Lesson 8: Aesthetic Labor and Aspiration

In many ethnographic contexts, how people present themselves—through clothing, posture, speech, digital profiles, or interior arrangements—is far from superficial. These acts of self-styling involve careful, strategic work aimed at navigating power, gaining recognition, or imagining alternative futures. The term aesthetic labor names this work: the effort people put into crafting appearances, affect, and spaces in ways that signal competence, belonging, or aspiration. To write ethnographically about aesthetic labor is to treat surfaces as dense sites of meaning or places where social hierarchies are negotiated, aspirations take material form, and dignity is both performed and perpetually at stake.

This lesson moves through a few sections. First, it traces the theoretical tradition from which the concept of aesthetic labor emerges, connecting it to Hochschild’s emotional labor and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. Second, it develops the concept of aspiration and its costs, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. Third, it addresses absence as an analytical resource: what is not shown, not owned, not worn. Fourth, it examines how race, class, and gender structure what aesthetic performances are possible, legible, and at what cost. Fifth, it offers a set of practical writing techniques.

1. The Theoretical Tradition: Emotional Labor, Aesthetic Labor, Distinction, and Consumer Citizenship

Hochschild: The Managed Heart

The concept of aesthetic labor grows directly from Arlie Hochschild’s foundational account of emotional labor in The Managed Heart (1983). Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, Hochschild showed that certain workers are required to manage not only their physical output but their feelings to produce and sustain particular emotional states (warmth, pleasantness, patience, authority) as part of their job. This emotional management is labor in the full economic sense: it is exacted, assessed, and differentially compensated. And it is distributed unequally: women, and those in service work more broadly, bear a disproportionate share of it.

Hochschild’s insight—that the self, including its affective and expressive dimensions, can be put to work—is the premise from which aesthetic labor develops. Where emotional labor focuses on managed feeling, aesthetic labor extends to the body’s visual and material presentation: how it is dressed, groomed, moved, and arranged in space. Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson (2003) argue that the analysis of service work has been impeded by its overemphasis on emotion at the expense of the body’s corporeal, visible dimensions. By shifting from emotional to aesthetic labor, they recover the embodied character of much service work: the requirement not only to feel appropriately but to look appropriately, and the significant labor that requirement involves.

Bourdieu: Distinction and the Social Grammar of Taste

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) is the other foundational text for this lesson, and it extends the analysis far beyond formal workplaces. Bourdieu shows that aesthetic preferences (e.g., in clothing, food, music, home decoration, body posture, manner of speech) are never simply individual tastes. They are socially organized, class-specific, and hierarchically ranked. What a person finds beautiful, appropriate, or desirable is shaped by their position in the social field and the forms of capital (economic, cultural, social) available to them. And crucially, the aesthetic preferences of dominant classes are naturalized as good taste, while those of subordinate classes are marked as vulgar, excessive, or deficient.

For ethnographic writers, Bourdieu’s framework means that every aesthetic choice observed in the field is potentially a data point about social position, not as a deterministic mapping of class onto style, but as evidence of the complex negotiation between aspiration, constraint, and the available forms of cultural capital. When someone chooses to dress “up” for a particular encounter, or to signal affiliation with a particular aesthetic community, they are not simply expressing personal preference. They are navigating a social field in which different aesthetics carry different amounts of symbolic power.

Witz et al. (2003) explicitly draw on both Hochschild and Bourdieu to develop their concept of aesthetic labor in retail and service settings, showing how workers are required to embody a branded organizational ideal: their bodies and behaviors meticulously scripted, their self-expression subject to managerial approval. In the high-end retail store they study, gendered “model” archetypes prescribe specific modes of dress, movement, and affect. Workers are instructed on where to stand, how to greet customers, and how to modulate their voices. Minor acts of self-expression (e.g., changing a hairstyle) require managerial permission. This is aesthetic labor as explicit organizational demand: the employee’s embodied appearance is treated as a productive resource to be managed.

Consumer citizenship

A helpful entry-point for critically analyzing aesthetic preference is to consider the consumer citizen: an individual unit engendered by capitalist social relations who expresses themselves through consumption in the free marketplace.

The consumer citizen consolidates their identity aesthetically by shopping for clothes, collecting commodities that reflect their “personal style” and developing unique personal-brands that help them aggregate social and financial capital. The same pattern applies to their politics: the consumer citizen worried about climate change takes political action by boycotting factory-farmed meat and buying organic produce, or else donating to campaigns or charities. The feminist consumer citizen is a choice-feminist: she may wear makeup, get plastic surgery, or engage in sex work, and these actions are evaluated strictly on the basis of agency–if she chooses them with her own free-will, they are permissible. And free-will is always possible for the consumer citizen, who is essentially an atomized and self-originating individual whose body is an inalienable property unit.

There is some degree of agency to be legitimately expressed by the free market, and the principle of ownership of one’s body has supported much progressive policy including the right to abortion, gay marriage, and the abolition of slavery. But consumer citizenship is also a site of unfreedom and ontological error. As Bourdieu argues, aesthetic “choice” is never atomized. It is always mediated by social relations, which are often more constraining than they are liberating.

Transfemme writer Shuli Branson criticizes what she considers the limitations of consumer citizenship in a trans context, when transness is narrowed to a consumer relation: “consuming products, consumers of the medical industry, self-originating individuals who decide to transition. But the actual material reality of most trans people…is that transition happens in relation to other people and that transness emerges from and through a networked understanding” (Branson p. 76). Here, Branson identifies the category of the progressive, trans consumer citizen and assesses their aesthetic choices in the context of the free market.

Taken further, one might ask where the options for consumption start and end: what kinds of gender-affirming medications and surgeries are available, and for whom? From which providers and chains of production? The same goes for aesthetic commodities that consolidate other identities: “punk” clothes on sale at Hot Topic, “boho” purses from The Gap, polo shirts from American Eagle. A person may choose from a range of clothing items, but may not choose to stop having their appearance contribute to their social capital. Likewise, a person may choose from a range of diet pills, but may not change their own powerlessness to the impact of body weight on workplace rights or unprejudiced healthcare. To this extent, consumption in a free market, whether in an aesthetic or political context, never represents unmediated “self expression” or absolute “free choice.”

2. Aspiration and Its Costs: Cruel Optimism

Aesthetic labor is not only about compliance with institutional demands. It is also, often primarily, about aspiration: the work of imagining and presenting a future self, a better position, a different life. People style themselves not only in relation to where they are but in relation to where they hope to be, or where they believe they deserve to be.

Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism (2011) is essential here. Berlant describes a structure of feeling in which people remain attached to aspirational objects (e.g., a better job, upward mobility, or a particular form of life) even when those attachments are undermining the possibility of flourishing. The optimism is cruel not because the aspiration is unreasonable but because the conditions that make it thinkable simultaneously make it structurally difficult or impossible to achieve. The worker who invests significant resources in professional dress for job interviews, the young person who curates a social media identity oriented toward a creative life that economic conditions will never sustain, the family that arranges its domestic space according to an aesthetic that signals middle-class aspirations it cannot economically secure… all of these are enacting a form of cruel optimism through aesthetic labor. The aspiration is real; the labor it demands is real; the gap between the performed future and the available one is also real.

For ethnographic writers, cruel optimism is a useful concept because it resists two common errors: the error of reading aspiration as delusional (failing to take seriously the genuine intelligence and desire behind it) and the error of romanticizing it as resistance (failing to account for the structural conditions that make certain aspirations perpetually deferred). Instead, cruel optimism is a survival tactic: the “making-do” and “getting-by” that exposes people to systematic attrition and helps them endure it. Writing aesthetic labor well means holding both the genuine longing and the structural constraint in the same frame without resolving either into the other.

Horst and Miller (2006) show this tension with precision in their account of cell phone use in low-income Jamaican communities in early 2000s. For schoolgirls, an outdated or bulky phone threatened social standing, compelling concealment rather than display. A sleek, high-end model became a marker of status, desirability, and symbolic capital. Ringtones served as further sites of self-curation: classical music or Christian tones distanced users from the “immoral” associations of dancehall, while personalized tones signaled affective hierarchies (e.g., a sour tune for an ex-partner, or a dancehall beat for a close friend). These are aesthetic investments made under conditions of economic scarcity; the aspiration they express is real, the cost it extracts is real, and the structural conditions that make the aspiration costly without guaranteeing its reward are what make this cruel optimism rather than simply desire.

3. Absence as Analytical Resource

One of the most important moves in ethnographic writing that is worth learning is the treatment of absence as data. What is not worn, not shown, not said, or not owned can be just as analytically revealing as what is. Aesthetic labor frequently unfolds under conditions of lack of means, access, recognition, or time, and these absences are not neutral. They are experienced, managed, and sometimes carefully concealed.

The girl who hides her phone rather than displaying it is performing a kind of inverse aesthetic labor: managing the absence of the desired object, preventing the absence from becoming visible, concealing the lack. This concealment is itself effortful and carries its own social stakes. Similarly, the conspicuous absence of certain objects from a domestic space (e.g., the absence of books in a home where books would signal cultural capital, or the presence of books in a space where they don’t quite fit) can be as analytically significant as what is present.

Theorizing absence can seem fraught, unreliable, or even unethical. Indeed, generating knowledge about withheld information risks reflecting the researcher’s perspective more than the subject’s, but when applied conscientiously, it can also counteract institutional concealment. Feminist rhetoriticians Bizzell, Kirsch and Royster advocate for a strategy they call critical imagination: “educated guessing as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand” (p. 71). By attuning themselves to gaps and blindspots, these researchers try to see what has previously gone unnoticed. One example of critical imagination in practice is NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, a book-length poem about the massacre of 130 enslaved Africans aboard the eponymous slave ship in 1781. The only historical documentation of the Zong massacre is a legal case report recounting the conflict between the white ship owners and their insurers. Using careful educated guessing, Phillip attends to the silences and violent erasures of Gregson vs. Gilbert and contributes a needed ethical intervention.

Gaps in narrative and silence in interviews are also forms of aesthetic absence worth attending to. When someone declines to describe how they prepared for a particular encounter, or changes the subject when asked about clothing or appearance, the refusal is itself information about stigma, about what is considered too intimate or too revealing, or in general about the politics of visibility in their particular context.

Writing such absences requires specific care. The risk is either ignoring them (treating the absence as simply the absence of data rather than as data about absence) or over-reading them (projecting significance onto gaps that may simply reflect the limits of access or rapport). The question to ask is: what would it cost to acknowledge this absence? Whose interests does the concealment serve? What social logic does it follow?

4. Race, Class, and Gender as the Structure of Aesthetic Possibility

Aesthetic labor is not evenly distributed, and the same aesthetic performance does not carry the same meaning or the same cost across differently positioned bodies. Race, class, gender, and geography structure what kinds of appearances are legible as competent, desirable, or professional, and who bears the burden of performing them.

The racialized dimension of aesthetic labor is particularly significant. In many professional and institutional contexts, a particular aesthetic associated with whiteness, middle-class norms, a or specific body type and style register is naturalized as the standard of competence or employability. Workers whose appearance does not conform to this norm bear an additional burden of aesthetic labor: managing their hair, concealing their body modifications, adjusting their dress, modulating their speech and manner in ways that bring them closer to the unmarked standard. This is double labor: not only must they perform the job, but they must perform the acceptable version of the self that is permitted to do it. The labor of “covering” (i.e., managing how much of a stigmatized or marked identity is visible in institutional settings) falls unevenly on those whose bodies are most legible as non-standard.

Further, aesthetic plasticity itself is racially determined. Race is different from other visible determinations like gender or class because it is genealogical as opposed to autological: it is inherited and constrains one's capacity to claim other identities as opposed to being partially self-determined. A person may wear makeup or get surgeries to appear more feminine, but they may not change the colour of their skin. Genealogical determinants also constrain autology, so racialization limits how one’s gender and class are read by others.

According to Bobby Noble (2006) to be recognized as plastic is to be recognized within some proximity to power, and so plasticity – the capacity to transform – is intentionally shored up within the bounds of whiteness. For Noble, race then prefigures gender designations, and plasticity is used to get closer to the ideal of whiteness. Practically, this means that the stakes of altering one’s appearance to “pass” or “cover” are always high. It also means that the capacity to change how one is perceived is not neutral, and so should not be exclusively interpreted as an innate quality or special talent.

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s (2019) work in Thick on race, beauty, and the labor of Black femininity in academic and professional spaces speaks directly to these structures: the work required to be seen as appropriately credentialed, the aesthetic performances that signal institutional belonging, and the way those performances are assessed against standards that were never designed with Black women’s aesthetics in mind.

Gender organizes aesthetic labor in similarly structural ways. Women in most work settings are held to more detailed and more demanding aesthetic standards than men. They may be expected to manage a greater range of appearance dimensions (hair, makeup, clothing, body size, movement) while also navigating the contradictory demands to be attractive but not too sexual, professional but not masculine, well-groomed but not vain. The costs of failing these standards are higher, and the rewards for meeting them are less certain.

Class shapes both what aesthetic performances are materially possible and what they mean when performed. The same aesthetic choice (e.g., minimalist clothing, no jewelry, a particular kind of bag) carries entirely different symbolic weight at different class positions: on a wealthy person it signals understated sophistication; on a person of limited means it may signal poverty, or the aspiration to transcend it, or simply the limits of what is available. Writing aesthetic labor requires sensitivity to this relativity: what an object or style means cannot be determined from the object alone but only from its position in a social field and the body that is carrying it.

5. Writing Aesthetic Labor: Techniques for Making Surfaces Dense

Write through objects rather than around them. Attending to how things are cleaned, maintained, displayed, or concealed can evoke the labor embedded in aspiration. A gold-plated watch, fake but meticulously polished, can carry a “dignity prop”: not a form of deception but of defiance, a way of claiming the appearance of a status that structural conditions deny. Writing the watch means writing its surface (the polish, the weight on the wrist, the angle at which it is occasionally glanced at) and its history (where it was acquired, what it cost, what it is substituting for). Objects do not speak for themselves; they require the prose to give them context, labor, and consequence.

Replace general descriptions with specific embodied detail. “She dressed professionally” is analysis without evidence. “Her stiff-collared white blouse was buttoned to the throat, but the frayed hem of her sleeve, chewed in private stress, hinted at hours unpaid” is both description and analysis simultaneously. The frayed sleeve does not appear in the official presentation of self; it is the backstage leaking into the frontstage, the cost of the performance showing through the performance. Ethnographic writing about aesthetic labor should be looking for exactly these moments: where the labor shows, where the maintenance breaks down, where the effort of the performance is visible at its edges.

Write the preparation, not only the result. The time spent ironing clothes, editing a selfie, styling hair, selecting a ringtone… this preparation work is usually invisible in public and in ethnographic accounts. Making it visible is one of the most productive things ethnographic writing can do, both because it reveals the effort behind what appears effortless and because it shows the social intelligence required to navigate aesthetic expectations. Someone who spends forty minutes preparing for a ten-minute interview has assessed the stakes with considerable sophistication; writing those forty minutes honors that assessment.

Attend to the audience of the performance. Aesthetic labor is always performed for someone: a specific institutional authority, a social group, a romantic interest, an imagined future self. Who the audience is shapes what the performance does and what it costs. Writing aesthetic labor means writing toward the audience as much as toward the performer: what is being read, what is expected, what is punished if wrong.

Write absence with the same precision as presence. The hidden phone, the outfit that was not worn, the room that is never shown to visitors… these require as much descriptive attention as what is displayed. “She kept her coat on for the whole interview” is not nothing; it is a choice with a social logic worth following.

Resist aestheticizing poverty or romanticizing resilience. The risk in writing about aesthetic labor under conditions of scarcity is turning struggle into spectacle (e.g., finding the frayed sleeve beautiful in a way that aestheticizes rather than analyzes the conditions that produced it). The corrective is specificity about cost: what this performance required, what it was competing with, what would have happened if it had failed.

6. From Field Note to Aesthetic Prose: A Worked Example

Raw note:

“Interview with M., 28, working at call center. Came in very dressed up: heels, full makeup, hair done. Seemed overdressed for the office where most people wore casual clothes. She mentioned she came ‘straight from somewhere.’ Later said she had a second interview at a law firm that afternoon. Her nails were done but one had broken, she kept touching it. Seemed nervous.”

The note observes the aesthetic presentation but reads it mainly as social incongruity (“overdressed for the office”) and as evidence of nervousness. The broken nail is noticed but not developed. The aspiration behind the presentation is recorded as fact without being analyzed.

Shaped prose:

M. arrived in heels, which I had not expected. The rest of the call center floor was running shoes and lanyards; she sat across from me in a pencil skirt and full face. She mentioned, without being asked, that she’d come straight from somewhere, and then, twenty minutes later, that she had a second interview at a law firm that afternoon. The heels were for that other type of interview, not for this ethnographic one at her current workspace. She was dressed for the future she was trying to get to, moving through the present in an outfit that didn’t quite fit it.

Her nails were done in a pale nude. One had broken—the ring finger, right hand—and she touched it at intervals throughout the interview, not drawing attention to it, just checking that it was still where she’d left it. The break was small. I didn’t think anyone else would notice. I suspected she thought they would.

The revision makes several moves. The heels are no longer just incongruous; they are performing a specific aspiration: she is dressed for the law firm interview, which means the call center job is not what she wants to stay with. The formulation “dressed for the future she was trying to get to” names the temporal logic of her aesthetic labor without editorializing its value or its achievability. The broken nail becomes the place where the performance is showing its cost: the effort to present a complete and seamless aesthetic surface, and the small crack in it that she is quietly monitoring. The final sentence (“I suspected she thought they would”) places the ethnographer’s perception inside the logic of aesthetic labor: the experience of being watched, of knowing that surfaces are being read, of managing that knowledge while sustaining the performance.

Works Cited:

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bizzell, Patricia, Gesa E Kirsch, and Jacqueline Jones Royster. 2012. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Branson, Shuli, E Ornelas, and Kai Rajala. 2024. “No Blank Slates.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 11 (1): 66–79.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg.

McMillan Cottom, Tressie. 2019. Thick: And Other Essays. New York: The New Press.

Noble, Bobby. 2006. “Our Bodies Are Not Ourselves.” In Sons of The Movement, 76–100. Toronto, Canada: Women’s Press.

Witz, Anne, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson. 2003. “The Labour of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization.” Organization 10(1):33–54.

Focus

Represent how people curate selves, objects, and spaces.

Learning Goals

Explain the concept of aesthetic labor in relation to its theoretical predecessors (Hochschild’s emotional labor and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste) and articulate what each contributes to the analysis of self-presentation as socially structured work
Apply Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to ethnographic scenes of aspiration, reading aesthetic performances as both genuine in their desire and constrained in their conditions
Recognize absence of objects, display, or narrative as analytically productive rather than as a gap in the data, and write it with the same precision as presence
Identify how race, class, and gender structure what aesthetic performances are possible, legible, and at what cost for differently positioned bodies
Apply specific writing techniques (object-centered description, embodied specificity, writing preparation and aftermath, attending to audience) to render aesthetic labor analytically rather than merely decoratively
Transform a field note about self-presentation into shaped prose that holds both the performance and the conditions of its production simultaneously in view

Activities

Activity 1: Reading the Surface

Activity 2: Writing the Preparation

Activity 3: The Dignity Prop

Activity 4: Writing Absence

Activity 5: Aspiration and Constraint