Abstract
This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women’s lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations of the interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women’s lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed.
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Notes
EMA was introduced in 2004/5 to encourage post-16 participation in education among young people from low-income households. Payments were means-tested and made directly to students. It was withdrawn, in the face of concerted protest from students, teachers and activists, by the Coalition government in 2011.
Jeffreys argues that Western beauty practices on a continuum from make-up to dieting, sexualised fashion and cosmetic surgery constitute a set of ‘harmful traditional practices’ in a different but comparable way to non-western gendered traditions. Western beauty practices are usually understood through a discourse of individual self-expression and choice that conceals the power relations underpinning them. They are nevertheless harmful traditional practices in that: they are harmful to the health of women and girls; they arise from and reinforce material power differences between men and women; they help produce gendered stereotypes that damage women’s life chances; and they are justified by tradition and culture.
A full Level 2 qualification is defined as 5 GCSEs at grade C or above, or equivalent as defined by the National Qualifications Framework until 2010 and, latterly, by the Qualifications and Credit Framework.
At the time of the study, qualifications such NVQs in beauty therapy and hairdressing were producing increasing numbers of students looking for work in these areas and a heightened competition for jobs. Although, at the time of my study, industry figures suggested skills shortages and vacancies (Habia, 2007), other research indicated that for every five students attaining a beauty therapy or hairdressing qualification in England in 2010–2011, there was one job vacancy (Gardiner and Wilson, 2012).
In 2005, the UK beauty therapy industry (including treatments delivered in spas, health clubs and salons) had an annual turnover of £904 million and employed 39,000 staff of whom 98 per cent were women earning an average gross weekly wage of £205 and an average hourly wage of £6.98 (Habia, 2007).
Bradley suggests that while ‘internalized flexibility’ (Bradley and Devadason, 2008) might reflect the immediate interests of young working women with children, it also has potentially negative consequences for earnings, working conditions and collective action against exploitation by employers.
The Connexions Service was launched in 2001 ‘with the aim of helping young people make informed choices and so aid a successful transition to adult life’ (Hoggarth and Smith, 2004).
Careers guidance in the United Kingdom has historically drawn on trait theory, developmental models and social learning theory, all of which rely on the idea that choice is, or should be, a rational process controlled by individuals themselves. The Connexions Service was born out of New Labour’s ‘Bridging the Gap’ policy which, according to Colley and Hodkinson (2001), demonised those who did not live up to the model of the ideal ‘reflexive chooser’ through a discourse that locates the causes of social exclusion in faulty attitudes, wrong choices and other personal (though implicitly classed) deficits.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus relates to ‘dispositions’ or mental structures through which social agents apprehend the world and which are ‘essentially a product of the internalization of that world’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, cited in Hatcher, 1998, p. 18). The concept has been used by educationalists to understand the way in which gendered and classed vocational identities are produced through socialisation and formal training (Colley et al., 2003; Colley, 2006; Vincent and Braun, 2011).
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Kidd, A. networks of violence in the production of young women’s trajectories and subjectivities. Fem Rev 112, 41–59 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.48
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.48