Abstract
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.
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