Portland Courant

11:30am PDT (06:30 +1 Day NZST)- JRH 122

When it comes to choosing our careers, we are often told to “do what you love” and expected to be passionate about our jobs0. However, most discussions of “work passion” focus on middle-class professionals, college graduates, care workers, or creative workers. Join Sidra Kamran in exploring what it means to profess love or passion for a stigmatized working-class job and why workers use contradictory narratives to explain their occupational choices.

The Wednesday after Spring Break, join the SOAN and AS depts for a colloquium presentation by Dr. Sidra Kamran - “Love or Compulsion: How Beauty Workers in Pakistan Manage Stigma.” There will be great discussion as well as snacks provided!

Title: Love or Compulsion: How Beauty Workers in Pakistan Manage Stigma

Date: Wed, April 5th

Time: 11:30am - 12:30pm

Location: JRH 122

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Abstract: When it comes to choosing our careers, we are often told to “do what you love” and expected to be passionate about our jobs. However, most discussions of “work passion” remain limited by a focus on middle-class professionals, college graduates, care workers, or creative workers. In my presentation, I focus on beauty workers in Pakistan to explore what it means to profess love or passion for a stigmatized working-class job. Beauty work in Pakistan is a low-status, demanding, and low-wage occupation. Nonetheless, beauty workers routinely foreground their shauq (intense liking or passion) for this work even as they simultaneously stress their economic need or majboori (compulsion). How do we make sense of these contradictory narratives? I argue that beauty workers foreground shauq for their jobs to gain dignity at work, obfuscate their poor economic standing, and to approximate a normative gender identity. Such claims to shauq, however, are not straightforward as women in Pakistan are routinely criticized for pursuing personal pleasures. Thus, women incorporate narratives of majboori in their self-making projects, alongside narratives of shauq, to manage stigma. Contrary to other studies of work passion that discuss “labors of love” as a matter of choice, I show how work passion can co-exist with compulsion and that workers strategically incorporate both types of narratives to achieve idealized femininities. Finally, I provide an alternative account to Euro-American understandings of “labors of love” by demonstrating how narratives of shauq draw on culturally specific notions of hunar (skill) in addition to neoliberal discourses of “do what you love.”

Original source can be found here.