Journal Articles

Men Wanted: Heterosexual Aesthetic Labor in the Masculinization of the Hair Salon

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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.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Gender & Society

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications., 2016

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

08912432

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 30, Number 4, August 2016 p. 618-642

Subject(s)

Masculinity
Hair Salon
Heterosexuality
Emotional labor
Aesthetic labor

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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