Abstract
Envision a conventionally attractive and presumably heterosexual woman who works at a trendy salon. She eagerly fetches a Red Bull for her client who seeks to be not only well-coiffed (see also Barber, Gender & Society, 2008) but praised for his masculinity. Because of the delicate power of hegemonic masculinity, salons carefully draft their discourse and design space for men. “Grooming salons” go out of their way to signal to men there will be no feminized stigma attached to their loyalty and patronage. There are few interactions with other men, while a masculinized discourse of products such as “color camo” (hair dye) is promoted.
Much has been written about beauty salons and beauty work, but less about the growing phenomenon that is men’s grooming industry marketed purposefully to a particular group of men—white and class-privileged. The relationship between the customers who are men and the service workers who are mostly women is the author’s central emphasis. To accomplish this, Kristen Barber observes two high-service men’s salons in Southern California, distributing surveys and conducting interviews with workers who groom—stylists and barbers, a shoe shiner, massage therapist and salon owner, shop managers, estheticians, nail technicians, and receptionists. Structures of class, sexuality, and race shape these salons as contextually different from women’s salons, barbershops, and emerging hipster shops.
The men customers are groomed by mostly women beauty workers who are carefully trained as gendered cultural mediators, narrowly recoding beauty to appeal to the salons’ targeted consumer. Barber theorizes “heterosexual aesthetic labor” to explain consumption and labor, which embodies a heteronormative, or rather heterofeminine, gender habitus. She argues the role of sexuality shapes both the experiences of the consumer and the service worker. Women beauty workers have heterosexual appeal to the clients, which reinforces clients’ heteromasculine identities as they participate in and benefit from historically feminized services. Heterosexual aesthetic labor operates differently, however, for men conducting beauty work in high-end salons as they are to be friendly yet straight to avoid eliciting latent homophobic fears from the clients.
Barber adds that dialectically, “feeling rules” and “touching rules” guide “heterofeminine care work” in the roles of confidante and “gender expert.” “Touching rules” dictate how and under which conditions to touch the male clients, which “shape the political economy of workers’ bodies, whereby the emotions and bodies of differently sexed and gendered workers become unequally commercialized” (p. 119). The rules differ again for beauty workers who are men, as they deemphasize care work and perform masculinizing ego work. Touch is gendered and the product, the pampering and massaging, supports expectations of classed and gendered experiences.
Barber illustrates how some of the women use “occupational choice narratives” as their sexual and gender identities surface from their work at the salon. The narratives reinforce gender dichotomies, resulting in multiple, hierarchical femininities. The women “make sense of their bodies, work, and identities in ways that protect them from feelings of degradation, exploitation, objectification, and commodification” (p. 166). The women workers find value in their work, creating identities and meaning. They create social boundaries as they decline dates while ogling and flirting continues. As this occurs, the essentialization of men as having uncontrollable sexual impulses downplays women’s invested and strategic emotional labor. It also fails to reflect how “sexuality organizes corporations” (p. 93) that “reinforces the larger gender order in which men exercise power over women’s bodies and workplaces create heterosexual cultures” (p. 99).
Barber suggests that the beauty industry’s rigid standards result in discriminatory hiring practices. For example, among employees and owners interviewed, more than 80% are white. The single shoe shiner is Latino and subordinate to clients but invisible to workers. All employees, with the exception of one woman who “passed” with longer hair during the hiring process, identify as heterosexual. The salon as a case study becomes an opportunity to understand how gendered labor perpetuates inequalities and supports this new consumer market.
Though the grooming work and shop floor are evocative, Barber’s attention moves beyond hair to the social exchanges that take place as cultural practices facilitated by the women beauty workers whose interactions with clients supports “men’s socially sanctioned entitlement to women’s sexual identities, bodies, and emotions” (p. 165). The main contribution is the bringing together of emotional labor, aesthetic labor, and physical labor, all the while highlighting the role of sexuality. That a sociologist with the surname Barber would come to research this topic is not without its ironies, however fortuitous. Ideally, the author will continue this engaging work that gets to the root of these many complexities.