“Becoming an Asian Businesswoman”: The Racialised Aesthetic and Emotional Labour of Asian Women in the French Business World

The concepts of aesthetic and emotional labour have been central to analysing the ways in which the service industry reinforces and reproduces gender inequalities and more generally commodifies emotions and aesthetic norms. By focusing on the experience of Asian “businesswomen” in multinational corporations based in France, this article explores the racialised logics that underlie these two notions. First, I highlight the everyday racism experienced by Asian women in the workplace, despite a specific French legal and social norm of colourblindness. In the second part of this article, I explore the aesthetic prescriptions present in the workplace and how Asian women navigate them. Finally, this article demonstrates that if conforming to implicit professional norms implies racialised aesthetic labour, it simultaneously involves racialised emotional labour, unfolding in three distinct patterns: reassuring white executives about the globalised economic markets, justifying non-white presence in a white professional space, and silently enduring experiences of racism.