Abstract
This article builds heterosexuality into the concept of aesthetic labor to better understand corporate efforts to construct gendered brands and consumer identities. By theorizing heterosexual aesthetic labor, I show how two men’s salons, Adonis and The Executive, hire for, develop, and mobilize the sexual identities and gender habitus of straight and conventionally feminine women to masculinize the hair salon. Drawing from ethnographic observations of and interviews with employees and clients at these men’s salons, I move the discussion of aesthetic labor beyond recruitment to show how service workers become interactional resources for customers’ projections of privileged identities. Emphasizing workers’ agency, I show how the women deploy professionalizing rhetoric and protocols and essentializing frameworks to manage the dilemmas of heterosexual aesthetic labor. These management strategies allow women a sense of legitimacy and at the same time keep gender and sexual hierarchies intact and naturalize men’s entitlement to women’s bodies.
The emerging literature on aesthetic labor foregrounds the role retail workers’ appearances play in successful corporate branding and in the sale of products and services. This is particularly true for frontline service workers who mediate the relationship between customer and product. Corporations hire workers with the “right” aesthetic qualities to support their brand images and this often translates into social inequalities, particularly in high-end retail that privileges white, middle-class, conventionally gendered workers. Retail brands also create sexualized—and often subordinating—marketing strategies that shape employment experiences (Hochschild 1983; Loe 1996; McBride 2005; Mills 1996, 2006). Sexuality, however, remains an undertheorized aspect of aesthetic labor and thus of corporate efforts to create gendered brands and consumer identities. In this article, I ask: How exactly does sexuality shape aesthetic labor?
Turning my attention to two high-service men’s salons in Southern California, Adonis and The Executive, I argue that beauty workers suffer the demands of heterosexual aesthetic labor, whereby management mobilizes employees’ heterosexual identities and heterogendered appearances to enhance both their corporate brands and their clients’ social status. 1 By hiring for, developing, and mobilizing the sexual identities and gender habitus of heterofeminine women, Adonis and The Executive “pull against the grain of the original coding” (Craig and Liberti 2007, 678) of the hair salon to masculinize a historically feminized space and consumer practice. Aesthetic labor scholars conceptualize workers as living breathing mannequins and decorative hardware that reflects customers’ identities back to them (Williams and Connell 2010; Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson 2003). This highlights the objectifying effect of aesthetic labor but also glosses over the organizational and interpersonal heterogendering of service relationships through which frontline workers become “identity resources” (Pascoe 2007) for customers’ projections of social locations.
While we know how men deploy classed and raced masculinity to make sense of their beauty consumption (Barber 2008, 2015), we know less about how the organization of labor supports these consumer habits. I unpack four main themes of heterosexual aesthetic labor to better understand this link between work, consumption, and gender: (1) the corporate practice of hiring for and developing heterosexual workers, (2) the commercialization of workers’ heterogendered habitus, (3) workers’ professionalizing efforts to reroute resulting identity threats, and (4) workers’ denial and gender essentialism as strategies for neutralizing interpersonal effects. I discuss how the masculinizing and high-service culture of Adonis and The Executive create identity dilemmas for women working at these salons at the same time it produces professional-class masculine beauty consumers. Moving beyond the point of recruitment, I show how heterosexual aesthetic labor affects hiring practices as well as worker–client interactions and the sociopsychological meaning-making strategies women deploy to maintain their professional identities and legitimize their work. The resistant potential of these coping strategies, however, are limited by the institutionalized link between heterosexual femininity and the salons’ and employees’ success. Findings reveal that the symbolic exchanges between management, workers, and customers are important analytic sites for developing theories on aesthetic labor.
Aesthetic Labor in Service Work
In her study of Delta flight attendants, Hochschild (1983) explored the way airlines require their frontline service workers to perform “emotional labor.” Emotions, she found, are commercialized so that workers manage their “authentic” feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and anger in order to smile at, defer to, and ultimately to produce happy customers. Since women are supposed natural nurturers and expected to be deferential, emotional labor in service work becomes feminized and linked to the production of gender—as well as race and class—inequalities (Duffy 2007; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Kang 2003, 2010; MacDonald and Merrill 2008). Hochschild’s study drew attention to service work as an important site for understanding worker exploitation in the new economy and has encouraged research on other undertheorized aspects of service work. Building on the concept of emotional labor as an embodied process and drawing from Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of habitus, aesthetic labor scholars have begun investigating corporate requirements for service workers to “look good” and “sound right” (Warhurst and Nickson 2001, 2007; Williams and Connell 2010; Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson 2003). Particular to habitus is the idea that class locations shape people’s behaviors, tastes, and dispositions, which are taken for granted as second nature. Aesthetic labor ties workers’ commercial value to such socially informed behaviors as bodily comportment, style, and speech and thus produces discriminatory hiring practices (Mears 2014). Williams and Connell (2010) show that high-end retailers like Banana Republic, for example, often hire white middle-class workers to sell goods to white middle-class customers. Corporations rely on a pool of ready-made workers to act as extensions of their brand images. Brands, Pettinger (2010) notes, “are presented back to the customer not merely through logos, the arrangement of the shop, and such like, but also through the bodies of employees.” While aesthetic labor moves beyond the emotions of service work, it adds to rather than replaces emotional labor as a means by which customers and corporations are commercially crafted (Cohen et al. 2013).
Aesthetic labor situates employees as models that display products (Pettinger 2004), decorative hardware that enhances a store’s environment (Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson 2003), and mirrors to reflect back customers’ social locations (Williams and Connell 2010). Customers expect to see themselves in the frontline service worker, interacting with employees as “identity resources” (Pascoe 2007) who resemble them in terms of race, class, and gender. This allows customers to identify with a brand, reassures them that they belong there, and encourages them to relate to products as important in reproducing their social privileges and identities. By treating workers’ habitus as commodities, corporations attempt to recreate the consumer during exchanges with particularly aestheticized employees.
The Gender and Sexuality of Aesthetic Labor
The aesthetic labor literature focuses on how corporations use race, class, and gender in hiring workers and to sort workers into different jobs. Employees of color might find themselves working in the stockrooms of especially high-end retail outlets while white women cashiers act as the face of stores (Williams 2006). In fashion retail, corporations expect sales associates to model their clothing, therefore capitalizing on existing “cultural forms of feminization” whereby women are rewarded for maintaining normative femininity (Pettinger 2005). While this concept highlights the diversity of femininities, I argue that gender habitus more fully captures the socially informed, ingrained, and habitual character of thinking, speaking, and behaving in masculine and feminine ways, making hegemonically gendered workers widely available to support mainstream corporate brands. Hegemonic gender aesthetics also infiltrate unconventional brands, sorting women into hierarchies within retail corporations such as plus-size clothing stores (Gruys 2012). Identifying such “transposable gender practices” can help scholars better understand the “gender coding” of—and gender inequalities embedded in—service establishments (Craig and Liberti 2007, 697; see also Acker 1990, 2006; Britton 2000).
Feminist scholars contend that the study of sexuality is integral to understanding structural, organizational, and micro-level processes that support and sometimes challenge the gender order. Heterosexuality, for example, is a key component of hegemonic masculinities, whereby boys and men gain gender privilege through the projection of heterosexual prowess (Connell 1995; Kimmel 1994). And lesbians are culturally masculinized as “dykes” or failed women (Halberstam 1998) who cannot serve as resources for men’s projections of hetero-desires. Yet aesthetic labor scholarship has largely overlooked the role sexuality plays in gendering both brands and worker–consumer relationships. Discussions of “sexual aesthetics” (Bridges 2014) thread through sex work literature that considers beauty standards in exotic dance clubs (Trautner 2005), scholarship on fashion modeling (Mears 2011), and research on “gay-friendly” workplaces in which employers expect LBG workers to display their sexualities so they can tout diversity in hiring (Giuffre, Dellinger, and Williams 2008; Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger 2009). While this scholarship contributes to the literature on sexuality at work, it does not tell us much about the role sexualized aesthetic labor plays in supporting brand images and consumer identities. “Strategically sexualized” work should be considered in the study of aesthetic labor, since it supports brands and fattens corporate revenues at workers’ expense (Warhurst and Nickson 2009, 399). Although she does not deploy the term “aesthetic labor,” Loe’s (1996) research on the hot wings restaurant, Bazooms, shows female employees fill sexual roles at work and cope with customers’ sexual harassment. Bazoom’s management requires women to squeeze into tight shorts and bust hugging shirts, but Loe focuses her analysis on the sexual offenses suffered and navigated by workers rather than on how sexual branding efforts exploit workers’ heterogendered habitus to create particular consumers. In her study of a lesbian bookstore, Adkins (2000) discusses the link between workers’ sexual identities and consumers’ relationships to a retail business by considering how queer identified and appearing employees uphold the gender and sexual character of their workplace. Politics of recognition situate the workers as secondary sites of consumption and provide a way to begin thinking about sexuality, identities, retail, and consumers in beauty work research, which has considered workers’ bodies insofar as women groom themselves to appear trendy (Sanders, Cohen, and Hardy 2013) and immigrant women experience racialized sexualization (Kang 2013).
Managing Sexuality in Service Work
Conceptualizing workers as models, decorative hardware, and mirrors importantly points to their objectification but also portrays workers as passive props rather than dynamic actors who manage interactions with customers, dilemmas at work, and the meaning of their labor. Women already have a more difficult time gaining professional recognition and respect than their male peers, since people are likely to see them as “gendered personas” rather than as disembodied workers (Forseth 2005, 443). Aesthetic labor threatens to compound this difficulty by emphasizing workers’ bodies, and heterosexual aesthetic labor especially draws attention to women’s sexual identities and appeal. Women service workers thus come up against dilemmas on the shop floor, which “represent[s] a minefield of threats to the dignity and virtue of female workers” (Otis 2008, 360). While the aesthetic labor literature leaves out workers’ agency—instead focusing on how corporations shape employees’ labor (Guerrier and Abid 2004)—workers may indeed resist and rearrange social relations on the job. Mears’s (2011) research shows that fashion models make decisions about gendered, raced, and classed “looks” when they engage aesthetic labor. And as women confront sexual dilemmas at work, they implement coping strategies to mitigate the potentially delegitimizing effects of labor. They may use “professionalizing protocols” to distinguish themselves as legitimate workers (Otis 2008), “coyly deflect” sexual attention (Parreñas 2009), and police their clothing to avoid drawing attention to their bodies (Giuffre and Williams 2000). Slippages between feminized service work and sex/sex work motivate workers to emphasize professional identities, to cast the workplace as reputable (Gimlin 1996), and to draw intimacy boundaries between themselves and clients (Sherman 2007). Displaying professionalism therefore includes “keeping one’s distance from close relationships with clients,” or otherwise avoiding “excess merger” and “over rapport” (Oerton 2004, 104). Some workers are highly invested in containing the effects sexuality has on their work experiences, identities, and status, while others come to accept and enjoy some sexuality in the workplace via a “period of adjustment” (Dellinger and Williams 2002; 247). Either way, organizational cultures enable and constrain workers’ abilities to resist and cope with sexuality and to forge powerful, dignified identities. Fine (1996) notes that professionalizing rhetoric is contextually available, so that personal trainers and stylists, for example, evoke different logics and strategies to manage identity problems at work. That is, workers attempt to fit their labor into meaning systems that are both readily available and self-enhancing (see George 2008; Oerton 2004).
In the high-service men’s salons, Adonis and The Executive, employees do not look like their customers. The mainly female beauty workers do not mirror their male clients’ social identities back to them. These women do, however, perform aesthetic labor that supports the organizational heterogendering of the salon brand and consumer experience. By emphasizing the women’s agency and the dynamic interactions between management, workers, and clients, I consider the women’s roles as interactive identity resources and answer the following questions: How do these organizations capitalize on heterosexual aesthetic labor to create a masculinizing and high-end consumer experience for men in a historically feminized space? How does this labor create dilemmas for the women workers? And what coping strategies do the women deploy to manage these dilemmas?
Men’s Salons
The hair salon is a historically feminized space in which women gossip, build communities, and shore up their appearances. Hairdressers and nail technicians create particularly feminized women when they trim split ends and jagged cuticles (e.g., Craig 2006; Gimlin 1996; Ossman 2002). Since hegemonic masculinity is produced via the repudiation of the feminine (Connell 1995; Kimmel 1994), it seems counterintuitive that men and masculinity might be reproduced in this space. However, while working-class men are unlikely to identify with or feel comfortable in a salon (see Paap 2006), class-privileged men can use salons to produce a high-end gendered aesthetic (Barber 2008, 2015). Dedicated men’s salons help these men purchase aesthetic-enhancing and pampering services without fear of feminization. Southern California is replete with luxury hair and nail salons and is on the forefront of the growing men’s grooming industry, with high-service salons dedicated to the primping and preening of men’s bodies. While California excels in men’s grooming, there is also a nationwide expansion in the production and purchase of services, spaces, and products designed for and marketed specifically to men (Euromonitor International 2010, 2015; IBISWorld 2010, 2015). Adonis and The Executive take advantage of men’s rising purchasing power within the beauty industry and represent larger shifts in how beauty is marketed to men.
Adonis and The Executive have clean lines, leather chairs, and charge upwards of $39 for a haircut. This cost allows middle- and upper-middle-class men to regularly patronize the salons while also excluding working-class men who might be unable or unwilling to pay this much for a haircut. Both salons offer manicures and pedicures, hair coloring, and straight razor shaves. Adonis provides massages and facials, is located in a hip beach community, and attracts casually dressed yet trendy clients in their 20s and 30s. The salon looks like a modern Soho establishment, with flat screen televisions built into work station mirrors and chrome accenting sleek leather chairs. The Executive offers men body waxing, is situated in a sprawling suburb with big box stores and office buildings, and attracts many clients in their 50s and 60s. These men generally get a haircut during their lunch breaks or after work; they come to the salon dressed in slacks, button-up shirts, and ties. Decorated in woods and vintage reproduction barber chairs, The Executive conjures up images of a swanky cigar shop or country club. The salons provide snacks, beer, wine, and “men’s” magazines, including GQ at Adonis and Golf at The Executive. Clients are welcomed by the warm smile of a pretty receptionist and appear comfortable waiting for their appointments and chatting with stylists.
Methods
Data for this article come from a larger research project that explores how women beauty workers are the cornerstones of the men’s grooming industry (Barber 2016). I spent nine months studying Adonis and The Executive. As luxury spaces, they are likely less racially diverse than more economical men’s salons like Sports Clips. But unlike Sports Clips, they offer an array of grooming services, allowing me to study a male clientele that demonstrates an interest in and ability to afford the careful commercial fashioning of their bodies. To better understand how heterosexual aesthetic labor operates on both an organizational and interpersonal level, I draw from 34 in-depth interviews with workers who greet and groom men, and who manage the overall operations of the salons. These employees include licensed hairstylists, barbers, nail technicians, and estheticians, as well as one massage therapist, four receptionists, and Veronica, owner of The Executive. Tyler, owner of Adonis, was unwilling to be interviewed. Despite having varying technical responsibilities, all of these employees were occupationally required to talk to and care for male clients, and all but the receptionists touched men’s bodies. Employees averaged 25 years old at Adonis and 34 years old at The Executive. Reflecting the predominance of women in this line of work, 2 all but three of these employees were women. Four women working at The Executive were hired before I exited the field, and their position as newcomers offered insight into the processes involved in adjusting to the salons’ work cultures. Of the 30 beauty workers (including The Executive’s owner), 22 were white while three identified as Asian, three as Latino, and two as “racially mixed.” Only the massage therapist identified as lesbian, with everyone else identifying as straight. The receptionists were straight white women and ranged from 19 to 24 years old. I conducted interviews with participants in coffee shops, a taco hut, a sub shop, and on benches and patio furniture outside the salons. While this meant the all-seeing eye of salon management might impact workers’ responses, it also meant that I interviewed participants when they were most entrenched in their workplace identities. Interviews lasted an average of one hour and covered how employees came to work in men’s grooming, what they believe the salons offer men, and their relationships with clients and management. I open-coded interview transcripts to identify themes around workers’ formal and informal labor. I then analyzed these themes for gender effects while leaving room for sexuality, class, and race to emerge as mitigating structures of the gendered interactions between employees, clients, and management.
Male clients were racially diverse but largely white. While Latino and Asian men frequented both salons, I never saw a Black man purchase services or products. Demographic information I collected from 12 client interviews at The Executive (and another at Adonis) shows that men were generally upper-middle class, with an average income of $152,150, and held jobs in professional occupations such as law and civil engineering. Ten of the men identified as “heterosexual,” and the others reported their sexuality as “male,” “married,” or “I didn’t answer the sexual orientation question, but I’m married.” The owner of Adonis did not permit me to interview clients (I interviewed one client I knew personally), but my recorded observations suggest they were well-to-do (signaled by their brand name clothing and ability to afford salon services) and often younger than those at The Executive. I conducted interviews with clients both in-person and over the phone to accommodate their busy schedules. Questions centered on how they became clients of Adonis or The Executive, their relationships with the staff, and why they believe men go to the salons. Interviews lasted 20 to 45 minutes and were audio-recorded and transcribed. I sorted data by how the men experienced the services, amenities, and interpersonal relationships at the salons. As men’s relationships with workers rose to the forefront of emerging themes, I conceptualized their descriptions as reflections of heterogendered and classed structures, organizations, and identities.
The Organization of Heterosexual Aesthetic Labor
Four themes arose that speak to the way heterosexual aesthetic labor organizes the gender of work, consumption, and corporate branding in men’s salons. The first two themes focus on how Adonis and The Executive hire straight, conventionally feminine women, develop these women’s appearances, and mobilize them as gendered brand representatives. Themes three and four emphasize how the women perform emotional labor via professionalizing and gender essentialism to manage resulting identity dilemmas at work. I unpack these themes in turn and highlight when emotional labor and aesthetic labor operate independently from each other or together. What emerges is a story about both the corporate commodification of workers’ heterosexual identities and the agency these workers deploy to deflect heteromasculine performances while also supporting a masculine brand image and a heteromasculinizing consumer experience.
Hiring and Developing Straight Aesthetics
Trish, a 29-year-old massage therapist, was the only lesbian at either salon. This “outsider within” (Collins 1986) status makes her especially attuned to the way heterosexual aesthetic labor drives hiring practices at Adonis. She told me it is obvious Tyler prefers to hire pretty straight women and so she must have been hired by mistake. “Tyler picks girls that are attractive, for sure,” she said.
I don’t know how I got the job. I had longer hair then, that’s probably why. He didn’t know I was a queer then. But he definitely wants to know if they’re cute. . . . Tyler definitely hires pretty girls, for sure. And if you show up without makeup on, he’ll be mad.
Long hair and makeup act as indicators of heterofeminine gender identity and influence Tyler’s hiring decisions, advantaging straight women and creating employment barriers for genderqueer applicants. Depicting herself as having slipped through the cracks, Trish sported short spiky blonde hair, tattoos, and a makeup-free face at the time of my study. Although she no longer met the salon’s demands for heterosexual aesthetic labor, she also did not pose a threat to Adonis’s heteromasculine consumer experience because her position as massage therapist kept her largely out of sight in a back room marked “spa area.”
Tyler relied on the gender habitus of straight women to help him hire the “right” kind of worker, but there were times when he also enforced heterosexual aesthetic labor by policing the women’s bodies. When I asked Connie, a 24-year-old stylist, if any unwritten rules shape her work experiences, she said the women have to “look good” or else Tyler will send them home to change. He reminds the women that their appearances are just as commercially valuable as their technical skills, and he is known to say, “You look like crap, go home and change.” The women understand that at Adonis “looking good” means appealing to the presumed heterosexual desires of their male clients. Mary, another 24-year-old stylist, explained: —say they come in and there’s a girl wearing just sloppy jeans with a T-shirt and tennis shoes and their hair is in a ponytail. Or you come in and the girl has her hair done, it’s styled really cute, they have a lot of makeup on, they’re dressed real trendy and cute, a cute little dress on or tight jeans or whatever, where would you rather go?
Women who wear little dresses, tight jeans, and obvious makeup, and who have carefully coiffed hair, support an institutionalized heteromasculine consumer experience at the salon. In a larger cultural context where hegemonic masculinity is tied to heterosexuality and straight women are readily objectified, this appears an obvious way to recode beauty so it is palatable to a straight male clientele. Overlooking the organizational production of clients’ entitlement to women’s bodies and sexualities, Mary suggested it makes sense men choose a salon that provides them heterosexual titillation.
Exemplifying the gendered character of heterosexual aesthetic labor, Adonis’s two male stylists, Joshua and Ryan, said they do not have to adhere to any particular appearance rules at work. Joshua, a 31-year-old licensed barber, explained: For me, I think it’s different, because I was the only guy for a long time, so I just made up my own [dress code]. I felt this was nice, so I’ll wear this; I think it’ll work, so I’ll just do that. I’ve never been bothered. [Tyler] always says, “Oh, you always look good!”
By virtue of being a man, Joshua does not suffer the same objectifying demands on his sexuality as the women. He instead focuses on carving out “brotherly” relationships with clients, who he said sometimes want advice from and to confide in another man. This does not mean he completely escapes the demands of heterosexual aesthetic labor, though; rather, these demands look different for men. Joshua and Ryan, a 34-year-old stylist, still project heteromasculine identities that mitigate clients’ potential homophobic fears of being touched, groomed, and cared for by another man. So, while Tyler may not police their appearances, he relies on Joshua and Ryan to possess a straight masculine habitus that helps to make Adonis a comfortable place for other straight men.
Women who worked at The Executive did not tell me stories about heterosexist hiring practices or being sent home to change into more heterosexually appealing clothing. But when I asked them why they believe men patron the salon, many of them said, “sex sells,” and as evidence pointed to online reviews in which clients described them as “hot chicks.” Veronica, owner of The Executive, believed hiring a mostly female staff set the stage for heterosexualized worker–client interactions and tried to stem this by enforcing a dress code. She boasted that her dress code controls shop floor interactions to create a professional organizational aesthetic. “Every salon has a dress code . . . ours is professional attire,” she said: No jeans. It’s nothing low-cut, nothing too short, because it’s a male environment. You’ve got to be familiar with what would provoke unwanted attention. So [a] dress code in the aspect of keeping it nice and professional.
Veronica understands that men’s entitlement to women’s bodies might impact service encounters at the salon, but the dress code supports the idea that it is women’s bodies, not men’s actions, that are the problem. She also overlooks how this entitlement is supported by implicit organizational demands on women’s heterofeminine identities and appearances.
The institutionalization of this dress code does not mean women at The Executive escape the demands of heterosexual aesthetic labor. Rather, the salon is organized around classed expressions of heterofemininity (Trautner 2005), so that what counts as “professional” includes tight black dress slacks with fitted button-up shirts and spandex leggings with off-the-shoulder tops, and almost always a pair of heels. It is a sexualized professional aesthetic that does double-duty in a salon set up to appeal to and reinforce the distinction of straight businessmen. By mandating her stylists adhere to a professional yet heterosexual aesthetic, Veronica secures a brand image that resonates with a high-status, straight, and largely white male clientele. She said, “It is discussed in our employee handbook, absolutely. We talk about attire, how you present yourself. . . . We’re a brand, and we want to support that brand in what we wear to work every day.” This appearance-disciplining policy sets workers up as extensions of the brand, whereby they ease men’s relationships to a historically feminized institution by appealing to both their racialized class privileges and heterosexual identities. This labor also reinforces the women’s paradoxical class positions. Appearing professional, the women at The Executive project a similar class location as their clients, and they often told me that their clients see them as fellow professionals. But they are not the men’s peers. They sit at men’s feet to shore up their toenails and wax their unwanted nose and ear hair. And while the women are solidly middle-class, they also rely on clients for commission and tips. This mimics conventional gender relations and symbolic gender expectations whereby women are financially dependent on and subservient to men.
Commercializing Heterofeminine Habitus
Organizational demands for heterosexual aesthetic labor situate the women salon workers as ideal commodities to promote a heteromasculine consumer experience. Both Adonis and The Executive feature these conventionally feminine employees on company websites, postcards, and television commercials, and Adonis has women hit the streets to solicit new business. With the exception of The Executive’s website, male employees are conspicuously absent from these marketing strategies. When the men do appear, they look as if they are clients rather than employees. The Executive’s online photo gallery included a group photo of the women gathering around two men who were seated in vintage reproduction barbershop chairs. While some women posed smiling at the camera, others appeared to be cutting the men’s hair. Only regular clients might recognize one of the men as Randy, a barber at the salon, and the other as Antonio, one of the salon’s two shoe shiners. By making male employees invisible, the salon invites clients to imagine a grooming experience unfettered by the homophobic discomfort of being touched by another man (see Alexander 2003 on the secret pleasures of homosocial barbershop touch), and instead gives the impression that clients will have beautiful women touching and talking to them. Such promotional efforts help to assure that men’s association with hegemonic masculinity will be enhanced not despite of, but because of purchasing salon services.
Adonis more blatantly commodifies its employees to encourage men to make appointments. Slippages between sexuality and aesthetic labor in the salons set up the women as recognizable identity resources (Pascoe 2007) for clients’ projections of heteromasculine desires and thus as secondary sites of consumption. One client I spoke with described the salon’s online commercial as “porn.” The commercial featured eight young, thin, and attractive women in miniskirts—all employees at the time—clawing at the salon’s front door. They slid around on stilettos, pushing each other while trying to break into the salon to reach the tall and freshly coiffed man inside. Whitney, the 24-year-old manager and receptionist, licks the man’s black dress shoe just before she pulls him toward her open mouth for a kiss. This commercial looped on a small flat screen television at the font desk, just to the left of where Whitney worked. Noah, the 34-year-old client who called it porn, said the commercial invited men to believe that having their haircut at Adonis will result in women “crawling all over each other” to date them. More specifically, the commercial allows men to imagine sexual exchanges with their hairstylists and nail technicians, or the salon’s receptionist.
Trish described a marketing event during a local classic car show. Tyler required women employees to wear suggestive tank tops and hit the streets to lure men into the salon: [T]here was a car show on [Main] Street, classic cars all over the place. We had to stand out in the front handing out water bottles with [Adonis’s] label on it, trying to advertise. . . . But [the stylists] all were wearing, and [Tyler] made me wear this, too, the tank top says “Men Wanted” on the front, and it says “follow me to [Adonis]” on the back. I had to wear that shirt! I was gonna’ shoot myself. I was like, “There’s no way!” And you’re walking around and the guys were like, “Men wanted?!”
This marketing strategy played on sexual innuendo, inviting men to approach the women as if they were personally soliciting sexual attention. While Trish had to presumably downplay her sexuality (Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger 2009) to successfully act as heterosexual bait, she was likely not the only woman to feel uncomfortable with this objectifying marketing strategy. She also did not believe that she had much of a choice in resisting participation since as a new hire she “did not want to upset” Tyler and jeopardize her employment.
The availability of women’s bodies and sexualities was not lost on men who reported enjoying their interactions with the “pretty women.” Dan, a 61-year-old client of The Executive, told me that a friend of his came to the salon, pointed to “a stunning blonde,” and asked the receptionist, “When does she have an appointment?” Choosing a stylist for her heterofeminine presentation highlights the women’s commercial value as gendered persons. Another client, 34-year-old Warren, told me, “There’s a tremendous amount of sex appeal at [The Executive], and most guys, that’s what they like. They like being waited on hand and foot by beautiful women.” Heterosexual aesthetic labor reaffirms straight women’s roles as servers of men and highlights the emotional labor involved in being both sexy and caring. Acting as identity resources, these women are supposed to make clients feel catered to as straight, class-privileged men. The men often flirt with employees and make sexual remarks that take advantage of the women as obligated identity resources for men’s displays of hetero-desires, and that consequently threaten the women’s professional identities.
Professionalizing Rhetoric and Protocols
Professionalism in service work denotes a kind of behavior that is emotionally constrained and focused on the customer, and so at Adonis and The Executive it reflects men’s high-status social locations back to them at the same time it creates subordinate women. Women at the salons repeatedly explained that the client “is number one.” Professionalism is also a contextually specific and readily available rhetoric with which the women deny men’s sexual behavior and reroute potential threats to their professional dignity. When I asked June, a 29-year-old stylist at The Executive, if clients flirt with her, she replied: “For the most part, they know they’re in a professional business, so they are not going to cross the line.” Kendra, a 35-year-old stylist, agreed: “It’s not that big of a deal. We’re in a professional environment, so it’s not gonna get out of hand.” Claiming men do not bring sexuality into the salon fails to acknowledge that sexuality is an organizing aspect of service organizations and retail brands, that men regularly objectify women in the workplace, and that displays of heterosexuality commonly associate men with privileged masculinity (Connell 1995; Kimmel 1994).
Imagining clients see them and the salons as professional allows the women to paint their work as devoid of over rapport (Oerton 2004) and casts the worker–client relationship as shaped by unspoken yet understood boundaries. However, cracks in the workers’ depictions of clients as sexually constrained appeared when they admited that they sometimes have to remind men they are professionals. Just minutes after claiming men do not “cross the line,” June explained she sometimes has to tell clients she is “serious” about her work. When men flirt with June, her status as a straight, heterosexually desirable woman becomes salient and she attempts to manage their impression of her: “I think you just have to be really up front with it.” She tells men, “I take my job seriously. This is a professional place. I would appreciate if you just leave it at that.” The regularity with which women working at the salons told me stories of having to deploy professionalizing rhetoric reveals that clients do not always self-regulate their heteromasculine performances. In fact, these performances are organizationally supported.
The degree to which women can contain men’s heterosexual behavior is constrained by the link between heterofemininity and the salons’ success. Adonis and The Executive operate under the assumption that happy clients who experience ego-inflating appointments are more likely to come back. Good service is defined by seamless interactions between customers and workers, and so while women working at Adonis and The Executive expressed to me a sense of frustration with men staring at their breasts or asking them on dates, they often coyly deflect (Parreñas 2009) unwanted attention rather than confront clients directly. Kendra, for example, teases men who flirt with her, “I’ll jokingly say, . . . ‘This isn’t that type of place.’” Turning men’s heteromasculine displays into a joke demonstrates the emotional labor women do to manage the interactional effects of heterosexual aesthetic labor. The agency women exercise to discipline clients, though, ultimately undermines their ability to be strong sexual subjects (Giuffre, Dellinger, and Williams 2008) and might appear to clients as rhetorical sexual banter.
Stylists and receptionists also manage the emotions of jealous wives and girlfriends. One day, while Brinn, a 24-year-old receptionist, was making her usual string of confirmation calls, I overheard her assuring someone that she was calling from The Executive: Brinn hangs up the phone and sighs, “You know what really bothers me? When I make a confirmation call and the guy’s wife says, ‘This is Joe’s wife.’ I’m not here to steal your man, lady!” She tells me this happens often; wives and girlfriends do not know their husbands or boyfriends are expecting a confirmation call from the salon and wonder why a woman is calling. “Yeah; they’re like, ‘Who is this?!’”
Wives and girlfriends call into question the legitimacy of Brinn’s relationships with clients. By framing women’s suspicions as irrational, Brinn individualizes their reactions and makes invisible the salon’s commercialization of women’s heterofeminine habitus. Isabel, a 31-year-old stylist, told me she constantly reminds clients’ wives that although she is touching and talking with their husbands, she does so in a professional space. She tried to place one wife at ease: “I’m like, ‘Now you know where your husband comes is a really, really respectful salon, it’s really professional, it’s nothing to be scared [of].’” Isabel challenges the idea that her relationships with clients are sexual and uses professionalizing rhetoric to separate The Executive from supposedly less respectful salons. The context in which she evokes a professional affiliation, however, has the unintentional effect of highlighting the slippages between sexuality and the labor of masculinizing the salon and the salon experience for men.
In addition to using professionalizing rhetoric, the women rely on two professional protocols to mitigate the interpersonal effects of heterosexual aesthetic labor (Otis 2008): (1) monitoring what they wear to work and (2) drawing social boundaries between themselves and clients. “You wouldn’t want to wear anything that’s too crazy, too short or whatever, be uncomfortable all day working around all men,” Jesse explained. She suggests women should expect to endure flirting and ogling by clients, and that men’s heterosexually aggressive behavior is normal and natural. It is up to women to control men’s behavior by finding work attire that abates unwanted sexual attention while also meeting organizational demands for heterosexual aesthetic labor. Personalizing the management of clients’ heterosexual performances lets men off the hook for their bad behavior and further veils the operations of heterosexual aesthetic labor. Stylists also draw social boundaries between themselves and clients to avoid overrapport. Mary, for example, sometimes socializes with clients in larger groups but will not date clients. “I try to keep it professional in certain ways . . . now that I’m single,” she said. “. . . I just don’t think I could date a client. So I kind of keep it on that level.” All of the women share this “no dating” policy, and most of them refuse to spend any time fraternizing with clients outside of work. Bridgette, a 41-year-old nail technician, told me: “I don’t really have any clients I have friendships with, no. I like to keep my work life separate from my private life.” Neither salon have written rules regulating worker–client relationships, but the women take it upon themselves to draw intimacy boundaries (Sherman 2007) important for avoiding unwanted familiarity and for casting clear divisions between their personal (sexualized) selves and their more public professional identities.
Naturalizing and Neutralizing Heteromasculine Performances
The women admitted that clients often ask them on dates, make sexual remarks, and even purchase them gifts and send them flowers at work. They sometimes made these come-ons into non-issues by denying and essentializing men’s sexual behaviors. Seasoned stylists said they had experienced clients flirting in the past but that this rarely still occurs. Bridgette used to feel so uncomfortable with men’s advances that she had considered quitting, A lot of my clients that were married were hitting on me, and it was kind of getting to the point where I was a bit tired of it. . . . So as far as—it kind of crossed my mind that I wouldn’t work here any more. But that was a phase for, like, six weeks, and then it stopped.
Client come-ons created a hostile work environment for Bridgette, but she felt unable to confront clients or to discuss her discomfort with Veronica. Her only option for escaping heterosexualized workplace interactions, she suggested, was to quietly leave her job. Jessie, a 28-year-old stylist at Adonis, said that while some clients flirt with her, they are mostly “harmless.” “Maybe some guys might [flirt]. . . . But they might just be like that,” she said. “I’d say 90% of the time they’re probably married anyway. I don’t think—they’re pretty harmless, . . . not too many creepers. . . . Not really anymore.” Jessie paints clients as flirts instead of “creepers” and naturalizes men’s behavior by claiming they “might just be like that.”
I found that the more seasoned workers often denied men’s sexual behaviors while the new hires had not yet moved through the necessary period of adjustment (Dellinger and Williams 2002), whereby they become accustomed to the interpersonal effects of heterosexual aesthetic labor. The four new hires at The Executive expressed surprise and frustration with management’s demands on their bodies and heterosexual identities. Veronica encouraged employees to greet clients with a hug and to even kiss them on the cheek. Nell, a 26-year-old new stylist, said, “Veronica does encourage that we hug our clients. I have a big problem with that. But that’s only because I feel that’s outside my job duties.” Male beauty workers at the salons rarely hug their clients. They instead shake clients’ hands or firmly pat them on the back. Expectations that women hug clients illustrates that their jobs are about more than cutting hair and clipping cuticles. Their jobs also require mediating men’s relationships with beauty by serving up a caring and physically intimate consumer experience. Ruth, a 30-year-old newcomer, explained that it is important to keep these interactions with clients from being read as sexual: “Being in this industry, you have to be comfortable with touching people. But everybody knows if it’s a weird touch or not, or where it crosses the line into being unprofessional.” New stylists revealed that management encourages physical intimacy to capitalize on women’s heterosexual aesthetic labor and were the most in tune to tensions between this labor and a sense of professionalism.
Like Jessie, who suggested men “might just be like that,” many women evoked essentializing rhetoric to neutralize the consequences of men’s sexual behavior. They framed men’s flirting and sexual comments as a result of their natural inclinations. When describing her interactions with clients, for example, Emily, a 21-year-old stylist at Adonis, told me that men are “wired” to see women as sexual objects, but that she and the other stylists try not to encourage their sexual fantasies: “Obviously, a lot of guys probably come in here because there are all these—‘Hot chicks’ gonna cut my hair, it’s gonna be so cool.’ Like, we don’t act like, ‘Oooh!’ Like a Playboy Bunny. . . . So, I’m sure they have it in their heads, guys are wired like that, but we don’t play into it.” Despite having clients who treat women as sexually available Playboy Bunnies, Emily refuses overrapport and instead reinforces ideological worker–client boundaries. This sort of perspective is vital to understanding the perpetuation of sexism, since the dictum that “men will be men” stems from and supports rampant victim-blaming rhetoric. This rhetoric excuses men’s supposedly uncontrollable heterosexual urges that objectify, subordinate, delegitimize, and harm the dignity of women, and that often excuse rape and other forms of sexual assault. In another example, Holly, a 22-year-old stylist and nail technician at Adonis, catches men ogling her breasts while she bends over in front of them to cut their bangs. She claimed this does not bother her because men simply cannot help themselves, Whatever. [I] laugh it off. They’re fricking guys. Like my boyfriend says, boys think with their unh-unh. They don’t think with their brains most of the time. So I just try to keep that in mind, and I’m like, whatever.
Accepting this ogling as part of men’s biological makeup may help to protect Holly from the sociopsychological harm of objectification, but it also allows her interactions with clients to go on uninterrupted so that she can cut hair without offending men’s sense of heterosexual entitlement. Evoking what McCaughey (2007) calls the “caveman mystique,” Emily and Holly uphold the myth that men are so close to their primitive roots that their sexual behavior cannot be altered; that misogyny, as it were, is written into their DNA. The question of what sort of men get away with this behavior also points to race and class privilege. Most of the men who patronize Adonis and The Executive are white, and it is unlikely the women would be so be so quick to describe Black and Latino men as “harmless”. After all, the same racist and classist stereotypes that allow the objectifying behavior of privileged white men also cast poor men of color as criminal, dangerous, and hypersexual.
Holly argued that men are inferior to women, despite their performances of heteromasculine dominance, because “they don’t think with their brains.” This rationalization suggests that even when women fail to directly discipline clients, they still dismiss the harmful consequences of men’s behavior. The problem is that men’s bad behavior goes unchallenged, reflecting a larger culture of silence around men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. Clients are not at the salon to be lectured about their misogynistic remarks or their ogling of women, and salon employees understand this. The women learn that when they speak to clients it is only to make the men feel funny, cared for, and attractive. A sign that hangs above the shampoo bowl at Adonis reminds stylists, “This is your clients [sic] time to relax . . . do not engage in conversation.” So when the women do encounter uncomfortable interactions in which men make claims to their bodies, they often remain silent. Emily tried to muffle the noises of one client who moaned while she shampooed his hair. “I have this one guy and he’s like, ‘unnnh, unnnh,’” she said.
And I’m like, “Ok, I get it, you like this head massage. You don’t have to make those groaning noises, please.” I had [another stylist] standing there, and I was just looking at my coworker. “Stop!” [I] put a towel on his face. “Why do you have to do that?” It’s so weird.
Emily expressed frustration with her moaning client and worked within the constraints of her job to control an otherwise uncomfortable interaction. In a workplace that relies on the organizational commodification and interpersonal consumption of heterosexual women—and emphasizes client privilege and worker deference—all she could do was cover his mouth with a hot towel that was already part of a free mini-facial.
Conclusion
Moving beyond the idea that aesthetic labor situates retail workers as models, decorative hardware, and mirrors, this article emphasizes the interactive aspect of aesthetic labor by exploring how service workers more generally both become identity resources for customers’ projections of social identities and navigate the objectifying effects of aesthetic labor. By bringing sexuality to the same analytic level as race, class, and gender, I show how the organizational processes of hiring for, developing, and mobilizing workers’ sexual identities and appearances help to create a heterogendered brand and consumer experience. Adonis and The Executive rely on heterosexual, heterofeminine women workers to organize and recode the historically feminized salon around notions of hegemonic masculinity. This creates a consumer environment in which high-status straight men are created at the point of purchase, so that men can avoid feelings of effeminacy while having their hair coiffed and nails buffed. Working for an organization capitalizing on gender hierarchies, women who labor on men’s bodies become more than skilled workers, they become gender and sexual persons ripe for consumption.
At the same time the salons regulate employees’ labor, workers find space to exercise agency. Worker agency is revealed when women at Adonis and The Executive discipline clients via professionalizing rhetoric and protocols, and when they engage gender essentialism to deny men’s heteromasculine behavior. These reactions aid the women in managing their discomfort and maintaining legitimate workplace identities yet also maintain unequal gender and class relations. So the question remains: Why don’t the women do more to manage slippages of sexuality at work? The answer is that as extensions of the brand, the women are responsible for creating seamless interactions that promote the heteromasculine and class privileges of their clients. They are commission- and tip-based employees, and so their livelihood is tied to the success of corporations engaged in the commercialization of heterofemininity. A culture of silence around men’s behavior also persists at the salons, and it is difficult to reject something that seemingly does not exist. Gender and sexual hierarchies therefore end up unfairly advantaging straight female applicants at the point of hire and become the personal burden of workers who (at least early on) see heterosexual aesthetic labor as a problem in the workplace.
Theories of aesthetic labor build on Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor, but at Adonis and The Executive it is clear they work in together. Heterosexual aesthetic labor requires emotional labor as the women manage their clients’ sexual behavior and enact silent subordination, by which Adonis in particular creates privileged salon experiences for men. Emotional deference to heterosexually performing clients reflects the gendered habitus of women as servers, and this deference helps to create successful masculinizing branding efforts. Organizational emphasis on professionalism at The Executive also calls for a constrained disposition focused on providing class-privileged customers with “good” (heteromasculine) customer service. Looking ahead to the future of service work research, I suggest scholars should consider the micro- and organizational-level heterogendering of retail workplaces and how gendered branding draws from and informs the inequalities of both labor and consumption. Focusing on the processes by which organizations become raced, classed, and gendered, we can see how sexuality differently shapes men and women’s work responsibilities. This research also encourages scholars to investigate the sociopsychological meaning-making strategies of workers to better understand how aesthetic labor shapes the informal job requirements of and the identities of workers responsible for reproducing others’ social privileges.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am thankful to Dana Britton, Catherine Connell, Edward Flores, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Lanita Jacobs, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Michael A. Messner for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article, as well as to Joya Misra, Jo Reger, and the anonymous reviewers of Gender & Society. I am also indebted to the owners, staff, and clients at Adonis and The Executive for their willingness to partake in this study.
Notes
Kristen Barber is an assistant professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is author of the book Styling Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Inequality in the Men’s Grooming Industry (Rutgers University Press, 2016).