Aesthetic Labor In Elite Schools Of Pakistan

Abstract

This study explores the role of aesthetic labor in elite private schools in Islamabad, Pakistan and how female teachers are indirectly expected to meet certain standards of beauty and grooming which are a part of their teacher identity. Relying on the concept of cultural and symbolic capital introduced by Bourdieu, as well as being founded on four detailed case studies, the study provides insights into the way these aesthetic expectations, despite being hardly ever explicitly discussed, are both institutionalized and internalized, affecting hiring and promotion, and even classroom visibility. Women teachers spend a considerable amount of emotional and financial resources to achieve these visual standards that are commonly disguised as professionalism but act as systems of gendered and class-based control. Contrary to their male counterparts, women are subjected to even greater scrutiny and pressure to represent the school brand image, thus aesthetic labor constitutes a type of invisible yet fundamental work. In this article, the argument is that these practices affirm systemic inequalities and requests critical policy interventions to confront unacknowledged nuisance and discriminatory consequences of aesthetic labor in the neoliberal education arena in Pakistan.

Keywords:  Aesthetic Labor, Elite Schools, Women