Emotional Labour in a Cyberabad Shopping Mall: A Feminist Understanding of New Forms of Labour

The article tries to understand the relationship between gender and changing forms of labour using Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour (1983). It focuses on the manufacturing of emotional and aesthetic labour, which are often formed and reinforced through the training of employees in Hyderabad’s high-tech city, also called HITEC city or Cyberabad. Though the site of the performance of the labour—the shopping mall, is usually seen as a space for consumption and leisure, this article conceptualises the mall as a workplace by looking at how low-paid labour involves a process of gendering that reinforces stereotypical forms of masculinity and femininity as well as create new ones. A typical male gaze guides the ways in which both service and consumption operate on the shop floor.