Hair Care: The Gender, Class, and Race of Emotional Labor and Touching Rules in Men's Grooming

• In Event: 342 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Paper Session. Embodied Labor and Intersectional Inequalities (co-sponsored with the Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work)

Abstract

In this paper, I draw from interview and ethnographic data at two high-end men's salons to discuss how systems of gender and heterosexuality impact the feeling rules by which workers come to see themselves as “other women” who provide their clients with important confidential friendships; male stylists, on the other hand, forge “guy time” with clients. I highlight moments when the racialization of gendered emotions rises to the forefront of care work in these salons. Elaborating on the notion of feeling rules, which guide emotional expressions and performances in organizations, and building on Miliann Kang’s “bodily labor,” I argue that the beauty workers in this study operate by different touching rules when grooming men. These rules help to explain how socially and contextually specific norms enable and constrain who can touch clients, how so, under what conditions, and how workers are supposed to feel about this touch. Instead of seeing talk and touch as mutually exclusive yet operating simultaneously in beauty work, I am interested in those moments when masculinizing emotional labor is a function of touch. I discuss what all of this means for the commercialization of workers’ bodies and emotions, and I unpack how the women create meaningful identities as hairapists and consequently pillar gender differences between men and women.

Author

• Kristen Barber, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale