“32 qualities like a Kumari”: Young women, skills training and work on the self in Kathmandu, Nepal

Abstract

How do discourses and practices of self-improvement shape the experiences of educated young women as they work towards creating hopeful futures? In this paper I discuss how young women are expected to work on the self and consequently inhabit their selves in new ways as they train to become flight attendants at a private airhostess institute in Kathmandu, Nepal. By acquiring new embodied qualities and sensibilities – manners of speaking, walking and grooming – trainees are encouraged to significantly modify their bodies and self-presentation. During and after our four-months training, I reflected with the trainees on how this required some of them to inhabit their selves in new ways, challenging notions of respectable femininity they had grown up with. Certain situations, such as the first glance into the mirror when wearing a professional makeup for the first time, dressing in a tight uniform in public transport or speaking up with a loud voice in front of others, were embodied moments hard to reconcile with trainee’s self-understanding. By making gendered moralities visible, such seemingly mundane instances led differently positioned trainees to engage in intense ethical reflections. However, by relying on the language of professional qualities and skills, the additional labour that some students needed to do to reconcile their sense of self with the expected work on the self, remained largely unacknowledged by the teachers, thereby reproducing dynamics of class and caste/ethnicity.