The article tries to understand the relationship between gender and changing forms of labour using Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour (1983). It focuses on the manufacturing of emotional and aesthetic labour, which are often formed and reinforced through the training of employees in Hyderabad’s high-tech city, also called HITEC city or Cyberabad. Though the site of the performance of the labour—the shopping mall, is usually seen as a space for consumption and leisure, this article conceptualises the mall as a workplace by looking at how low-paid labour involves a process of gendering that reinforces stereotypical forms of masculinity and femininity as well as create new ones. A typical male gaze guides the ways in which both service and consumption operate on the shop floor

Today, as shopping malls mushroom the cities, young women occupy these malls by working in stores as shop-floor employees. Uniformed or dress-coded, smiling faces, ready to help customers in distress, the women shop-floor employees in organised, branded, retail outlets in India are a relatively new labour force that has emerged from the post-1992 neoliberal capitalist formation in India. Their purpose is to serve the ever-growing number of consumers of mostly inessential goods and services deluged by the economic regime of neoliberalism that demands an active and expanding culture of consumption for its sustenance. These women, in the process, become a part of the regime as well as its conspicuous culture. They imbibe its ideological codes to sustain themselves in the workforce, thereby becoming a ‘small’ and disposable part of this order, who nevertheless play an important role in reinforcing and sustaining it. These women, as we shall see in the following sections, internalise the codes of the dominant blueprint offered to them by their workplaces. They do so by learning to speak in English, putting on make-up, being polite to the customers and smiling incessantly. Sticking to such everyday behavioural practices also contributes to their search for upward mobility in their jobs. Furthermore, the nature of their employment requires them to actively propagate a culture of consumption by being the conduit between the product they are selling and the customers, thus keeping the wheels of a developing neoliberal culture of consumption moving. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Nandini Dhar; individual chapters, the contributors.

This article will look at the ways in which gendered work is being transformed in contemporary India by focussing on Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana. Since the mid-1990s, after India opened its doors to multinational agencies, new forms of gendered labour have manifested. One of the ramifications of this gendered process is the feminisation of labour that enabled the participation of more women in the work force, engaging in activities that were low-paid. The basis of feminisation is that certain jobs require fewer skills or particular kinds of skills, for which women are thought to be suitable. This also has implications for the low bargaining power of women workers. The feminisation of the labour force in HITEC city, Hyderabad is a consequence of the changing labour markets with globalisation, offshore factories, migration and other changes in the workplace.