Blue pill or red pill? : schooling, aesthetic labor and precarious reality among Chinese working-class girls

Abstract

This study seeks to discover why working-class girls are willing to do service work with aesthetic labor, which requires them to modify their working-classness and obtain a middle-class feminine body. Existing literature on service labor attributes working-class girls’ commitment to aesthetic labor simply to their material needs due to their social-economic disadvantages. However, this explanation is insufficient because working-class girls lack the appropriate middle-class dispositions which require corresponding economic, cultural, and symbolic capitals. While sociologists on cultural and social reproduction have been interested in studying working-class culture and employment over decades, the attention has primarily been on men and their masculinity, even in female-dominated occupations.

Drawing on a six-week participant observation and semi-structure interviews with nine working-class female students and two male students, who major in High-Speed Railway Attendance at a vocational college in Central China, this research aims to challenge the material determinism of women’s labor participation and enrich studies in cultural reproduction theory by adding the experience of working-class girls.

Echoing the classical debates on structure, agency and local culture in class formation studies, this study uses Paul Willis’ theory of cultural production and reproduction in social reproduction to analyze working-class girls’ commitment to service labor with high investment but low reward. My finding illustrates that working-class girls’ entry to aesthetic labor is facilitated by their cultural understanding of good work and female body and their interpretation of their employment conditions, which is shaped by the structural conditions and the cultural repertoires they are exposed to. First, doing aesthetic labor is viewed as good work because it is not as tedious or bitter as factory work and it offers working-class girls a fantasy of the modern lifestyle of urban lady under the condition of precarious employment. Second, through the discourse of service in the schooling process, students read the requirements of aesthetic labor as universal rules for human interaction instead of exploitation and subordination. Therefore, they attribute their failure and struggle to obtain middle-class femininity to their own responsibility which leads to everyday self-policing and self-discipline. Third, students tend to blame their failure to achieve social mobility based on aesthetic labor on the school’s low teaching quality not on the capitalist system for treating them unfairly. Therefore, they do not penetrate the exploitation and unfairness in aesthetic labor. (380 words)