained some
Hindi terms that did not have complete translatability (Young Jeong Kim 2012) and they are marked through italicization. The names of all interlocutors have been anonymized.
2.In
2019–2020, India’s female labor force participation rate was estimated
to be 24.7 percent in rural areas and 18.5 percent in urban areas
(Periodic Labour Force Survey [PLFS] Annual Report [July 2019–June 2020]
2021). While these figures are striking, they need to be assessed with caution since surveys may underestimate women’s work (Abraham 2013; Sudarshan and Bhattacharya 2008).
In 2019–2020, 63.8 percent of women workers compared with 60.8 percent
of men workers in urban areas worked in services (Periodic Labour Force
Survey [PLFS] Annual Report [July 2019–June 2020] 2021).
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Asiya
Islam is lecturer in Work and Employment Relations Department at the
University of Leeds. Her research interests include gender, class,
youth, socioeconomic change, emerging forms of work, and digital
technology.
