Employable femininity and multisensorial hierarchies: becoming aesthetic citizens in Nepal’s aviation training industry

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Nepal’s private airhostess training industry and trainees’ bodily and personal transformations in relation to hegemonic norms and practices of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kathmandu, it examines everyday encounters in a training institute where young women learn to become flight attendants for international and domestic airlines. The article demonstrates that interactions between instructors and trainees make visible and (re)shape notions of employability, urban modernity, and the Nepali nation in relation to bodily appearance, grooming practices, and self-presentation. By acquiring new orientations and habits, trainees are encouraged to overcome some gendered norms while adhering to others in order to embody a particular vision of employable femininity. Analysing how becoming an aesthetic and modern citizen is put into practice in the aviation training industry, the article centres the role of embodied aesthetics and the senses, thereby contributing to a conceptualization of ‘aesthetic citizenship’ as multisensorial.

KEYWORDS:

• Employable femininity
• flight attendant
• training
• senses
• urban modernity
• aesthetic citizenship
• Nepal

Introduction

Girls without make-up look like food without salt.

One chilly winter morning in December, instructor Sangita wrote this sentence on the whiteboard during a short break from the 7 am to 9 am class.¹ We were at ‘Sky Dreamers Academy’, a private airhostess training institute located on the fifth floor of a shopping mall on the outskirts of Kathmandu. A flurry of excitement filled the air. After three days of theory on personal appearance, hygiene, and grooming, today was the practical class for a new batch of students. Trainees ran around swapping eyeliners, lipsticks, and foundations, constantly checking their images in the body-length mirror covering the wall on one side of the classroom and assisting each other in creating the required look.

‘Mam’, as the trainees respectfully called Sangita, had first demonstrated the complex beauty routine expected from a properly groomed future flight attendant step-by-step on one trainee’s face, neck, and hair. She had peppered her instructions on the importance of make-up and skin care by referring to them as acts of self-love (aphailai maya garnu parcha) and ways to increase one’s self-confidence (aphailai confident banauncha). Students had noted down the permissible shades for lipstick and nail polish, namely a vibrant red, and for eyeshadow, which were black, grey, and brown, as these were ‘airline standards’. Much to everyone’s dislike, Sangita had given us only twenty minutes to produce a passable make-up and hairstyle with the limited school make-up supplies. Giggles, chitchats, and complaints were exchanged quietly. Once the time was up, Sangita asked each trainee to pose in front of her. She proceeded with individual feedback, wrote down grades, and scolded some trainees for taking too long, applying little lipstick or not appearing ‘neat and tidy’ enough, for example, when some hair escaped their hairpins and buns. No one received full marks. Finally, from tomorrow onwards, she announced, everyone had to purchase their own cosmetics and appear fully groomed at the institute for the rest of the four-months training. Developing new habits like this, she stressed, was crucial for the young women – high-school graduates in their late teens and early twenties – on their path to becoming flight attendants.

Food needs to be salted in order to be enjoyed, and girls need to be made up to look ‘beautiful, pretty, cheerful, and charming’ as Sangita put it that morning. A comparison between salt and make-up as ingredients adding flavour to where it is supposedly missing points to the importance the institute placed on transforming trainees’ bodily appearance and grooming practices. In fact, teachers, staff, and those running the institute never grew tired of stressing the market logic that new skills and habits would lead to bodily and personal transformations and therefore would increase the young women’s employability for national and international aviation and by extension for the hospitality industry.

Conceiving cabin-crew institutes as places of encounters, this article discusses Nepal’s private training industry and trainees’ bodily and personal transformations in relation to hegemonic norms and practices of citizenship. Schools are central institutions for the making of ‘modern’ citizens, the dissemination of civilizing discourses and narratives about the nation state (Benei 2005; Gilliam and Gulløv 2016; Leibold 2019). In multi-ethnic Nepal, schools have been examined as spaces where nationalism, Hindu socio-cultural and religious norms, monolingual ideologies and discourses of modernity and development have been circulated to create a shared national identity (Caddell 2005; Pigg 1992; Pradhan 2020; Thebe Limbu 2021). Building on these insights, I extend these discussions of the making of modern and, as we shall see, aesthetic citizens to the professional sphere of the private job training industry in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu.

At Sky Dreamers Academy, interactions between trainees and instructors make visible and (re)shape notions of employability, urban modernity, and the Nepali nation in relation to bodily appearance, grooming practices, and self-presentation. Particular ideas on employable femininity are meant to turn into embodied qualities by acquiring new orientations, skills, and habits. Trainees are encouraged to view these as ‘professional values’ unmarked by dominant axes of difference in Nepal such as class, caste, or ethnicity. In matters of self-presentation trainees are also taught to overcome some dominant gendered norms while adhering to others in order to increase their employability. By negotiating what constitutes an employable female citizen and how to modify the body accordingly, I argue, instructors and trainees make claims of belonging to Kathmandu, the country’s biggest city, and, by extension, to the Nepali nation.

Moving beyond an understanding of citizenship as legal status, I draw on the notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008), which is particularly productive when analysing everyday interactions at Sky Dreamers Academy. From this perspective, acts of citizenship are ‘deeds’ through which people in their daily lives – regardless of their formal status – ‘constitute themselves as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due’ (ibid.). In my analysis of how becoming a modern female citizen is entangled with notions of employability in the training school, I centre the role of embodied aesthetics and the senses. In doing so, I contribute to further conceptualizations of ‘aesthetic citizenship’ (Liebelt 2019) which foregrounds self-fashioning through seemingly mundane bodily practices such as engaging in grooming or applying make-up, as well as acts of monitoring others in everyday deeds of citizenship. While Claudia Liebelt explores aesthetic citizenship in terms of visual markers of belonging, I show how, in an urban job training context, aesthetic citizenship emerges as a multisensorial relationship.

This article draws on ten months of ethnographic research carried out between 2022 and 2023. I spent a considerable amount of time as a trainee at Sky Dreamers Academy, where I studied how to become an airhostess together with ten women on a four-month training course. When negotiating research access, I explained my larger project on skills training, young women’s everyday lives and their quest for meaningful work to the management and subsequently to staff, trainees, and instructors. As an ‘apprentice ethnographer’ (Downey, Dalidowicz, and Mason 2014), I engaged in embodied learning and gained experiential knowledge of how to modify one’s appearance and ways of talking, moving, and interacting. In addition to participant observation and informal conversations at the academy, where I interacted with about thirty trainees, I spoke with and interviewed instructors, school owners, receptionists, recruiters, and flight attendants. Moreover, I attended airline recruitment events, joined trainees in preparing and submitting job applications, as well as on shopping tours and visits to photo studios and skincare clinics. I met some women at their workplaces and at home, participated in leisure activities, and spoke to their families. My methodology is grounded in feminist anthropology, which involves a commitment to paying careful attention to ethics and power differentials, as well as to feminist theory, thought and practice (Davies and Craven 2016). Besides analysing fieldnotes and interviews, I used media reports to develop my arguments.

Skills training and new gendered possibilities

Sky Dreamers Academy is one of around a dozen private cabin-crew training institutes that have opened in Nepal since the mid-2000s. Across institutes, the training is divided into sections on safety, airplane technology, and emergency procedures on the one hand, and hospitality, customer service, and the acquisition of ‘soft skills’ on the other hand. Grooming lessons, mock-up interviews, Yoga or Zumba classes and swim training complete the curriculum. While some institutes accept male students, Sky Dreamers Academy caters exclusively to women aged seventeen to twenty-eight. In addition to age, admission is contingent on a high-school diploma, physical criteria such as a height of 5.2 feet, ‘weight in proportion to one’s height’, ‘a clear complexion’ and no visible tattoos, as well as legal status as an unmarried woman who is entitled to Nepali citizenship.² Since cabin-crew schools are widespread in Nepal, some domestic airlines prefer applicants who have passed such training, which lasts between three and nine months.³ However, national and international regulatory aviation bodies such as the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal and the International Civil Aviation Organization do not require airlines to hire applicants who were previously trained in private institutes.

Nepal’s ongoing de-agriculturalization and urbanization, the growth of the service industry following economic liberalization in the 1990s, women’s increased entry into the wage-labour market (Grossman-Thompson 2017; Adhikari and Sharma 2022), and high rates of youth unemployment and mass labour migration (Sharma 2013; Zharkevich 2019) have all contributed to the emergence of a public-private skills training industry. The government aims to skill its citizens for gainful employment through programs offered by the Council for Technical and Vocational Skills and public-private partnerships, as well as in collaboration with donor-supported agencies (Thami and Bhattarai 2015). In urban centres, there also exists a private skills training industry which cabin-crew institutes form part of.

Trainees at Sky Dreamers Academy hail from various socio-economic, class, caste, and ethnic backgrounds. While some had grown up in the Kathmandu valley, others moved there during high school pursuing the promise of a better education, after graduating for further studies or with the goal of attending a cabin-crew course. Born in the late-1990s to mid-2000s, they are familiar with discourses on gender equality and social inclusion. Education and the socio-political transformations against which their lives unfold present new trajectories of imagination and possibility regarding questions such as which career to pursue when compared to previous generations.

Significantly, the majority of trainees I met aspire to move abroad. Recruitment into an airline promises an official path for international migration. Cabin-crew institutes’ marketing efforts and social media depictions of flight attendants’ lives as cosmopolitan and glamorous draw on desires for social and spatial mobility. These widely circulating images add to imaginations of working for a national or international airline as a valuable but also attainable career for young Nepali women. Some institutes seek to cultivate relations with representatives of international airlines and recruitment agencies. This situates them as adjacent to an expanding migration industry consisting of labour brokerage and recruitment agencies, educational consultancies, language and soft-skills training institutes (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015; Shrestha 2018). The popularity of private institutes which promote international labour migration through work in aviation as a desirable career for young women must be understood in view of Nepal’s rapid political transformations, which have deeply affected gender dynamics.

From the mid-eighteenth century until 2008, this landlocked country with a population of about 29 million people was ruled as a Hindu kingdom. In 1990 the first People’s Movement (Jana Andolan 1) led to a democratic opening. This was accompanied by ethnic, religious, regional, caste, and gender-based mobilizations which were previously suppressed during Nepal’s Panchayat era (1961–1990) when the Nepali language, Hinduism and the Hindu monarchy served as central pillars in the development of a national unified culture (Burghart 1994).⁴ However, Nepal’s population is characterized by great ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity. While officially Hindus make up an absolute majority (81%), the country is marked by religious pluralism. Buddhism and Islam constitute the largest minority religions. Moreover, Nepal is home to 142 Hindu caste groups (jat) and indigenous nationalities (Adivasi Janajati) and 124 languages (NSO 2023b).⁵

In post-1990s Nepal, calls by historically marginalized groups – including Adivasi Janajati and women – for a more inclusive state led to fierce debates about nationhood, social inclusion, diversity, and citizenship in the public sphere, a reflection of a new relationship between the state and its citizens (Shneiderman et al. 2016; Shneiderman and Rai 2019; Tamang 2011). The years between 2006 and 2017 were a period of federal restructuring following ten years of civil war between Maoist groups and the king’s government. In the aftermath of the catastrophic 2015 earthquakes, a new constitution was promulgated which affirmed Nepal as a secular federal parliamentary republic. The first elections under the federal system were held in 2017.

Notwithstanding the great gendered differences among Nepal’s heterogenous population, it was rather uncommon for women to work outside their communities until the mid-1980s (Adhikari and Sharma 2022). Yet, against the backdrop of economic and political shifts, differently positioned women began to seek pathways for social and spatial mobility through labour and education both within and outside Nepal. Gradually, greater public visibility and new forms of mobility became socially acceptable (Adhikari 2020; Becker 2021; Grossman-Thompson 2017; Liechty 2010). Among the mothers and elder sisters of trainees at Sky Dreamers Academy, some have worked in popular migration destination countries such as India, Malaysia, or the Gulf states as domestic workers, in factories or in the service industry. As a country relying heavily on remittances, Nepal has one of the highest rates of national absentees worldwide (Zharkevich 2019).⁶ Labour migration is a gendered phenomenon. From mid-July 2021 to mid-July 2022, women accounted for less than ten percent of international labour approvals (MoLESS 2022). This number has been rising steadily since the mid-2000s, speaking to emerging patterns of mobility and migration.

Despite these recent shifts, due to centuries of political, social, and cultural domination, the hegemonic socio-cultural values and gendered norms of high-caste hill Hindu communities still permeate everyday life (Grossman-Thompson 2017; Tamang 2000, 2002). As the following will show, Sky Dreamers Academy was no exception to this.

Bikas and the Nepali nation: reproducing unmarked norms

When instructors taught us about Nepal’s aviation sector, they transmitted a particular story about the nation. The academy’s seven teachers were in their fifties and sixties and had decades of flying under their belts; all of them had previously worked as cabin crew for the national carrier. Their memories of their careers, covering the 1980s up to the early 2010s, were steeped in notions of aviation as an unfolding field of national progress that reflected the state’s long-term preoccupation with bikas, the Nepali concept for ‘national development’. For example, teachers talked extensively about the progress brought to ‘remote areas’ (durgam chhetra) through enhanced connectivity by air.

The administrative category of ‘remote area’ that circulates in policy, public, and airline speech comes into being from the perspective of the central state, with its seat in Kathmandu. Bikas is the main trope through which elites, institutions, and citizens came to understand Nepal’s place in the world (Pigg 1992). Incorporating Nepal into the global capitalist economy from the 1960s onwards through the nationalist ‘development’ project supported by foreign aid was tied to the consolidation of a hegemonic national culture that had far-reaching consequences for the construction of a hierarchy of places and people (Pigg 1992; Tamang 2000, 2002). It is the village (gau), its inhabitants (gaule), and ‘Nepali women’ – a homogenized category created through development discourse itself – who are the subjects of national and international intervention due to their perceived inherent backwardness (Pigg 1992; Tamang 2002, 2009; Adhikari and Sharma 2022).⁷ In contrast, Kathmandu emerges as the epitome of national modernity, the centre from which progress emanates to the rest of the country. A hierarchical thinking valuing the urban and devaluing the rural pervades not only national politics and development interventions, but also education, people’s self-understandings, and the way they relate to and come to know fellow citizens (Pigg 1992; Thebe Limbu 2021; Tamang 2002; Sharma 2013).

Similar to private schools in the late-1990s and early 2000s (Thebe Limbu 2021), Sky Dreamers Academy reproduced a national culture based on the cultural and linguistic norms of hill Hindu communities through everyday practices. All holidays at the institute except for the Nepali New Year were linked to Hinduism. In contrast, on the public holidays of non-Hindu and Adivasi Janajati groups, trainees were expected to attend class. When Geetu, an instructor from a caste group considered ‘upper caste’, addressed the difficulties of working as cabin crew in Nepal, she talked at length about working extra hours during Tihar and Dashain. She stressed that working during the main Hindu festivals – a time requiring extra labour from women at home, she added – constituted a drawback of a job she otherwise praised as highly desirable.

While classes were conducted in a mix of Nepali and English, early on Geetu talked about the importance of English in the aviation field. She emphasized that everyone should speak English in class rather than Nepali to cultivate it as a habit, since ‘Nepali is your mother tongue’. This was an assumption; she had not asked students about their mother tongues. Although Nepali serves as lingua franca, less than 45% of Nepal’s population speak it as their first language (NSO 2023b). Geetu did not appear to have considered the possibility that other languages might be spoken as mother tongues among a diverse student body. Furthermore, another teacher once taught us what information is contained in a passenger’s manifest. To explain this document, which lists an aircraft’s passengers, she wrote three names on the whiteboard which we copied into our notebooks. These names all indicated ‘upper caste’ hill Hindu status.

Sky Dreamers Academy also reproduced a dynamic not uncommon across educational settings, where it is often Adivasi Janajati students who are questioned, while students with last names from dominant Hindu groups are not (Thebe Limbu 2021, 84). During the first day of class with Geetu, trainees had to introduce themselves by stating their full name, age, and educational background. When it was seventeen-year-old Lhamo’s turn, Geetu asked repeatedly for her surname, which made Lhamo stand out among her classmates. To Geetu’s audible surprise, she had never heard Lhamo’s surname before. In Nepal, surnames often indicate caste and ethnic belonging. Geetu could not place Lhamo in the overall schema of caste and ethnicity, so she kept guessing, naming several Adivasi Janajati groups, expecting Lhamo to clarify her identity. Eventually, Lhamo, a shy and quiet student, mentioned the name of a commonly known group, and Geetu moved on to the next student.

These examples illustrate how homogenized ideas about the nation and its citizens structured interactions at the institute, perpetuating hill Hindu communities’ cultural and linguistic values as unmarked norms and reiterating the logic of bikas. In what follows, I demonstrate how notions of employability, urban modernity, and the Nepali nation became meaningful in relation to gendered norms, bodily appearance and grooming practices. I posit that self-fashioning and questioning perceived others’ urban belonging as aesthetic and modern citizens constitute acts of citizenship that are situated within multisensorial hierarchies.

Employability, respectability, and ‘natural looks’

Working as an airhostess requires constant interactions with strangers, travel away from home, and overnight stays, activities which, according to Hindu gender ideology, are traditionally understood as harming a woman’s social reputation and prestige and therefore her family’s (Bennett 1983; Grossman-Thompson 2017). In this view, a woman’s body is a site of cosmological pollution, and her place is ideally in the domestic realm as wife, mother, sister, and daughter (Bennett 1983; Skinner and Holland 1998). Becoming an employable female citizen through training at Sky Dreamers Academy produced a tension between gendered expectations of professionalism and hegemonic notions of respectability, which instructors and trainees had to navigate.

During a hospitality class, senior instructor Rita taught the basics of customer care. To clarify the work expected from an airhostess, she said: ‘We are the caregivers, like mothers to the child’. By characterizing the profession of an airhostess through the trope of the mother, Rita did not simply explain what the job entailed: she also legitimized a flights attendant’s profession by naturalizing it as inherently feminine care work and therefore as respectable, despite its public nature. In imparting ‘professional values’ to the young women, instructors also conveyed ideas of respectable femininity, with Hindu gender ideology serving as an implicit point of reference.

Throughout training, students were reminded of their responsibility to balance professionalism and respectability, including in bodily ways. Once Geetu scolded nineteen-year-old trainee Aditi for wearing the institute’s name badge too low on her uniform’s blouse. Looking at her reproachfully, Geetu said in front of everyone: ‘It’s your fault if people look there!’, her eyes wandering to Aditi’s breasts. Geetu’s message, which made Aditi visibly uncomfortable, was clear: trainees were to blame for potentially evoking people’s thoughts about their sexuality. Ideas of indecency and chastity guided Geetu’s words, arguably mirroring wider social anxieties about women’s increased public visibility and concerns for their sexuality and morality (cf. Grossman-Thompson 2017).

While the institute validated young women’s desires to participate in the public sphere and capitalist productivity, it simultaneously asserted that they had to transform themselves into modern yet respectable citizens first under expert guidance. Trainees’ selves and bodies turned into sites of intervention in a private training context, reproducing an ideology that views female Nepali citizens as targets of modernizing efforts. ‘You are the image makers’, ‘You represent the country’ or ‘You are called the ambassador of the country!’ were sentiments students were reminded of regularly. These messages left no doubt that the laborious transformation into future representatives of airlines embodying the right balance between professionalism and respectability was a matter of representing the nation at large.

Indeed, following 8 March 2023, Nepali newspapers enthusiastically celebrated the first all-female crew flight in Nepal’s aviation history. On international women’s day, a flight of the national carrier had been operated by a six-member, all-woman crew including four airhostesses and two pilots on the route from Dubai to Kathmandu. Nepal’s biggest English language newspaper, The Kathmandu Post, described the event as having ‘scripted history’, quoting the airline’s deputy spokesperson, who praised the flight as ‘another milestone for Nepali women’s empowerment’ (Prasain 2023). The national praise for the all-woman team echoed development discourse and demonstrated the momentary pride assigned to female citizens working as pilots and flight attendants. However, public visibility simultaneously evokes scrutiny of young women’s bodies.

For the project of turning trainees into employable citizens, embodied aesthetics and bodily appearance were crucial, as the introductory vignette suggests. Trainees had to appear for class fully groomed, including make-up, styled hair, nails polished in bright red, and ears adorned with white pearl earrings. They were not supposed to wear a nose stud or septum piercing, bodily adornments common amongst various Hindu castes and Adivasi Janajati groups. Additionally, everyone had to wear three-inch black heels and a uniform consisting of a knee-length dark blue pencil skirt and a tight white blouse that had been tailored for each of us. Getting used to this grooming routine, instructors stressed, would help to develop ‘a steady hand’ when applying make-up and decrease the preparation time for recruitment events. The grooming routine took most trainees between thirty and ninety minutes. Thus, students in the morning batch, who attended class from 7 am to 9am, got up between 4 am and 5:30 am to get ready for class. Since some trainees were attending college parallel to their airhostess training, they were caught between opposing grooming regimes, as they traversed different educational settings within a single day. In college, wearing make-up and nail polish was discouraged, in some cases even prohibited, while at Sky Dreamers Academy it was compulsory. In both spaces, women’s bodies were subject to immense regulation.

Drawing on their work experience with the national carrier and their knowledge of the aviation industry, instructors pointed out differences in appearance norms: Asian Airlines were stricter than their European and American counterparts. Over the past decade, working conditions and appearance requirements for cabin crew at international airlines have come under internal and public criticism. In response, some European, US-American and Australian airlines relaxed their requirements for make-up and uniforms.⁸ At the institute, such changes were not relevant. According to instructors, domestic, Asian and Middle-Eastern airlines recruiting flight attendants in South Asia followed rigorous protocols; it was these that they intended to teach.

For class, creating an impeccable look that was ‘natural’ yet ‘glamorous’ and ‘appropriate for one’s age’ was what students should aim for. Accessories had to be ‘old-fashioned’ as opposed to ‘fashionable’. The make-up colour palette was limited to ‘airline standards’. Individual expressions by creating a too glamorous, bold look or wearing extravagant jewellery were discouraged. According to Sangita and Geetu, an artificial look was not desired either. When explaining that a face should not resemble a mask, a result of applying too much foundation or opting for a wrong shade, Sangita elaborated that ‘it doesn’t look good. It should look natural, harmonized’. However, despite efforts to explain and demonstrate what constituted a ‘natural, harmonized look’ that would increase employability by projecting the right kind of attitude and subjectivity during job interviews, there was no shared understanding between the instructors and the variously positioned trainees on this matter. On the contrary, perceptions about what constituted natural, yet professional make-up differed tremendously.

In spite of Sangita’s firm call for a volunteer to demonstrate the grooming during a practical class with another batch of students, at first no hand was raised. The classroom was steeped in eerie silence, and most students had lowered their faces, their eyes focused on the ground avoiding eye contact. Growing impatient after repeating her question, Sangita turned the situation into a lecture: ‘I won’t call. Someone needs to come. Let’s go! As cabin crew we have to develop that attitude!’ Her message was clear: Initiative and self-confidence were the qualities students should cultivate. Seventeen-year-old Usha, a student from a Hindu caste group, finally got up and took a seat in a chair placed at the front of the classroom. She was giggling, and covered her face with her hands for a moment. Seeing herself transformed in the mirror later on, she seemed pleased, taking selfies and short videos with her smartphone. Towards the end of class, Usha asked Sangita for some products to remove the make-up. She added that she did not want to leave the institute and go home in full make-up. ‘Why not? You look good!’, Sangita answered forcefully. When Usha did not reply, Sangita did not wait for an answer before instructing us with a slightly raised voice: ‘What to do?! You have to do it! This is part of the job!’ Sangita’s disapproval of Usha’s rejection of wearing professional make-up at home and in public was palpable.

After class, Usha quickly disappeared into the mall’s public restroom and removed her make-up. ‘My brother would make fun of me!’, she told me the next day, when I inquired why she had felt uncomfortable leaving the institute with make-up. A month later, I met her again in front of the restroom mirror. She was applying red lipstick before class as required. ‘I don’t like it’, she complained. When I reminded her of the earlier incident, she exclaimed: ‘I looked like in a marriage!’, adding that she was not used to applying make-up in her daily life.

Usha was not alone with her ambivalent feelings about the grooming requirements. Even trainees who used make-up for personal pleasure, at work, during festivals or receptions did not apply vibrant red lipstick or red nail polish outside the institute. Twenty-two-year-old Maya from an Adivasi Janajati group known as the Limbu worked part-time as a barista. While she applied light make-up when working in the café, she never wore red lipstick prior to joining the academy. In fact, she used her older sister’s red lipstick for class, the exact lipstick her sister had worn at her wedding. In Limbu culture, Maya explained, the colour red was optional on the occasion of a wedding. In this regard, the norms of bodily appearance Maya grew up with in her community differed from that of the Hindu majority.

In South Asia, bodily ornamentation traditionally marks women’s status and life stages (Sijapati and Harris 2016). In Hindu culture the colour red is associated with weddings, signifying sexuality and the status of a married woman (Yadav 2016). Some trainees, especially those from Adivasi Janajati backgrounds, struggled with the application of highly visible make-up in general, as they were not used to it, and it was uncommon in their families and respective communities. While for them the colour red implied Hindu caste-belonging, it was trainees like Usha from Hindu caste groups and Newa students who found a particular shade of red lipstick and nail polish discomforting due to its association with marriage.⁹ Among those students, seeing oneself in vibrant red evoked uncomfortable feelings of a life stage they did not associate with. Rather than perceiving the institute’s make-up as ‘natural and harmonized’, most students experienced it as heavy and in opposition to their self-understanding as young women. Importantly, connotations of the colour red varied among the diverse student body, but this was not addressed by the teachers.

To sum up, expectations of professionalism including the embodiment of employable femininity by wearing a tight uniform and applying make-up, red lipstick, and red nail polish were often at odds with trainees’ understandings of appropriate looks. Creating employable femininity at the Sky Dreamers Academy as it pertained to bodily appearance produced tensions for trainees depending on their social location along axes of difference that were further influenced by family dynamics and factors such as college attendance. In the eyes of the institutes, a modern Nepali woman was a woman who was willing to transform herself, to develop new habits and skills that project professionalism through the way she grooms, dresses, and talks, while balancing this with hegemonic notions of respectability. As modern citizens, trainees are supposed to work towards employability, thereby participating in embodied acts of self-fashioning that prove their rightful belonging to the professional job sphere.

As the incident between Sangita and Usha demonstrates, trainees were also encouraged to make claims of belonging to the city and to challenge dominant appearance norms in the intimate space of the home by modifying their looks and confidently embodying employable femininity beyond the classroom in spite of what strangers, family members or neighbours might think. Thus, young women are supposed to overcome certain gendered norms and notions of femininity by transforming the way they relate to make-up, traverse public space or interact with strangers while simultaneously adhering to other norms, such as acting as a caregiver ‘like a mother to a child’ or sitting and walking ‘like a girl’. Whereas Sky Dreamers Academy’s curriculum referenced universal airline standards, instructors mediated those by implicitly relying on high-caste Hindu values, even if this meant that certain aspects of the hegemonic gender ideology had to be overcome.

Multisensorial hierarchies and olfactory management

In negotiations of rightful urban belonging, social imaginaries of places and people reproducing the rural-urban binary structured interactions at the academy. Different types of trainees emerged when staff, instructors, and trainees spoke about students and fellow classmates. One distinction that was commonly drawn concerned the difference between young women from inside (upatyaka bhitra) and those from outside (upatyaka bahira) the Kathmandu valley. To some extent, this was an organizational matter. For example, trainees from outside needed assistance in searching for a place at a girl’s hostel for the duration of the training if they did not have extended family nearby. However, being from outside the valley was frequently used synonymously for being from a village, a socio-spatial category carrying the notion of what is traditional and backward as opposed to modern and developed.

Twenty-one-year-old Lhakpa, a trainee from an Adivasi Janajati background, had grown up on the outskirts of Kathmandu and had attended a private English-language secondary school. During our interview, she recalled that several students in her group came from outside the valley, mostly from the Tarai, the southern plains bordering India.¹⁰ And to her surprise, they were ‘complete villagers’ (sarai gaule). When I asked her how she could tell, Lhakpa elaborated:

Lhakpa: They couldn’t speak English at all; – and, you know, – we know if somebody is really from the village or not by just looking at them. You know, by looking at the way they talk, by their tone, by how educated they are, by what they wear, everything. And even Geetu mam used to scold one girl really badly because she was really like a kind of village girl. And she was like this short [makes a hand gesture] and she couldn’t speak one word of English. And mam used to be really pissed because…she used to be like: ‘If you can’t speak English, you can’t do nothing, you can’t get into airlines’. And when mam told us to bring make up – they ask us for make-up – she brought this 2000 kit. You know, there is a make-up kit like a kids’ make-up kit – she brought that.

Anne: For kids? For children?

Lhakpa: Yeah, everything in one pallet, like this flower type of, you open it and there’s like lip gloss there and there is eye shadow a little bit here and then…Geetu mam was giving us make-up classes and she was like: ‘Who’s box is this?’ And then that girl said: ‘It’s mine’. ‘I knew it, it was yours!’ Mam was like: ‘I knew it was yours, I was expecting it’.¹¹

Lhakpa’s description of her classmates and her memory of the incident between Geetu and the student illustrates common tropes that intersect in the notion of the ‘village girl’. For Lhakpa, just by ‘looking at them’, she claims to know who is a ‘complete villager’. In addition to sight, which evaluates aesthetic differences as in sartorial choices and bodily comportment, Lhakpa based her judgment on observations using other senses: listening to a person’s tone, accent, and potentially grammar and choice of words, observing their overall behaviour and evaluating their knowledge, in particular of the English language. Generally, instructors and trainees equated the capacity to speak English effortlessly with being an educated and smart person (cf. Thebe Limbu 2021). In this regard, Lhakpa felt her classmate failed terribly, which led to Geetu’s emotional outburst. Significantly, financial means and class background were not mentioned as factors influencing who could afford a private English-language education when discussing trainees’ English proficiency.

Consuming the right kinds of product served as a further marker of distinction. Lhakpa recounted how her classmates needed to contact their parents to ask for money before going shopping for cosmetic products. In contrast, she already possessed some of the cosmetics she needed. In Lhakpa’s view, the difference between herself as an urban, educated and fashionable person and her classmates, some of whom had just moved to Kathmandu, was striking. Importantly, being a ‘complete villager’ came to stand for a moral category for a particular kind of person, namely one who was sensorially recognizable, uneducated, and ill-informed. Questioning the trainees about the ‘flower make-up kit’, Geetu claimed to know to whom it belonged even before inquiring about its owner. Thus, this trainee emerged as someone from whom nothing more could be expected, someone inherently lacking. Sky Dreamers Academy promised a personal and bodily transformation that would increase employability. Addressing the limits of this promise, Lhakpa concluded that her classmate should not have been admitted to the academy in the first place. The money spent on the diploma course was wasted; according to Lhakpa, her classmate did not stand a chance of succeeding in the competitive airline sector.

In Geetu’s and Lhakpa’s evaluations, not only was the trainee unfit to be a flight attendant, she did not embody the employable femininity expected of a modern citizen; in fact, her presence in the institute and the city itself stood out. As an urban newcomer, she was arguably perceived as a spatial intruder whose embodied aesthetics, in combination with a supposed lack of knowledge, marked her rural origin. In urban Turkey, Claudia Liebelt (2019) shows, a ‘visual economy of recognition’ (Ahmed 2000, 30) is central to middle-class residents’ judgments and determinations of female bodies belonging to Istanbul. Similarly, categories of difference pinned on to the female body mattered in everyday encounters at Sky Dreamers Academy when scrutinizing (non)belonging to Kathmandu and, by extension, the Nepali nation.

Evaluating others were not individual, personal acts. Rather, they were systematic and encouraged. Personal appearance and grooming were closely scrutinized. Not only instructors, but also receptionists scolded trainees for wearing too little make-up or the wrong shades when entering the institute. Trainees were reminded routinely that, when dressed in uniform, they represented the institute, which they had to treat as seriously as representing an airline and the Nepali nation in the future. For several weeks, trainees were given the daily task of grading each other’s ways of wearing the uniform, make-up and hairstyle. Geetu checked the marksheet at the end of each week and provided overall feedback. Thus, constant monitoring of the self and others formed part of the institute’s routine, with the aim of creating standardized modern appearances. Trainees had to provide feedback to one another, grade each other, and ultimately single out those who did not embody employable femininity.

In addition to sight and hearing, smell featured prominently in the multisensorial aesthetic hierarchy that was mapped onto the rural-urban divide. During a class on ‘Tourism in Nepal’, Geetu recalled her experience of flying regularly to domestic airports. Talking about climate zones, she remembered the cold weather in mountainous regions. ‘We have been to all sorts of places’, she said before adding: ‘In Dolpo, the passengers used to stink cheesy. They don’t bathe for so many months because it’s so cold there. How difficult it has been!’ She explained that the domestic twenty-seater plane had two extra passenger seats close to those of the cabin crew: ‘I always wanted to keep those empty!’, Geetu exclaimed. The olfactory memory made her act out a feeling which I understood to be disgust: Geetu grimaced, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.

This episode of olfactory othering, accompanied by Geetu’s visceral reaction, was striking. First, ‘all sorts of places’ was a description signalling that a flight to Dolpo, a region bordering Tibet in northern Nepal, was very different from trips to destinations such as Frankfurt or London, which Geetu always remembered fondly. Second, when the class were reading the handout on tourism out loud together that day, Geetu had skipped the part mentioning Nepal’s ethnolinguistic diversity. Therefore, rather than being seen as co-citizens, inhabitants of Dolpo entered the classroom merely as ‘smelly others’ that day. Third, Geetu drew an olfactory boundary between herself, as a pleasantly scented urban airhostess, and the malodorous ‘non-showering’, ‘cheesy smelling’ inhabitants of Dolpo.

Although she might not have perceived the smell as an inherent difference, as she attributed the habit of not showering to climatic difference, her comment fed into a long-existing stereotype about Nepalese from high mountain regions. Due to their cultural-religious differences from the Hindu majority population, ethnic groups inhabiting the mountains were historically lumped together under the term bhote, ‘people from Tibet’. The term carries with it derogative meanings of alcohol-consuming, ‘dirty, beef-eating Buddhists’ (Campbell 1997, 216), who are morally suspect.¹² Moreover, mountain dwellers’ loyalties to the nation state have repeatedly been questioned due to their historical ties to Tibet (Ramble 1997).

When I mentioned Geetu’s olfactory memory to my research assistant Rani, a twenty-nine-year-old university graduate from an ‘upper-caste’ Hindu background, she proved to be familiar with the trope of the smelly bhote. She recalled how her parents educated her about personal hygiene. When she was reluctant to take a bath as a child, they teased her by saying that, if she did not wash herself, she would smell like a bhote. In this instance, bodily malodour appeared as a quality associated with Nepalese from the mountains, independently of actual experience.

Caste in India, Kapoor (2022) argues, is experienced relationally on the basis of ideas of purity and impurity that create embodied boundaries through repulsion and disgust. The sensorial ordering of bodies might lack any material basis arising in concrete encounters between actual bodies (ibid.). Regardless of the material basis of Geetu’s memory, olfactory boundary work evokes affective and visceral reactions that reinforce and naturalize imagined differences. For Geetu, the profound otherness of passengers from Dolpo was expressed through smell; to her, these were olfactory intruders in the plane, invading her professional work environment. Though trainees were taught not to discriminate against passengers and future colleagues on the basis of religion, gender, ethnicity or caste, embodied belonging and difference came to matter in the classroom and were expressed along multisensorial aesthetic hierarchies.

Indeed, personal hygiene and body odour were recurring themes, and instructors gave detailed advice on ‘olfactory management’ (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 8). Guidelines in handouts and verbal remarks included reminders such as: ‘brush teeth twice a day’, ‘use mouth wash for bad breath’, ‘keep your eyebrows in a clean shape’ and ‘keep nails in a clean and good condition’, which meant cutting them to a particular shape, fingernails oval, toenails straight, and applying nail polish for ‘hygienic reasons’.¹³ Regarding body odour, one handout suggested: ‘Make a bath with warm water to be fresh to remove dirt/dust’, ‘Use antiperspirant and perfume or body spray’. The young women were prompted to shower regularly, as body odour was not to be tolerated. They were also called upon to pay special attention to personal hygiene during menstruation. Smells emanating from one’s body were framed as ‘weaknesses’ to be detected through self-awareness: ‘You need to remember the small, small things, which might be your weakness’, Sangita elaborated, explaining that some people might prove to have smelly feet after taking their shoes off, while a sick tooth may cause foul breath. Perfumes, we learned, could be used, but in moderation. They should smell sweet, but not too strong. One handout warned that ‘scents can trigger asthma, overpower a room, and are often more offensive than pleasing to others’. These meticulous guidelines demonstrate that instructors not only cautioned students to develop a heightened sense of smell – an important professional skill for detecting smoke on board of a plane early on – but also expected them to develop a new sensory register to distinguish appropriate from non-appropriate (body) odours and to manage them accordingly.

Some advice on hygiene and scents, however, was not applicable to trainees’ personal circumstances. Under the headline ‘Freshness’, one handout stated: ‘To get that feeling of general well-being and freshness, indulge in a bath. Add your favourite perfume, put rosewater or rose petals in your bath water’. Discussing this advice on social media with twenty-year-old trainee Nisha, she sent an emoji crying of laughter, explaining that not everyone could afford this. Moreover, she wrote that most people do not have bathtubs. Indeed, hostels with shared restrooms and shower facilities, as well as many private houses in Kathmandu except those of wealthy residents, do not usually have bathtubs. Certainly, rose petals were not on trainees’ shopping lists either. More aspirational than based on lived reality, the handout communicated that taking baths with rose petals was a possibility, thereby projecting a desirable life tied to sensuous experiences of fragrances and luxury that few Nepalese have access to.

Sensory historians argue that, following the sanitation and personal hygiene campaigns which led to an overall ‘silencing’ of smell from the eighteenth century onwards, Euro-American modernity itself came to be seen as deodorized (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994; Kettler 2020; Simmonds 2019). At Sky Dreamers Academy, the ideal trainee was an odourless or at least a deodorized citizen. Relying on a specific Nepali hierarchy of places and people, instructors and students engaged in embodied self-fashioning and the scrutiny of trainees’ urban belonging as modern citizens within multisensorial hierarchies. In their interplay with notions of what it means to be(come) employable, markers of urban and by extension national belonging extended beyond the visual and included sound and olfaction.

Conclusion

When Usha, Maya, Lhakpa, and other women at Sky Dreamers Academy engage in grooming, apply make-up and transform the way they dress and talk, their actions constitute acts of citizenship in the sense that they intentionally modify their bodies and self-presentation as they work towards their dream of being selected by an airline. By doing so, they claim new opportunities for participation in the global service economy as modern Nepali citizens. Since Nepalese citizenship can only be acquired at the age of sixteen, requiring the navigation of arduous bureaucratic procedures, numerous young women join job trainings prior to acquiring citizenship documents. Thus, acts of citizenship such as aesthetic self-fashioning and monitoring others as urban intruders in the training context and beyond might precede the legal work needed to claim formal citizenship without which employment as a flight attendant is impossible. According to training institutes, however, success in recruitment processes rests on the projection of the right kind of gendered subjectivity linked to the embodiment of employable femininity.

In Nepal, where youth unemployment and labour migration are thriving and women’s international movement remains subject to national debate, following new career paths in search of social and spatial mobility requires enduring ambivalent feelings that arise from the tension between the conflicting demands for gendered professionalism and respectability. Cabin-crew training institutes expect their trainees to prove their willingness to transform themselves into aesthetic citizens who radiate urban modernity by crafting themselves visually, vocally, and olfactorily. As a spatiotemporal and moral category, urban modernity remains tied to ideas about the nation state that perpetuate the bikas discourse and the gendered norms of high-caste hill Hindu communities despite Nepal’s ethnic and cultural diversity and recent shifts towards a more inclusive state. Since in the national context of Nepal the urban is what is valued and made desirable, trainees’ national belonging is ultimately expressed through an embodiment of employable femininity that reflects urban modernity.

Far from being limited to Nepal or South Asia, embodied aesthetics and the senses can be crucial for the making of modern citizens in the job-training sphere. Recent scholarship has argued that greater attention should be paid to the senses and their naturalization in the making of citizens, citizenship, and political belonging (Trnka, Dureau, and Park 2013). Here, I have explored the senses as they pertain to aesthetic citizenship and come to matter in acts of embodied self-making, as well as in scrutinizing supposed others’ bodies. This scrutiny is guided by multisensorial hierarchies and is affected not only visually, but also in auditory and olfactory terms, triggering affective reactions such as feelings of disgust. Conceptualizing aesthetic citizenship as multisensorial rather than as merely visual refines our understanding of how normative state ideologies and modes of differentiation become corporealized. In their claims for inclusion and their struggles for social as well as spatial mobility, differently positioned prospective workers in Nepal’s aviation training industry and beyond experience becoming aesthetic citizens in multiple ways.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Beauty and the State Conference (Freie Universität Berlin), the Annual Martin Chautari Conference (Martin Chautari) and among colleagues at ISEK (University of Zurich) in 2023, and I am grateful for the constructive feedback I received on all three occasions. Special thanks go to Avash Piya, Darshan Karki, Claudia Liebelt and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and invaluable suggestions. I also thank Neeti Aryal Khanal for her support and the opportunity to discuss my research during a lecture at the Department of Gender Studies, Tribhuvan University. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my friends and research participants in Kathmandu and everyone I encountered through Sky Dreamers Academy. The research for this work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant number 433753905.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names, including that of the institute, are pseudonyms.

2. In practice, I noticed a certain flexibility in meeting these criteria. The physical criteria are a compilation of (inter)national airlines’ different requirements, though there is some variety in this regard. Likewise, being unmarried is not a universal criterion.

3. Our four-month course fee was 35,000 Nepali Rupees (245 Euro), or around two monthly salaries for a waitress, nurse, or receptionist in Kathmandu. Trainees had additional costs for their uniforms, swimming equipment, cosmetics, and photos.

4. The Panchayat system was a village-based form of democracy that served to strengthen the Hindu monarchy (Burghart 1994).

5. At least 58 of these groups are Hindu castes and 64 are Adivasi Janajati. Caste and ethnicity are lumped together in the census, so these numbers derive from Shneiderman and Rai (2019), who use the 2011 census. An increase of 17 caste/ethnic groups between 2011 and 2021 shows that ethnic and caste formation are ongoing processes.

6. In 2021, 23.4% of Nepali households had a member living abroad (NSO 2023a). Since 2013 the annual share of remittances in GDP fluctuated between 22.3 and 27.6% (World Bank 2022).

7. In the making of a passive ‘Nepali woman’, the rural often intersects with the indigenous or the ‘low caste’. This image is also promoted by women’s groups led by Kathmandu-based women, many from high-caste Hindu communities, who also occupy relative positions of power in political parties and INGOs (Tamang 2009).

8. See, for example, articles in The Guardian (2023) and The New York Times (Yeginsu 2019).

9. Newa, the Kathmandu valley’s original inhabitants, are Adivasi Janajati with their own caste system. A majority of Newa are Hindus.

10. Due to hill-centric nationalism and the Tarai’s proximity to India, there is a history of questioning its inhabitants’ belonging to the Nepali nation (Shneiderman and Rai 2019).

11. Interview with Lhakpa, 7 February 2023.

12. In the Hindu majority society eating beef is frowned upon; killing cows remains illegal in Nepal.

13. Based on the national airline’s training manual, instructors had written the handouts years ago.