China's Beauty Proletariat: The Body Politics of Hegemony in a Walmart Cosmetics Department

Abstract

In her best-selling book, Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Meili liandan zhang dami), author Lu Junqing articulated an emergent aesthetic and economic logic: women's pursuit of beauty is the most certain means of achieving career success. In an industry that is rapidly growing, millions of women flock to retail beauty counters where they consult with cosmetics sales agents about how to best enhance their appearance so as to ensure their place in the labor market. This research examines the workers of China's beauty economy through a case study of rural migrant cosmetics sales representatives in an outlet of a major global retailer. The author asks, how are the new “body rules” generated by the beauty economy used to organize and discipline labor in the workplace? Body rules are norms for the public presentation of different types of bodies. Retail cosmetics employers recruit bodies to become models for customer emulation, vehicles of display, and vessels of communication. Employers seek to alter and control this physical capacity. The author argues that as retail employers offer women workers opportunities to master new body rules for femininity, these women are less apt to question the low-wage and insecure conditions under which they labor.

Selling Motherhood: Gendered Emotional Labor, Citizenly Discounting, and Alienation among China’s Migrant Domestic Workers

“… 6. In her study of rural migrant women working in a cosmetic department, Otis (2016) observes a similar mode of employer control where the mastering of new body rules for feminine beauty tends to deflect the women from questioning their low-wage and precarious working conditions. …”

Symbolic violence in embodying customer service work across the urban/rural divide

“…This study offers two important contributions to the literature. First, it extends the service work literature by pointing to the urban/rural divide as an important dimension of the embodied classed customer-worker interactions in the context of the Global South (Otis, 2016;Otis & Wu, 2018b). Although rural to urban migration in the Global South is a historical and cultural phenomenon, it is more prominent and rampant today than ever before (Tumbe, 2018).…”

“…They believed that urban middle‐class customers knew more than them about style and taste, and they aspired to attain that urban capital. Similar to the service workers in Baas and Cayla's (2019) study, the workers in this study construed their work as something that helped them gain “upward mobility”; however, it remains contentious whether it was “upward mobility” or “embodied hegemony” in terms of prescriptive urban body rules (Otis, 2016, p. 157).…”

“…Although knowledge about the urban/rural societal divide is available elsewhere in the literature outside service work, we do not yet know how it informs the service work, specifically the customer–worker dynamics. To date, only a handful of studies by Otis and Wu have examined the role of urban/rural embodiment in customer service work (Otis, 2016; Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). For example, Otis's (2016) research on saleswomen in cosmetics stores in Walmarts in China emphasizes the way young female saleswomen from a rural background reinvented their bodies as “legibly modern and urbanely feminine” (p. 161), by learning a “delicacy of touch” (p. 171) while applying products to the customers.…”

“…To date, only a handful of studies by Otis and Wu have examined the role of urban/rural embodiment in customer service work (Otis, 2016; Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). For example, Otis's (2016) research on saleswomen in cosmetics stores in Walmarts in China emphasizes the way young female saleswomen from a rural background reinvented their bodies as “legibly modern and urbanely feminine” (p. 161), by learning a “delicacy of touch” (p. 171) while applying products to the customers. She argued that learning a new embodiment represented an opportunity for young female saleswomen from a rural background to acquire new forms of femininity that concealed their rural origins in the hope of achieving social mobility.…”