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Abstract
This is a study of the work experience of beauty retail employees, studying their alienation, subjectivities and relations. On the surface, beauty retail employees look glamorous, as befits the living exemplifications of Dior, Chanel and the like. On the other hand, partly because of the impenetrability of this glamour, they are also frowned upon, by customers and even by themselves. They are seen as cold, judgemental and aloof. This led me to question how one survives in the retail beauty industry when it explicitly requires you to be empathic and ethical at the same time as it implicitly requires you to be superior and bitchy. Surely, in between these two, lie the hidden injuries and alienation of the beauty retail employees. The research draws on ethnographic research conducted via participation observation and nineteen interviews conducted with beauty employees in the retail beauty industry in Penang and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and in Sydney, Australia. The thesis compares the analytical power of three different views of alienation. First, it explores Hochschild’s the Managed Heart to understand the alienation caused by management. Not entirely satisfied by Hochschild’s understanding of subjectivity and by her assumption that alienation is caused mainly by the capitalism, the thesis turns to the analyses of alienation based on Lacan and Hegel, which are the basis of contemporary poststructuralist accounts. Lacan and Hegel offer accounts of identity-formation that indicate that wherever there is subjectivity there is alienation. This second analysis is more satisfying than the first, but: is subjectivity really omnipresent? Are there moments where an employee is not identified, and hence un-alienated? This question leads the thesis to the work of Buber, which insists on the importance of shared or common meaning in relationships. The thesis confirms the importance of these un-alienated experiences at work, however due to the highly identified nature of the beauty industry, these moments are rare. The thesis presents, therefore, a more comprehensive and nuanced account of workplace alienation than is usually found in the academic literature. It confirms that beauty retail employees suffer from alienation both because of management control and because of the processes of subjectification. The study also points to the possibility and importance of experience of un-alienated presence and realness.