Shaped for beauty : Vocational and gendered subjectivities in private education for the beauty industry

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis was to answer the question: How are vocational, gendered subjectivities produced in vocational education for the beauty industry? Drawing on Foucault and poststructural feminist theory, this question is answered in four papers, in which the material consists of beauty-school recruitment and marketing material, interviews with skin and spa therapy students and observations of practical skin and spa therapy training. These are educational arrangements that are closely bound to the economic sector of the beauty industry, and they have remained remarkably unexplored. Various aspects of subjectivity production are explored throughout these papers: Paper I shows how the potential beauty student is shaped through processes of responsibilising and individualising in recruitment; Paper II shows how a scientific and caring professional emerges; Paper III shows how students learn to adopt a critical gaze towards bodies; and Paper IV shows how students are produced as emotional workers and learners, taking Hochschild’s term “emotional labour” as a point of departure. The results show how (medical) scientific knowledge becomes a resource in the production of the skin and spa therapy professional, mobilising gender relations of power, and neglecting other types of skills and knowledge. However, relational and caring aspects of work and learning emerge in the study through the way in which wider discourses of femininity inform the ways in which students are produced as professionals.