‘The Girls are Alright’: Beauty work and neoliberal regimes of responsibility among young women in Urban India

Abstract

This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.