Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism PDF
Preview Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism
A E S T H E T I C L A B O U R Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism EAdniate Sdo bfyia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff With a foreword by Susie Orbach Dynamics of Virtual Work Series Editors Ursula Huws University of Hertfordshire,UK Rosalind Gill University of London,UK Technological change has transformed where people work, when and how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between ‘play’ and ‘work’ and creating new types of unpaid labour con- nected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. This affects private life as well as transforming the nature of work and peo- ple experience the impacts differently depending on their gender, their age, where they live and what work they do. Aspects of these changes have been studied separately by many different academic experts how- ever up till now a cohesive overarching analytical framework has been lacking. Drawing on a major, high-profile COST Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Dynamics of Virtual Work, this series will bring together leading international experts from a wide range of disciplines including political economy, labour sociology, eco- nomic geography, communications studies, technology, gender studies, social psychology, organisation studies, industrial relations and develop- ment studies to explore the transformation of work and labour in the Internet Age. The series will allow researchers to speak across disciplin- ary boundaries, national borders, theoretical and political vocabularies, and different languages to understand and make sense of contemporary transformations in work and social life more broadly. The book series will build on and extend this, offering a new, important and intellec- tually exciting intervention into debates about work and labour, social theory, digital culture, gender, class, globalisation and economic, social and political change. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14954 Ana Sofia Elias • Rosalind Gill • Christina Scharff Editors Aesthetic Labour Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism Editors Ana Sofia Elias Rosalind Gill King’s College London City, University of London London, UK London, UK Christina Scharff King’s College London London, UK Dynamics of Virtual Work ISBN 978-1-137-47764-4 ISBN 978-1-137-47765-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47765-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962713 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image © Gari Wyn Williams / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom “This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neo liberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearances have escalated to new, unforgiving levels.” —Susan J. Douglas, University of Michigan, USA “In this inspiring collection, the labor involved in creating a viable self receives detailed analysis, with each contributor showing how expecta- tions of beauty serve to elevate or condemn.” —Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA “This book incisively conceptualizes how neo liberalist and postfemi- nist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamor, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public […] ‘Aesthetic entrepreneurship’ is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the twenty-first century.” —Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA v Foreword: The Making of the Body Bodies are made. They are made in historical time with respect to class, gender, geography, economy and aspiration. Bodies are given to us within the family where the first body emerges. How the body is seen, treated and handled will form the basis of the individual’s sense of their body. There is no such thing as a body, only a body made in relationship to another and other bodies. The body, like the psyche, is an outcome of intersubjective engage- ment. In late modernity, as global capitalism gathers the world into one, the making of a body takes on a form that flattens differences (although not entirely), and the making of femininity is marked by a concealment of the work of body making. This work is so integrated into the take up of femininity that we may be ignorant of the processes we engage in. In so far as we are aware of them, we are encouraged to translate the work of doing so into the categories of ‘fun’, of being ‘healthy’ and of ‘looking after ourselves’. These categories are not interrogated—except by body activists—and owe much to the industries that profit from these prac- tices. As long as the work is slipped inside of these carapaces, the com- mercialisation of the body gives great riches to the style, beauty, fashion, cosmetic and surgery industry. As urbanisation continues its gallop, entry into modernity is marked by the uptake of beauty practices, a shared aes- thetic and the gloss of glamour. vii viii The Making of the Body The chapters in this collection unpick these categories and reveal the ways in which subjectivity and agency have been rethreaded to weave new narratives. The girls Anne Becker interviewed in Fiji in the 1990s who started purging after watching US TV shows on the newly established TV so as to better approximate the bodies they viewed there showed us how local cultures were being effaced. At first we saw this as the export of body hatred to the emerging economies entering global culture and of course it is, but just as women are not passive consumers but agents in their own engagement with what late capitalist consumer culture offers as a way of belonging, we listened to the Fijian girls’ explanations. They wanted to be part of the new world. They didn’t believe themselves to be passive consumers. Neither can it be said that countries are passive consumers. African, Asian and Latin women have their own interpreta- tion of the neoliberal ‘femininity’ project and mark their own idioms on the global conversation through influencing aspects of global imagery. Meanwhile young women across the world are employed in industries that sell glamour while working in abject conditions themselves whether in the nail bars of New York or the beauty salons in Shanghai. Women’s bodies have become an updated version of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks. But let’s complicate the matter further. Let’s look at another level of the construction of the body. Let’s consider how bodies have come to be so available for constant transformation. What is it about the way our bodies are constituted? How have the influences of the style industries become transmuted to inside desire? How is it that the body as is, is found to be so unsatisfying that it is in need of constant attention and work? My clinical perspective of engaging and observing bodies, bodies that are ever younger and ever older (as age compression demands that 6-year- olds look like 12-year-olds and 70-year-olds like 40-year-olds), shows that the body is unstably constituted. In order for its owner to keep it going—and I describe the body in this way intentionally as this is how my patients do—the body requires constant attention. It needs to be critically assessed, to be available for modification, for fixing and fussing with, in short to be produced. Through these actions, an unstable body is reassured that it exists. The constant attention keeps it going. A sense of The Making of the Bod y ix needing to be done to and then doing provides a form of ongoingness to a body that feels desperately unstable. Instability is the prompt to action. But why is it so unstable? As preoccupation with beauty has become central in the lives of women, not just for the short period, it concerned our grandmothers and their mothers, so body instability has undermined the bodies of those who mother. As celebrities display bodies with no outward sign of having giving birth within a month post partum, as even a French Minister needed to look like birth had never touched her four days after she delivered as she walked out of the Elysee Palais in high heels, as women in Brazil have a tummy tuck following a caesarean sec- tion, so we see the management of birth and post partum as simply a punctuation point on the journey of lifelong body surveillance. The body is always to be regulated according to the dictates of visual culture, not the prompts from a baby’s need for the breast and for succour or the mother’s need to nurture and rest. This situation puts a new and disturbing shape to the mother-daughter structure or perhaps I should say, the mothering person. It means that the baby—who acquires her or his sense of its body through the body of those who mother—is imbibing a body that is caught in regulation and preoccupation. This regulation and preoccupation informs the mother’s relating to her own body, and it also informs her relationship to her baby’s body, her baby’s appetites, her baby’s bodily explorations and the ways in which she takes up space. The baby enters into corporeality with the bodily sense that she must be watchful. She mimics what she sees. Her body is not simply unfolding; it develops with reference to prescriptive practices and with the internalisation of criticism and self-surveillance. By the time that girl is in the playground, she will be playing with plastic surgery apps that let her transform herself as she wishes in preparation for the time when aesthetic labour will form part of her daily routine. As the instructive chapters in this collection show, adult women live with irresolvable pressures and contradictions when it comes to the body. We must affect to look young yet appear to know about the world while seeming innocent. We must decorate and transform ourselves but look as though this is neither a time, money or labour cost. We are to appear ‘natural’ and ‘professional’ and ‘sexy’ and ‘nonchalant’ and ‘available’ and x The Making of the Body ‘desirable’ and ‘cute’ and ‘fun’ and ‘capable’ and ‘healthy’ all at the same time. Aesthetic labour has colonised our bodies, and like all forms of labour, the meanings we make of it and of our bodies are, as these chapters dem- onstrate, complex. We are managing the struggle for agency and self- expression in a time of ever-increasing commercialisation of the body. This is not an easy call whether in Newcastle, Lagos, Lima, Karachi or Melbourne. Susie Orbach
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