Somaesthetic Labor and Career Trajectories in the Era of Precarious Employment

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 5: Gender, Care, and the (Re)Production of Inequality

Abstract

Labor studies has repeatedly responded to socioeconomic transformations by conceptualizing new forms of labor. In this vein, this article proposes “somaesthetic labor” to theorize occupations that aesthetically transform human bodies through embodied skills. Resituating Shusterman’s concept of somaesthetics into the context of labor process, the article examines four occupations—personal training, hairdressing, manicure, and tattooing—to develop a deductive framework linking bodily materiality, skill configuration, organizational (dis)embeddedness, and career trajectories. The argument proceeds through five propositions. First, the material and physiological properties of different body parts condition how aesthetic conceptions can be realized in practice, shaping the configuration of skills. Second, because clients’ bodies vary and resist standardization, workflow, surveillance, and evaluation are structurally constrained, limiting organizational scaling. Third, when aesthetic skills are deeply embodied and situational, practitioners retain relative autonomy and bargaining power vis-à-vis production organizations. Fourth, the more aesthetic outcomes are heterogeneous and artistically claimed, the more aesthetic value can be converted into market value, shaping revenue strategies and career imagination. Finally, organizational disembeddedness encourages trajectories oriented toward self-employment and petite entrepreneurship. By foregrounding the human body as the object of labor and tracing how its materiality structures skill, organization, and valuation, the article re-centers bodily variation and embodied expertise as constitutive forces in contemporary work. In doing so, it complicates prevailing narratives of precarious employment by showing how limited organizational incorporation may coexist with alternative forms of autonomy, valuation, and career formation.

Author

• Thomas Peng, National Taipei University, Taiwan