UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Thread Between Them: Affective and Intimate Labor in Los Angeles Threading Salons Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1k62d82z Author Sharma, Preeti Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Thread Between Them: Affective and Intimate Labor in Los Angeles Threading Salons A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies by Preeti Sharma 2019 © Copyright by Preeti Sharma 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Thread Between Them: Affective and Intimate Labor in Los Angeles Threading Salons by Preeti Sharma Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Grace Kyungwon Hong, Co-Chair Professor Purnima Mankekar, Co-Chair This dissertation examines the transnational beauty practice of threading in salons across Los Angeles county through its emergence, labor, regulation, and contestation in the neoliberal immigrant service sector. I argue that threading salons, which provide facial hair removal and skin care services, rely on South Asian immigrant and refugee women’s affective and intimate labor; their labor not only produces clean eyebrows but also a global beauty aesthetic and relations rooted in a South Asian imaginary emerging in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Once learned informally among friends in schoolyards or at home in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, threading takes on a different form as service work in Los Angeles salons in ethnic enclaves, strip malls, and chains where the practice is represented as ancient, cultural, and/or natural. I draw from feminist theories of work on racialized and gendered service to demonstrate continuities in how immigrant and refugee women of color have long performed devalued ii reproductive service work that produces and requires affects, emotions, and feelings in contemporary global capitalism. I examine salon workers’ service interactions as well as broader forms of worker advocacy through the lens of affect to understand new dimensions of exploitation. Ultimately, salon workers navigate relationships with customers, other co-workers, and owners embedded in workplace pleasure and instability as a way to challenge affective and intimate forms of exploitation in non-unionized work. I deploy interdisciplinary methods, including 18 months of ethnographic participant observation at two different threading salons, one in an ethnic enclave and another in a multi- ethnic neighborhood, along with 26 interviews with workers and owners in the region, to compare salon workers care and body maintenance work. I also use discourse and policy analysis to parse out the ways threading gets situated within multicultural incorporation and deregulation. Additionally, I participated in local, regional, and national beauty salon organizing meetings to capture how advocates build intersectional organizing across racial, environmental, and reproductive justice movements necessary in the beauty service industry. iii The dissertation of Preeti Sharma is approved. Jennifer Jihye Chun Lieba Faier Robin D. G. Kelley Grace Kyungwon Hong, Committee Co-Chair Purnima Mankekar, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv DEDICATION To the salon workers who dared to be unruly, pushing for your collective welfare at the workplace, and to immigrant and refugee women service workers broadly, who continue to dare and dream across industries and communities—this is my attempt to lay bare the concerns you address through your love and responsibility for each other and all of us. To my grandparents—Bhabhi Ji and Pita Ji, Badi Mummy and Pita Ji—in your forced respective journeys 60 years ago/ refugee crossings/ by foot and by train/ who knew two generations later was 680 miles plus 13,400 miles plus 2,700 miles away. To my Mom, Dad, and Sister. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ....................................................................................... II DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... VIII VITA ............................................................................................................................................ XII INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 “The Thread Between Them”: Affective Economies of Racialized and Gendered Labor and Consumption ............................................................................................................................... 4 Contextualizing Threading: South Asian Americans and Service Work in Los Angeles .......... 8 Feminist Theories of Work: A Brief Review ............................................................................ 17 Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 28 Stakes and Implications ............................................................................................................ 35 Chapter Overview ..................................................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER ONE. IT’S HAIRY BUSINESS: THE GROWTH OF THREADING SALONS AND THE WOMEN THAT STAFF THEM, 1980–2018 ..................................................................... 40 From Enclave to the Mall: The “Age-Old” Beauty Practice of Threading in Los Angeles Salons ........................................................................................................................................ 42 Westward Expansion! Transnational Modalities of Chain Beauty Service in the U.S. ............ 51 How Threading Travels: Incorporations of Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Labor in Beauty Service Work ............................................................................................................................ 66 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 89 CHAPTER TWO. THE THREAD BETWEEN THEM: AFFECTIVE LABOR AT THE SALON ....................................................................................................................................................... 91 The Saturday Morning Threading Salon Routine ..................................................................... 93 Modes of Customer Service, Affective Labor, and Salon Worker Reputation ........................ 99 Salon Time: The Speed and Affects of Leisure ...................................................................... 111 Affective Communities at Work and the Limits of Sisterhood .............................................. 129 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 135 CHAPTER THREE. TWIST OF FATE: THREADING REGULATIONS IN CALIFORNIA 138 Neoliberal Biopolitics and the Role of Licensing Regulations in Beauty Service Work ....... 140 Superfluous, Cultural, or Natural: The Definitions of Cosmetology, African American Hair Braiding, and South Asian Threading ..................................................................................... 147 Diversity Capitalism and Immigrant Women’s Economic Empowerment: The Rationality of Training ................................................................................................................................... 161 vi Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 166 CHAPTER FOUR. RAISING EYEBROWS: UNIONS, WORKER CENTERS, AND HEALTHY COLLABORATIVES ............................................................................................. 168 A Brief Context: From Journeymen to Beauty Culturists ...................................................... 172 Worker Centers: An Intersectional Approach to Racialized and Gender Service Work ........ 181 “Each and every customer, I made them”: Worker Centers and Affective Labor .................. 187 FLSA, Commission, Noncompete Clause, and Affective Labor ............................................ 194 Toxic Beauty No More: “Healthy” Collaboratives for Racial, Reproductive, and Environmental Justice ............................................................................................................. 199 Conclusion: On Intersectional National Worker Center Visions and Federal Limitations .... 212 EPILOGUE: IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE WOMEN WORKERS AND LABOR LAW: MOVING THE MOVEMENT IN THE TIME OF NEOLIBERALISM ................................... 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 221 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation took life for nine years in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA thanks to the generosity, kindness, and brilliance of many people. Their efforts enhance and exceed the dissertation that follows but below is my attempt at naming them. I start with my committee, Grace Hong, Purnima Mankekar, Lieba Faier, Robin Kelley,