Styling ‘kabiliyat’: immigration classifications and affective labour among South Asian beauty workers

This paper focuses on affective labour, investigating how legal status and occupational hierarchies shape embodied self-presentation of immigrant beauty workers. Drawing on ethnographic data from immigrant run beauty salons, I find that classification of being an asylee, undocumented and permanent legal resident inform the embodied resources available to beauty workers in reclaiming value. I identify two distinct embodied processes- through which immigrant women beauty workers enact distinct social positions. First, beauty workers seeking asylum and those without legal immigration utilise certain styles of dress and bodily practices to articulate tradition and ‘culturally’ authenticate themselves while providing beauty services. Second, workers who have been in the United States for a longer time or have permanent residency emphasise wearing a beauty vest and attending beauty events as critical steps in becoming a ‘professional’ beauty worker. These findings reveal the consequences of racist immigration structures by showing how immigrant workers engage in non-normative practices (which general American public often labels ‘immigrant cultural practices’) to claim legitimacy in their work. I argue that aesthetic work – shaping of the self for economically valued affects – is a project of affective labour- work undertaken to claim recognition to mediate and shape affect informed by immigration structures.