Racialized authenticity: South Asian migrant women in the ethnic beauty market

Abstract

Over the last two decades, ethnic beauty markets in Los Angeles have grown rapidly as cultural commodification soars alongside the growth of migrant workers in the global city. The South Asian beauty industry, in particular, has emerged as a site where there is a hypervisibility of ethnic aesthetic practices, such as threading hair removal and henna art, as well as South Asian migrant women who are formally and informally employed in these salons. Threading, often marketed as an Indian, Asian, Ayurvedic and/or Eastern hair removal technique, uses intertwined cotton threads that are rolled across the skin to pluck hair out from the roots. This growing market for threading services has uniquely relied on the labor of migrant women from the subcontinent, one that has been sustained through efforts to authenticate women’s labor as desirably Other. Based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Asian beauty industry, this article examines the structural mechanisms through which migrant women are racialized as ‘authentic’ workers with a focus on businesses’ hiring practices resulting in the hypervisibility of migrant women in the industry, marketing and advertising of these services, as well as state legislation. I use the term ‘racialized authenticity’ to understand these structural productions and the ways they inform the context within which beauty industry interactions take place. These interactions occur in threading salons where racialized expectations around un/desirability are encountered by workers and consumers as well as in training programs where threading is taught. Together, these insights reveal the contradictory forms of South Asian racialization in the US that allow workers to authenticate their labor as desirable for consumers while simultaneously signaling their foreignness.