Drawing on the concept of aesthetic labour, this article examines how skill training programmes in the organized retail industries in Kolkata modulate underclass female service worker-bodies to align them with the corporeal ideals of a globally fetishized consumer-citizenship aesthetics. Applicants for the entry-level jobs in retail are usually young women from economically underprivileged families, who are routinely viewed as being ‘deficient’ in the basic social, communicational and cultural norms. This necessitates a refashioning of the workers’ personhood by changing their bodily deportments, hygiene standards, communicational skills and social etiquettes. Yet there is little sustained examination of the impact of such skill training on the everyday lives of young female employees who are simultaneously tied to the aspirations for corporate social mobility as well as the vagaries of their own personal lives imbued with poverty, low wage and socio-economic precariousness. Based on a two-year ethnography in shopping malls in Kolkata, this study makes an original contribution in reflecting on how, while female service workers might very well learn to inhabit spaces like shopping malls through a learnt performance of embodied consumer cosmopolitanism under aesthetic labour regimes, their class backgrounds continue to produce moral surveillance, frictions as well as restrictions.

中文翻译：

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生产审美自我：印度有组织零售业的审美技能和劳动分析

本文借鉴审美劳动的概念，研究了加尔各答有组织的零售行业的技能培训计划如何调节下层女性服务工作者的身体，使她们与全球迷恋的消费者-公民美学的肉体理想保持一致。零售业入门级职位的申请人通常是来自经济贫困家庭的年轻女性，她们通常被视为在基本的社会、沟通和文化规范方面“有缺陷”。这需要通过改变他们的身体举止、卫生标准、沟通技巧和社交礼仪来重塑工人的人格。然而，很少有人持续研究此类技能培训对年轻女性员工日常生活的影响，这些女性员工同时与企业社会流动的愿望以及充满贫困、低工资和社会问题的个人生活变幻无常联系在一起。 - 经济不稳定。基于在加尔各答购物中心进行的为期两年的民族志研究，本研究在反思女性服务工作者如何通过审美劳动制度下的具身消费者世界主义的学习表现来学习如何居住在购物中心等空间方面做出了原创性贡献，他们的阶级背景继续产生道德监视、摩擦和限制。低工资和社会经济不稳定。基于在加尔各答购物中心进行的为期两年的民族志研究，本研究在反思女性服务工作者如何通过审美劳动制度下的具身消费者世界主义的学习表现而很好地学会居住在购物中心等空间方面做出了原创性贡献，他们的阶级背景继续产生道德监视、摩擦和限制。低工资和社会经济不稳定。基于在加尔各答购物中心进行的为期两年的民族志研究，本研究在反思女性服务工作者如何通过审美劳动制度下的具身消费者世界主义的学习表现而很好地学会居住在购物中心等空间方面做出了原创性贡献，他们的阶级背景继续产生道德监视、摩擦和限制。