Keele Research Repository
Explore the Repository
Wood, R (2023) From Aesthetic Labour to Affective Labour: feminine beauty and body work as self-care in UK ‘lockdown’. Gender, Place and Culture: a journal of feminist geography. ISSN 0966-369X (In Press)
![[thumbnail of Manuscript revised with author details.docx]](https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
Manuscript revised with author details.docx - Accepted Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 2 March 2024.
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.
Download (80kB)
Abstract
This paper draws on qualitative survey and interview data with 72 participants focusing on feminine body and beauty work practices in the UK’s first Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ in 2020. The data suggest that the affective dimensions of beauty were intensified, accelerated, and expanded during this period. Feminine beauty and body work was deployed to produce desired affects: namely positivity, productivity, and the elimination of stress and anxiety.
I argue, therefore, that beauty practices became oriented less around aesthetic labour – the work of improving and maintaining appearance – and more explicitly and substantially a project of affective labour – the deep feeling work of generating and maintaining a disposition that aligns with the needs of capital. Using the lens of affective labour provides insight into the way that the affective harms of the pandemic crisis were individualised and managed by feminine selves through practices of beauty and body work.
Participants’ affective labour projects produced two interrelated sets of immaterial outcomes. First, they helped maintain a ‘market ready’ set of positive and productive dispositions that were particularly crucial for those subjects in heightened conditions of precarity, insecurity or isolation. Second, affective labour was key to the deeply gendered, racialised and classed moral formulation of the ‘good’ pandemic citizen who would, and could, follow the directive to ‘stay at home’ in order not only to care for themselves and others, but to use the ‘opportunity’ of lockdown to transform and improve the self.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Additional Information: | The final version of this article and all relevant information related to it, including copyrights, can be found on the publisher website. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | aesthetic labour; affective labour; beauty work; body work; self-care; lockdown; femininity |
Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BH Aesthetics H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman > HQ1101 Women. Feminism |
Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Humanities |
Depositing User: | Symplectic |
Date Deposited: | 16 Mar 2023 09:46 |
Last Modified: | 16 Mar 2023 09:46 |
URI: | https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/12015 |