ILPC 2027

Migration, Aesthetic Labour and the Citizenship – A Case of migrant women workers in the services sector in India

Binitha  V Thampi, Associate Professor

Humanities and Social Sciences Department

Indian Institute of Technology, Madra

Chennai, India, Pin - 600036

binithavthampi@gmail.com; binithathampi@iitm.ac.in

The period of post-liberalisation economic growth in India was characterised by an increase in the volume of migration that produced a complex mobility regime, distinct from the ways in which migration has been historically understood. One of the specificities of this mobility regime has been an increased influx of migrant women into the emerging services sector. The entry of migrant women into the services sector has resulted in new forms of embodiment that can be conceptualised  as ‘aesthetic labor’. Migrant women labourers from Northeastern India are found to have a comparative advantage in the emerging services sectors such as beauty and personal care, retail selling, hospitality services etc. due to their pan Asian mangaloid racialised features. Their presence in the services sector of cities such as Bangalore and Chennai provides an interesting case to examine the ways in which these forms of embodiments are constituted and played out in cities with their distinct histories of migration and contrasting cultural economies.  This paper attempts to unpack this embodied labour that shapes the worker identity of these migrant women in specific locations that enables certain forms of citizenship. It adopts the framework of feminist labour geography and uses qualitative accounts of 140 single female migrant workers.  The four analytical categories the study employs are gender, labour, mobility, race/ethnicity. How do they interact and produce certain enabling and disabling conditions in and out of the spaces of work to perform their citizenship is the central theme that the paper investigates.