Laboring Femininities: Skill, Body, and Class-making Among Beauty Workers in India

Tea plantation workers in India have historically been a part of the feminized workforce, constituting somewhat exceptionally formal labor in a country with high informalization of women's employment. In the past decade, however, a combined fallout of neo-liberalization and globalization contextualized within the local history of varying phases of incorporation, accumulation/dispossession and shifting relations of production brought about a crisis in the tea plantations leading to closures, retrenchment, and casualization. The women workers from tea plantations joined the burgeoning casualized urban labor force. Through ethnography and interviews I traced women workers from tea plantations in West Bengal, India, who migrated to the beauty industry in Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR. The paper focuses on the construction of women's labor in the beauty industry with continuities and contrasts from the tea plantations to understand the makings of gendered labor and skill. The women's frequent invocation of femininity as skill foregrounds the woman's body as central to woman's labor and the workplace but also provides a scope to unsettle understanding of femininity as a specific and naturalized concept. Using the lens of migration from one sector of feminized labor to another, this paper interrogates the production of the feminine worker and the workplace in different but related contexts. Their reflections on their work, skill, and workplace allows us an insight into the ways in which the body as the woman and the worker is deployed as skilled/natural and how they themselves co-construct, negotiate, and subvert the construction of femininity and feminine labor in the workplace.