Men in Beauty Work and Feminization of Digital Labor Platforms

Abstract

Extant research on the gendered dynamics on digital labor platforms and care work is divided in terms of focus: (migrant) men involved in supposedly “masculine” work such as driving and delivery, and home-based repair work, and the feminized invisible work performed by women in home-based care-work such as domestic work and beauty work. While such scholarship has merit, it completely dismisses the particularities of the South Asian context where beauty work, considered to be ritually impure work, has historically been performed by men from the marginalized Nai caste. Foregrounding the views of men in beauty work, particularly Nai-barbers (on and off platform), our findings reveal that Nai-barbers find the relocation of work from barbershop to customer’s home by platforms particularly humiliating. The transition from being entrepreneurs, in charge of their barbershops, to mere workers supervised by both platforms and customers, evokes memories of the servitude their ancestors endured. The humiliation and degradation of work they experience are rooted in caste and colonial histories. Our findings underscore the need to go beyond the immediate temporal context to identify the conditions of work that workers find degrading, and situate the feminization of platform economy within the context of coloniality and casticization of power, thus bringing a necessary intersectionality that recognizes but goes beyond gender.