All in a day’s work: affective labour, disaffection and migrant leisure in a South Asian beauty salon

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the role of beauty salons in London as sites of migrant leisure. It argues that this leisure is created through the affective labour of beauty workers. Produced through the efforts of migrant beauty workers, leisure in the beauty salon leads to sociality and resistance of traditional gender norms among other migrant women. However, leisure can be disrupted when beauty workers withhold their affective labour due to a feeling of disaffection in their jobs. Here, disaffection is defined as a feeling of alienation or disenchantment from their work. It is against this context of disaffection stemming from feminised and racialised labour practices as well as living conditions of migrants in the UK that we need to consider the work of beauty workers and the consequent production or disruption of leisure in the beauty salon.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure
• migrant leisure
• affective labour
• disaffection
• beauty salon
• South Asia

Introduction

If popular media is to be believed, then there is no worry that a good massage or a facial cannot ameliorate. A day at a spa or a beauty salon is presented as a way of recovering from the stresses of domestic and work life. Advertisements and popular media exhort women to invest in beauty deploying the language of ‘me time’, ‘pampering’ and ‘indulgence’ (Lazar, 2009, p. 375). Academic scholars attribute it to the postfeminist logic of ‘self-care’ that is now a global phenomenon (Falkof, 2022). A majority of women who visit the beauty salon experience it as both ‘restorative’ and a ‘leisure’ activity (Black & Sharma, 2001, p. 924). On the other hand, scholars also recognise the constraints to leisure that women face owing to their moral, religious or practical responsibilities to their family and household (Scraton, 1994). Migrant women, especially, find it challenging to locate a community and a safe space to engage in leisure activities that are familiar to them (Wagner & Peters, 2014).

In this article, my research setting is a beauty salon in London both run and visited by first-generation migrant women from South Asia, predominantly working-class. Researching leisure at a site where working-class migrant women receive beauty treatments from migrant beauty workers allows for ‘thinking intersectionally’ about gender and leisure (Watson & Ratna, 2011). My main focus in this article is on the affective labour of migrant beauty workers. I argue that leisure in the beauty salon is co-created at the intersection of migrant women’s desire to experience the salon as a site of leisure and the labour of beauty workers that produces an affective atmosphere in the salon. Through the relational labour of workers that goes beyond providing the service they are paid for, the beauty salon emerges as a site of sociality as well as resisting traditional gender norms for other first-generation migrant women.

However, just paying for a service does not guarantee accompanying feelings such as leisure and relaxation as the creation of these immaterial feelings depends on the emotional state of workers themselves. As affect flows between bodies, the emotional state of workers can make or break clients’ experience of leisure in the beauty salon. Going beyond the conception of emotional labour as the management of emotions in service economy (Hochschild, 2012), I look at emotions shaped by racialised and feminised labour practices in beauty work. Such emotions can drive beauty workers to feel ‘disaffection’ or a feeling of alienation and disenchantment with their work (Manalansan, 2010). In this article, I show how the beauty worker’s feeling of disaffection has a direct bearing on the client’s experience of leisure in the beauty salon.

This article proceeds as follows. In the next section, I provide a brief review of relevant literature followed by a note on the methodology of this research. I then proceed by mapping the affective atmosphere of the beauty salon and illustrating two different kinds of scenarios – one in which the affective labour of beauty workers leads to the production of leisure and the other in which workers feeling disaffection disrupts the leisure of clients. I also delineate the conditions that lead migrant beauty workers to feel disaffection. Thus, I attempt to make plain the affective labour of migrant beauty workers that makes leisure possible in the beauty salon.

The labour of leisure in migrant women’s lives

In this section, I look at two strands of literature that intersect in my research: literature on migrant women’s access to leisure and literature on affective labour that shapes leisure in the beauty salon. Susan Shaw (1994) identified three approaches that have been used to study women’s leisure – the dominant approach being how women’s access to leisure is constrained by their caring responsibilities as well as their lack of entitlement to leisure. In this stream of scholarship, constraints to leisure are understood to arise out of gendered power relations. Another strand of leisure looks at how leisure itself can be experienced as a constraint by reinforcing traditional norms of femininity. A third stream of research termed ‘new and emerging’ thirty years ago saw leisure activities as having the potential for resistance (Shaw, 1994, p. 15). Since the time of Shaw’s article charting the field, this stream has grown substantially as scholars have examined the ways in which women use leisure to challenge societal norms about women’s roles and behaviours (Shaw, 2001). However, in order to understand the complexities of gender and leisure, scholars need to focus on ‘intersectionality’ or the interconnections among the multiple dimensions of social categories such as gender, race, age, sexuality, ability, and class (Choo & Ferree, 2010). While gender is one of the most significant determinants of women’s access to leisure, their experiences and constraints cannot be explained by gender alone (Watson & Scraton, 2013). Intersectional analysis in leisure research can explain how sociocultural categories intersect with and influence each other (Henderson & Gibson, 2013). An intersectional approach is especially useful while exploring leisure in migratory contexts as migrants’ access to leisure is mediated by a combination of factors such as gender, race, religion and class.

Leisure, however, is not one of the main lenses employed in the study of migration. Migrants are frequently studied through the lens of labour that leads to mobility. Commenting on the British context, Jonathan Long et al. (2014, 1781) state that ‘where there has been research on the role of sport and leisure in integration in the UK it has focused on refugees rather than migrants; and more general research on new migrants is heavily dominated by the economic’. Mata-Codesal et al. (2015) argue that leisure is an important site to explore continuity and change in the lives of migrants – how they retain ties with their country of origin while at the same time creating a sense of belonging in the country of migration. In the few studies that do attend to leisure among migrant communities, the focus in on the leisure practices and identities of men rather than those of women (Ratna, 2017).

Watson and Ratna (2011) argue that a spatial analysis of the leisure practices of migrants helps in thinking intersectionally about leisure. Here, intersectionality refers to seeking ways of ‘understanding and accounting for multiple disadvantages that move beyond static concepts of identity and inequality’ (Wagner & Peters, 2014, p. 39). Public spaces of leisure are often racialised, gendered and classed (Watson & Ratna, 2011). Researching in the city of Leeds with two groups of migrants – Polish (national group) and African (continental group), Long et al. (2014) found that the presence of Polish migrants in public leisure spaces such as pubs and the countryside was more prominent. The leisure practices of African migrants, on the other hand, were associated with churches. The researchers concluded that Polish migrants were able to use the ‘symbolic capital of whiteness’ in accessing public spaces of leisure which made them less apprehensive than the African migrants in entering them (Long et al., 2014, 1790). In a study conducted with Muslim women from South Asia in the same city, it was found that the participants preferred attending an aerobics class that catered specifically to South Asian women for leisure over public spaces such as the city centre (Scraton & Watson, 1998). Thus, rather than studying leisure spaces as sites where leisure takes place a priori, a spatial analysis of leisure acknowledges that leisure is experienced through a continuous process of negotiation and contestation with space depending on one’s social location (Wagner & Peters, 2014; Watson & Ratna, 2011).

Besides the spatial negotiations involved, a conception of leisure as ‘freely-chosen, self-actualising experience’ might also overlook how certain forms of leisure are produced through the labour of migrant and racialised women (Wearing & Wearing, 1988, p. 111). Scholars have looked at the kind of labour that goes into producing leisure as a product in post-Fordist economy. This kind of work where affect plays a central role is characteristic of the post-industrial, neoliberal service-based economy. This labour is affective because its products are intangible, or comprise ‘a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 292–93). Affective labour warrants that workers go beyond the mere possession and performance of skills to mobilise their capacity for the creation of ‘subjectivities, social relationships and sensations’ (Farrugia et al., 2018, p. 273).

Affective Labour is integral to beauty work. Researching beauty salons in two cities in the UK, Paula Black and Sharma (2001, p. 104) described the physical and emotional labour of beauty therapists, often performed in poor working conditions, highlighting how ‘one woman’s leisure is another woman’s work’. The beauticians who participated in their research defined beauty work as working ‘with feelings as well as with the body’ (Sharma & Black, 2001, p. 915). Making people feel better was considered to be an integral part of their job and a source of considerable job satisfaction. From the perspective of the clients in their research, the ambience of the salon was vital. The clients expected the salon to be welcoming, friendly, warm and clean (Black, 2002). Even if they could do the beauty treatments by themselves at home, they chose to go to the salon for a sense of leisure and pampering. One of the beauticians interviewed in this research described the main product of a beauty salon visit to be immaterial and intangible: ‘You make them look nice. I think you give them [a] feeling of well-being, I think they get that attention for that period of time which perhaps they don’t get in other areas of their lives’ (Sharma & Black, 2001, p. 918). To provide such a sensation to the client, the beautician must give her ‘total and individual attention’ (ibid., p. 919). However, Marjo Kolehmainen & Katariina Mäkinen (2021, p. 449) argue that affective labour is ‘collective, intercorporeal and trans-subjective’. Therefore, affect can neither be reduced to the emotional investment by workers nor to the feelings that emerge in clients. Affective labour is a work of co-production between the worker and the client as affect denotes the capacities of bodies to affect and be affected through encounters between them (Kolehmainen & Mäkinen, 2021).

Given this background, in this article I highlight the negotiations that produce the South Asian beauty salon in London as a site of leisure rather than presuming that it is a site where leisure is always already possible. I demonstrate how leisure is created through the relational labour of migrant beauty workers as well as the willing participation of clients. However, the experience of leisure is heavily interrupted when conditions of labour and life lead the beauticians to feel disaffection in their jobs. To understand both affective labour and the absence of it in beauty work, we need to take an intersectional approach that considers the intersection of gender, race, class and migrancy. As a theoretical framework, intersectionality goes beyond an additive approach that takes gender, race and class to be static concepts; instead, it looks at how inequalities are produced at their intersections without reducing them to a single cause (Wagner & Peters, 2014).

Researching leisure in the South Asian beauty salon: A methodological note

As part of my doctoral study, I conducted an ethnography of two hair and beauty salons in London between 2020 and 2022 with the overall aim of developing an understanding of beauty salons as sites of diasporic intimacy for first-generation migrant women from South Asia. The empirical data presented in this article comes from fieldwork conducted in one of those salons known as Maya Hair & Beauty (all names used in this article are pseudonyms). Located off a busy high street in North-West London, the salon is situated in a markedly South Asian Hindu part of the street dotted with Indian-owned stores selling colourful traditional clothes, sweet and savoury snacks and idols of Hindu deities.

The methods used in my research are participant-observation and longitudinal interviews. I conducted over 200 hours of participant-observation at Maya Hair & Beauty by working as an assistant. My job largely entailed sweeping the floor, washing hair, collecting payment and apprising customers of Covid regulations. While I made sure at the outset that the salon owner and the beauty workers understood what my research was about, I also continually reminded them of my researcher role. In terms of my positionality, I believe that insider or outsider are not fixed but unstable and ever-shifting positions, differentially experienced and expressed in the field (Naples, 1996). The participants in my study and I shared the same gender and race. Like them, I was also a first-generation migrant in the United Kingdom from a South Asian country and therefore shared their unique vantage point of being ‘in-between’ two cultures and societies. I spoke the languages that they spoke in. Therefore, while I was able to develop friendly relations with all the participants, I was also aware that the social and cultural capital I had accrued through my education and work over the years was visible in my comportment, accent and clothes, marking me as an outsider, especially in a context where most women I encountered were working-class.

My research followed an ‘inductive-iterative’ approach wherein ethnography moves back and forth between theory and analysis, data and interpretation (O’reilly, 2009, p. 104). I went to the field with an open mind and relied on my field notes for themes to emerge. Leisure emerged as one of the modalities through which migrant women experienced intimacy in the salon. The data presented in this article to support my arguments about leisure is observational data or vignettes from my fieldnotes. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that observational data is subject to interpretation by the researcher, right from choosing what to observe to analysing the fieldnotes (Mulhall, 2003). What a researcher finds interesting to write into field notes, in the first place, is determined by the researcher’s personal and professional interests. At the same time, observing leisure in the field poses a peculiar challenge in that the presence of the researcher might interfere with the leisure experiences of the participants. Although given the communal nature of the salon my presence was not remarkable in any way, I tried hard not to interfere with how the clients experienced the salon (an attempt that did not meet with much success as will become evident to the reader). However, that did give rise to a limitation in my research – I chose not to conduct any interviews with clients, especially ones whose experiences in the salon seemed less than pleasurable.

The affective atmosphere in a South Asian beauty salon

Maya Hair & Beauty offers hair and beauty services at affordable prices. It is owned by Anita (38), who came to the United Kingdom from Nepal in 2000. After working in several low-paid jobs, she opened her own beauty salon in 2018 as she had earlier worked in her sister-in-law’s beauty salon in Nepal. The salon’s customers are recent migrants from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, many of them working-class.

The salon is quite small and cramped. It consists of a low-ceilinged room with mirrors and three salon chairs. The walls are covered in blue wallpaper and the room decorated with fake flowers and roses from Ikea. The salon does not have a separate reception area or a private cubicle for massages. One corner of the room is partitioned off with curtains where a customer can lie down on a massage bed for a private treatment such as massage, facial or body hair waxing. At the entrance of the room, there are two benches for customers to wait on, doubling up as storage units for salon products. There is a small altar with Hindu deities affixed to the wall close to the entrance. On one of the shelves in the wall stands a small transistor radio that is always set to South Asian FM channels. The latest Bollywood hits can be heard in the background while getting a beauty treatment at Maya Hair & Beauty which contributes to the affective atmosphere of the salon. Despite the lack of space, the salon is always clean and organised. The lack of privacy in the salon is substituted by a communal atmosphere of female sociality.

Two kinds of affective atmospheres can be identified at Maya Hair & Beauty. When the salon is moderately busy, the atmosphere in the salon is jovial. Beauty workers take time to chat, crack jokes with each other as well as with clients, share food and sing along to the songs on the radio. Given the salon owner Anita’s quick wit and sense of humour, there is never a dull moment in the salon. Beauty workers give time and personalised attention to their clients, often listening to their life stories. The attention is both personalised and communal at the same time – Anita has her eyes and ears everywhere and owing to the small area of the salon is able to chat with all the clients simultaneously.

In Black’s study (2004, p. 76) conducted with white beauty salon workers in the UK, the workers claimed a counselling role in their work wherein they performed the role of an intimate but detached listener. The workers explained that their role was just to listen without getting into any controversial topics such as sex, politics and religion. At Maya Hair & Beauty, however, beauty workers neither abstain from discussing sex, politics and religion, nor do they shy away from going deep into their clients’ lives. What is important to remember is that for many first-generation South Asian migrant women in the UK who do not speak English and have not had much formal education, the ethnic beauty salon is one of the few sites of sociality they have access to. They feel comfortable discussing their personal lives and seeking practical advice in an all-women space. Issues on which advice and help is sought from the beauty workers can range from how to make one’s husband contribute to household chores to how to find work in the informal neighbourhood economy. Ethnic minority business owners such as Anita often act as community leaders; they are deemed as role models who have not only negotiated the constraints of gender norms by establishing successful businesses but have also accumulated the material means to support other first-generation migrant women.

However, there is a palpable shift in the affective atmosphere when the salon gets busy, with anywhere between four to eight women waiting for their turn while there are only two to three beauty workers present in the salon. The overcrowded room acts more as a beauty shop than an intimate salon space, with beauty workers dividing their time between clients – doing a quick facial on client A while client B waits for her hair dye to set, then washing client B’s hair while the face pack on client A’s face is left to dry. It becomes a place where a client can buy beauty services and when they come out, they will have got value for their money, but not associated feelings such as relaxation or pampering. Beauty workers might still ask perfunctory questions about the lives of clients and clients might want to share details, but the interactions are brief, somewhat mechanical even, as beauty workers have their eyes on the clock and at the queue in the waiting area. On such busy days, typically coinciding with weekends and festivals, each beauty worker might see up to forty clients in a day. They cannot be expected to greet every client joyously and enthusiastically or mask their feeling of exhaustion. As a result of working hard day after day, workers may at times show disaffection.

Disaffection is the process of going through the motion of work without showing joy, enthusiasm or a sense of ease (Hardt & Negri, 2004). Disaffection also tells us something about the lower rungs of the beauty industry in the UK propelled by migrant women workers at large. As beauty work is considered ‘low-skilled’ labour, it becomes a viable option for many migrant women to enter the labour market. Some of them do not have proper training but aspire to learn beauty work through apprenticeships in salons such as Maya Hair & Beauty. The informal and precarious nature of the job – low wages, no holiday pay, zero-hour contracts – keeps them on the edge and affects their emotional well-being. In need of money, they might even work seven days a week and up to twelve hours a day in a job that demands backbreaking labour while being on one’s feet all the time. Beauty work also involves intimate contact with bodies and bodily waste leading to negative feelings. The difficult nature of their work is only compounded by the stressful conditions in which migrant women workers live, which is usually in shared housing with families belonging to the same ethnic community.

Disaffect could also result from the significant downward mobility some workers face upon migration. Anita, the owner of Maya Hair and Beauty, is a trained graphic designer from Nepal. Having failed to find a job corresponding to her professional qualification, she decided to open a beauty salon. Her husband, who has two master’s degrees in Business Administration, works as a bus driver in London. Despite being a hard-working entrepreneur who employs other migrant women, Anita has to work seven days a week in her salon to make ends meet. She is also unhappy about not being able to provide job security to all her employees, especially during lean periods of the year such as winter. Migrant workers often find themselves at a disadvantage in the labour market due to lack of recognition of their qualifications as well as their unfamiliarity with the system (Dyer et al., 2010). It is not uncommon for beauty workers at Maya Hair and Beauty to talk about their downward mobility in the UK with a pinch of humour. Their narratives often centre on their disillusionment with the promise of migration and loss of class status. Mary, who worked as assistant beautician at Maya Hair & Beauty, for example, was constantly preoccupied with how educational or professional qualifications did not matter in the UK, only the ability to work hard did, creating an undifferentiated class of workers wherein some experienced upward mobility and others, downward. Having previously worked in a beauty salon in Dubai, she experienced the work conditions and low wages in UK’s beauty industry as particularly harsh. It is against this context of feminised and racialised labour practices as well as living conditions of migrants in the UK that we need to consider the work of beauty workers.

In the next section, I illustrate how beauty workers produce leisure in the salon through their affective labour, leading to migrant sociality and resistance of traditional gender norms.

The production and role of leisure in the South Asian beauty salon

A middle-aged Indian woman came to Maya Hair & Beauty carrying with her a pack of hair colour. Anita greeted her as ‘Riya’s mother’ instead of using her name. Then she quickly informed me that the last time Riya’s mother came to the beauty salon was on the occasion of Riya’s wedding. She was usually too busy to come to the beauty salon. In keeping with her reputation, Riya’s mother announced that she was going to get the hair colour applied and then go home. She did not have the time to wait for the colour to dry and then be washed off by a beautician. She even set a timer on her phone so that she would know when to wash off the dye. ‘Why are you getting all worked up? Sit here, we will wash off your hair nicely and send you home’, said Anita. ‘For forty minutes! No way! I have so much to do’, Riya’s mother answered, keeping her eyes peeled for the clock on the wall. As assistant beautician Harsha was applying colour to her hair, Riya’s mother received a call on her mobile phone that she answered in a frazzled voice. ‘See, she has been summoned already’, remarked Anita. Riya’s mother explained that it was her son who had called to say that he was home. Now she had to go and cook for him.

Anita promptly clarified, for my benefit again, that the son she was referring to was not a child but an adult – a man with a wife and a kid. ‘Can he not cook for himself? If not, let him eat bread and butter’, she said to Riya’s mother, followed by a proper dressing down. ‘You are always running about. Sometimes one must live for oneself. We, South Asian women, we want to do everything ourselves. The husband is on his mobile phone and the wife keeps running about’, said Anita, mimicking a man sitting cross-legged and operating his phone. She then mentioned that even though she does not worry about her husband’s and children’s meals, they still manage to feed themselves. ‘Really, occasionally, you must take time out for yourself. Live for yourself’, she insisted. Riya’s mother smiled and gave in. It was as though something had dawned on her in that very moment. Not only did she wait for forty minutes for the dye to dry but also asked for a pedicure. Getting her pedicure, she looked happy and relaxed. ‘Anita, you taught me how to live today’, she gave Anita a hi-five.

Although Anita would have been paid the same whether she washed the client’s hair after application of dye or not, it was important to her that her client experience leisure and relaxation in the salon instead of using the space functionally. Her relational labour involved remembering personal details and deploying them strategically so that the client experienced the attention as personalised. Not only did she manage to persuade her client to stay in the salon and let the beauticians serve her but also made her realise that she did not have to be at the beck and call of the male members of her family all the time. That she, too, had the right to leisure. The fact that Anita was able to mobilise a discourse of ‘how South Asian women ought to live’ shows the standing of the beauty salon owner vis-à-vis her working-class clients.

The idea that by staking a claim to leisure and focusing on themselves women can momentarily take a break from their roles and wives and mothers originates in the beauty salon organically. South Asian migrants living in the UK have been found to display more traditional gender roles, characterised by a clear division of labour between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, compared to white British and other minority immigrant groups (Wang & Coulter, 2018). To counter such a rigid ascription of gender roles, the South Asian beauty salon become a space where an articulation of leisure as resistance is generated. Women use leisure time with other women to challenge their lack of power or express their dissatisfaction with the roles and behaviours that the society expects of them (Shaw, 2001). Women-only spaces may also enable a reconstruction of gendered identities, especially by posing a challenge to socially acceptable behaviours (Green, 1998). While such an approach to leisure can, of course, be critiqued for being steeped in consumerism, the expectation to find leisure spaces outside of consumerism must not rest squarely on the shoulders of working-class migrant women.

As part of staking a claim to leisure while challenging socially acceptable behaviour, women also participate in sexual humour in the beauty salon. One thing that struck me right from my first day of fieldwork at Maya Hair and Beauty was how much Anita relied on sexual humour by way of double entendre to lighten the atmosphere at the salon. It was remarkable not only because of the sexually conservative image of South Asian women but also the very little research that exists on ‘working-class humour’ among women workers, let alone South Asian women workers.

An Indian woman came to Maya Hair & Beauty to get her eyebrows done. ‘Stretch it for me’, Anita said to her, meaning that she wanted the client to stretch the skin around her eyebrows with her fingers. ‘I don’t like to stretch’, the client answered. ‘Darling, if you don’t like to stretch, how will you have kids?’ remarked Anita. The client burst into laughter. Here, laughter was produced by a shared understanding or imagination of what it meant to ‘stretch’ and what was being ‘stretched’. Another time, Anita was washing the hair of a client. She moved the hose of water over her head to wash the hair dye off. The woman commented on how much Anita was shaking the hose. ‘I am shaking it for your benefit’, said Anita. ‘Don’t talk dirty to me!’ the woman acted coy. ‘What did I say wrong? I said I am shaking it for you’, Anita reiterated, well-aware of the double entendre in her statement. Here, it was less ambivalent, as the Hindi word ‘hilana’ which literally means ‘shaking’ is also a slang for masturbating.

Not only does this kind of humour challenge gender norms but also the notion of respectable femininity. Laughter is a form of shared intimacy that creates a feeling of leisure in the beauty salon. A women-only space affords women the chance to ‘let their hair down’ and ‘behave badly’, i.e. outside the limits of ‘normal, acceptable, womanly behaviour’ (Green, 1998, p. 181). Participation in this kind of leisure must not be seen through a frame of individualism but as ‘communal leisure’ (Arai & Pedlar, 2003, p. 109). Even though visiting the beauty salon to get a beauty treatment is a commercial activity, the leisure produced in the salon is shared with others rather than being entrenched in an individualistic ethic of private consumption and relaxation. The importance of this kind of leisure for communities of first-generation migrant women from South Asia in the UK who are often embedded in their roles as mothers, wives and low-paid workers cannot be underestimated. Beauty salons provide this feeling of leisure mainly through an affective atmosphere that is created through the labour of beauty workers.

Disaffection and the disruption of leisure

Disaffection lets us see how it is not always possible for workers to create a sense of leisure in clients, especially when they are faced with the structural conditions of feminised and racialised labour. I do not view disaffection as a form of resistance but simply as a condition that portrays the emotional complexity of workers. Here, I draw on Martin Manalansan’s theorisation of disaffection vis-à-vis migrant Filipino care workers. Emerging out of the need to survive and persist in difficult situations, disaffection refers to the feelings of emotional distance, alienation, antipathy and isolation (Manalansan, 2010, p. 217). While Manalansan understands disaffection to manifest itself through composure, the salon workers in my vignettes express their disaffection more openly and explicitly. Even for people who generally like their work, contradictory feelings might emerge in response to monotonous and back-breaking routines of labour. Disaffection, then, lets us acknowledge this ambiguity without categorising workers as good or bad. Below, I present two examples of disaffection from my fieldwork.

The strong smell of chemicals used for hair straightening fills up the narrow passageway leading from the main road to Maya Hair & Beauty. Even before I enter, I can tell that someone must be getting their hair straightened in the salon. It is a slightly built Indian woman, Pinki, who smiles at everyone but does not talk much. Assistant beautician Mary has been working on her hair for five hours, going through rounds after rounds of applying straightening cream followed by pressing the hair with a hot iron for the bonds in the hair to break from application of extreme heat and chemicals. As she presses strands of Pinki’s long hair with a hot iron, a sharp and unpleasant smell is released into the air along with the fumes. Pinki has been sitting on the chair patiently, without taking a break to eat or drink. Her hair is apparently very dry. Mary is concerned about the quality of her hair and the effect that permanent straightening is going to have on it. ‘Her hair is so dry’, she complains to salon owner Anita in Hindi, although she usually speaks English in the salon, implying that the comment is made for Anita alone. She reiterates this comment every few minutes, visibly flustered by her client’s hair. Pinki now smiles apologetically. Aware that Mary is struggling with the client’s long hair, Anita lends her a hand. They begin to press strands of Pinki’s hair with two irons simultaneously. Pinki winces with pain at her hair being pulled in two directions at the same time. Now Anita too begins to remark on the dryness of her hair. ‘Do you oil your hair, darling?’ she asks, in a condescending tone. Pinki shakes her head no sheepishly. Anita recommends regular oiling, hair mask and keratin treatment for her hair. Anita and Mary make no effort to hide the hard work it is to press long and dry hair into submission: they talk about the pain repeated hair pressing causes in their wrists. They also discuss the strong odour of hair straightening chemicals and the health hazard it poses for them to inhale it for hours on end in front of the client.

‘I hope you learnt a lesson today’, says Anita to Pinki when the process is finally over, referring to the additional pain that Pinki had to endure because her hair was dry. Pinki is made to feel amply guilty for not looking after her hair. When I ask her later why she was keen on getting her hair straightened despite the pain, she laconically says, ‘Because I like straight hair’.

This is an illustration of disaffection where beauticians express negative feelings about a particular beauty treatment in front of the client. Not only do they not put in the affective labour to make the client feel better in the face of pain, but they make her – a paying customer – feel responsible for it. They complain about how hard and time-consuming hair straightening is, how unpleasant the odour of chemicals, and how much it hurts their body. They also make it explicit that the quality of the client’s hair has caused further unpleasantness to herself and the workers, blaming the client for not looking after her hair. It is almost as though the hair they are working on is disembodied from the client in whose presence they repeatedly pass remarks on it. At worst, this vignette can be read as an extremely negative experience for the client; at best, a case of service interaction lacking in affective labour. But disaffection cannot be understood without taking into account the conditions in which beauty workers perform hard labour that takes a toll on their bodies day after day. A beauty worker at Maya Hair & Beauty sees twenty clients in a day on an average – while quick services such as eyebrow threading are preferred, services like hair straightening invite displeasure because of their physically demanding nature. Prolonged standing, repetitive tasks performed in improper postures and exposure to chemicals can lead to several musculoskeletal disorders and chronic diseases in beauty salon workers (Kumari et al., 2017).

Another day, a middle-aged European woman called Paula, one of the few non-South Asian regulars at Maya Hair & Beauty, walks in for eyebrow threading and hair colour. Mary threads her eyebrows and upper lips and then proceeds to colour her hair. Mary is usually chatty and speaks English well. But in all the time that she spends working on Paula, she does not make any conversation with her. She laments to me in Hindi instead knowing that Paula would not understand what she is saying. Mary tells me that since she moved to the UK with her husband and two children a few years ago from the Indian state of Goa, they have lived in shared housing. They share a two-bedroom house with two other families from the same town her husband is from. Lately, frequent quarrels have begun to erupt between people living in the house over sharing the kitchen and the bathroom. She complains to me about how it gets under her skin to see the bathroom or the kitchen occupied when she goes home after a hard day’s work and wants to take a shower or cook dinner for her children. She tells me that she has given her husband an ultimatum: he either finds a new house for them or she will go back to Goa. She informs me of the troubles the shared house has started to create in their relationship. In dire need of a listener, Mary is glad to have found one in me, the researcher. She does not care about making conversation with her client as long as she is doing the job that needs to be done. This neglect is not lost on the client. Trying to follow our conversation, Paula keeps staring at our reflections in the mirror. When Mary takes her to the sink to wash her hair, Paula tells her that she has seen beauty workers come and go while she has remained a loyal client of the salon, suggesting that the high turnover is possibly the reason for why beauty workers do not invest in building relationships with clients. Paula’s passing comment is almost prescient because in a few weeks, Mary too would leave. After a futile house hunt in London, Mary and her husband would move to a small town in the UK with more affordable housing where Mary would find part-time beauty work with the help of her ethnic network.

This is a case of disaffection where the worker works efficiently but with a detached demeanour, going through the routinised motion of work without being able to provide the complementary personal attention or care. Disaffection can be caused by the kind of work beauty workers are required to do but it can also be caused by the worker’s personal circumstances arising out of their precarious socio-economic position. Living in cramped housing with co-ethnics is just one of the many ways in which new migrant workers experience precarity in London. Mary and her husband could not afford to rent a house by themselves in London, and living in shared housing was causing her severe mental distress, making her detached and irritable at work. As Carolyn Veldstra (2020) points out, the stakes of the demand for emotional labour are highest at its intersection with precarity. The affective regime of capitalism renders socio-economic precarity as just another individual feeling that needs to be managed by the worker. But as evidenced in Mary’s case, workers are human beings with complex emotional lives which includes the leakage of so-called personal emotions in the workplace. It is interesting to note that although Mary chooses to disburden herself to me and not the client, the client catches on the negative feeling through her tone. Eventually, she lets on her disappointment at the experience, implying that she would prefer beauty workers who were emotionally invested in their clients.

This service interaction might have proceeded differently if I were not present in the beauty salon. Aside from the researcher’s role in co-creating data in the ethnographic field, this also points to the emotional labour of listening that is continually demanded of beauty workers, without acknowledging that they themselves might be in need of a listener. A beauty worker acts like a sponge, absorbing everything that clients confide in them, without being able to reciprocate as that would be deemed unprofessional. It is not surprising, then, that they take the opportunity to disburden themselves when they find a neutral listener in the salon.

Conclusion

While existing literature shows that leisure for first-generation migrant women cannot be taken for granted, in this article I illustrate how beauty salons can act as a crucial site of leisure for many first-generation, working-class migrant women from South Asia in the UK. Leisure in the beauty salon is primarily created through the affective labour of migrant beauty workers, also from South Asia. As part of the affective labour expected of them, beauty workers are required to provide personalised attention to clients without resorting to ‘formulaic or standardised responses’ (Sharma & Black, 2001, p. 928). This kind of affective labour requires that beauty workers remember client’s personal details, act as deep listeners, offer advice and support, even engage in humour. Leisure thus generated produces migrant sociality and leads to challenging traditional gender norms for women who are deeply embedded in their roles and wives and mothers.

However, leisure is not always possible, especially when beauty workers decide to withdraw their affective labour owing to disaffection. Low wages and little job security in the beauty industry along with strenuous and monotonous physical labour can lead to workers feeling disenchanted with their jobs. Even for a salon owner, working in the beauty industry can entail experiencing downward mobility and working seven days a week. Thus, the less-than-ideal conditions of work in the highly feminised and racialised profession of beauty can have an effect on whether clients feel a sense of leisure in the beauty salon. The lack or disruption of leisure, however, also goes on to highlight the importance of the affective labour performed by beauty workers. This article has also underscored the importance of taking an intersectional approach to analysis of leisure by showing that migrant women’s access to leisure as well as migrant workers’ affective labour that creates or disrupts leisure in the beauty salon unfolds at the intersections of gender, race, class and migrancy.

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of the special issue on ‘Emotions and Leisure’, especially Dave Scott, for his caring support. I am also deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and rigorous engagement with a previous draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the UCL Graduate Research Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Nandita Dutta

Nandita Dutta is a PhD researcher at University College London. Her research interests are focused on gender, work and migration in and from South Asia.