“Everyone Wants to Feel Like a Movie Star”: Aesthetics, Work, Pleasure, and Caste in India

Abstract

This article explores the social category of work as it intersects with pleasure (mazaa). Through an ethnography of beauty workers in urban New Delhi, in interwoven digital and non-digital spaces, I interrogate how certain forms of work are valued at the expense of others. Beauty work refers to the broad category of work that enhances the physical appearance of oneself or others. It is a part of the new categories of entrepreneurial work that have emerged in post-liberalization India, where demands for consumer goods and services have escalated. I focus on makeup artists and beauticians: two categories of relationally produced beauty workers. While the former are popularly constructed as creative workers, the latter are viewed as providing mundane and dull forms of labor pertaining to bodily cleanliness, like body-hair removal. Pleasure, through creativity, sutures practices of work in relation to categories of class, capital, labor, caste, gender, and aesthetics. Creativity and pleasure, then, emerge as sites of articulating caste-based immunocapital (Olivarius 2019). I argue that mazaa becomes a negotiated and historically situated site for negotiating caste-based immaterial (immuno)capital.