ABSTRACT
This study develops the concept of skin capital, a form of embodied capital in Pierre Bourdieu's framework, produced not through acquired skill but through market valuation of phenotypic (physical, biochemical, or behavioral) racial difference. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi and semi-structured interviews with nineteen women from Manipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram engaged in paid intimate labor, it shows how an “East Asian presenting” phenotype is converted into capital that can be performed, accumulated, and exchanged at rates above market norms. The authors introduce phenotypic labor: the curation and staging of racialized appearance as an erotic commodity and argue that racial fetishism in commercial sex concentrates broader inequalities facing bodies in India.
KEYWORDS
Skin capital, phenotypic labor, racial fetishism, sex work, Northeast India, Bourdieu, intimate economies
My face is my capital. Not my brain, not my degree, not my English. My face. These eyes. This is what they’re paying for. Everything else I could learn, but this, I was born with it, and in Delhi it has a price. – Lalmuanpuii, twenty-three, Aizawl, Mizoram, Authors’ interview, September 2025.
In Bourdieu’s (1986) canonical taxonomy of capital (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic), the body appears primarily as a vehicle for the habitus, the durable dispositions through which agents navigate social fields. Loïc Wacquant, in his ethnography of Chicago boxers, extended this framework by demonstrating that the body itself can function as capital: boxers accumulate “bodily capital” through disciplined training, converting physical capacity into economic return (1995a, 1995b, 2004).
1. Concepts of “Bodily Capital” and Others
The concept of “bodily capital” has since been applied to athletes, dancers, models, and sex workers (Mears 2011; Hoang 2015; Warhurst and Nickson 2007). But in each of these formulations, bodily capital is understood as acquired, the product of labor, training, discipline, and investment over time.
This paper identifies a different species. Among the Northeastern Indian women the authors studied in Delhi’s informal intimacy economy, the body’s primary market value derives not from what it can do but from what it looks like, specifically, from the phenotypic features (epicanthic folds, flat nasal bridges, lighter skin relative to the North Indian norm, straight dark hair, smaller skeletal frames) that mark them as racially distinct within the Indian context and, crucially, as racially proximate to East Asian bodies within the transnational erotic imaginary. We call this skin capital: the convertible value of racial phenotype within a specific market field.
The concept is analytically necessary because existing frameworks cannot account for what we observed including the study done by Punathil on Northeastern women working in Spas in Northern India (Punathil, 2025). Hochschild’s (1983) “emotional labour” captures the affective work these women perform but not its racial specificity. Bernstein’s (2007) “bounded authenticity” describes the manufacture of intimacy for sale but not the role of racial fantasy in structuring that intimacy. Wacquant’s “bodily capital” presupposes accumulation through effort; skin capital, by contrast, is ascribed at birth and activated by context, a Mizo woman’s face has no special erotic value in Aizawl, but in Delhi it commands a 200-300% premium over phenotypically ‘mainland’ competitors in the same market tier. The capital is not in the body per se. It is in the racial difference the body signifies within a specific field of desire, which is the social and commercial context (clients, venues, marketing, and cultural fantasies) that determines which bodily traits are eroticized and thus, in turn, monetizable. The same face can be ordinary in one field but highly valued in another because that field’s tastes and market structures assign erotic meaning and price to racial differences.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 elaborates the theoretical framework. Section 3 describes the fieldwork. Sections 4 through 7 present the findings. Section 8 concludes by arguing that racial phenotype functions, in this economy, as a means of production in the classical Marxian sense, and that recognizing it as such demands a rethinking of how we theorize the intersection of race, sex, and labor.
2. Bodies, Fields, and Racial Value
2.1. Bourdieu's Capital and Its Limits
Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) theory of capital posits that social power is distributed through multiple, convertible forms of capital that operate within semi-autonomous fields, structured arenas of competition governed by field-specific logics. Economic capital (money, property), cultural capital (education, taste, credentials), and social capital (networks, relationships) are accumulated, invested, and exchanged according to the ‘rules of the game’ operative in each field.
The body enters Bourdieu’s framework through the habitus, the embodied, pre-reflexive dispositions that agents carry as a consequence of their social position. The habitus is “history turned into nature” (Bourdieu 1977, 78): class-specific ways of walking, speaking, eating, and gesturing that are experienced as natural but are in fact socially produced. Wacquant (1995b, 2004) made the body more analytically explicit by showing that prizefighters invest in their bodies as a form of capital, subjecting them to regimes of discipline (training, diet, pain management) that convert raw physical capacity into marketable fighting skill. The body becomes, in his terms, a “form of capital in its own right” (Wacquant 2004, 128).
But there is a crucial limitation. In Wacquant's account, as in Bourdieu’s broader framework, capital is acquired. It is the product of labor, of time, effort, and investment. The boxer’s body capital is accumulated through years of training; the model’s through regimes of diet, exercise, and aesthetic self-management (Mears 2011). Even the sex worker’s “erotic capital” (Hakim 2010; Green 2008) is typically theorized as a combination of attractiveness, social skills, and sexual competence that can be cultivated and deployed strategically.
What we observed among Northeastern women in Delhi does not fit this model. Their primary market asset, the racialized phenotype, is not acquired. It is inherited. It cannot be accumulated through effort, though it can be enhanced through specific cosmetic and performative labor (a point we develop in Section 5). It is not the product of class-specific socialization. It is, in the most literal sense, skin-deep. And yet it functions within the field of Delhi’s intimacy economy, exactly as capital functions: it confers competitive advantage, commands premium pricing, and can be strategically deployed, converted, and even (through cosmetic modification) invested in.
We therefore propose skin capital as a sub-type of bodily capital that is:
2.2. Emotional Labor, Erotic Capital, and Their Insufficiencies
Hochschild’s (1983) foundational concept of emotional labor, the management of feeling to produce a publicly observable facial and bodily display, has been extensively applied to sex work (Sanders 2005; Chapkis 1997; Boris and Parrenas 2010). Sex workers manage their own emotions (suppressing disgust, performing desire) and the emotions of clients (producing feelings of desirability, intimacy, specialness). This framework is necessary but insufficient for the present case because it treats the emotional labor as racially unmarked. A flight attendant’s smile, in Hochschild’s account, is generically warm; a sex worker’s performed desire is generically erotic. But the labor we observed is specifically racial: the women are not performing generic intimacy but racialized intimacy, a fantasy structured by the client’s desire for a body that signifies East Asian otherness.
Hakim’s (2010) concept of erotic capital, comprising beauty, sexual attractiveness, social skills, liveliness, social presentation, and sexuality, gestures toward the body’s market value but remains individualistic and voluntaristic, as if erotic assets were a personal portfolio to be optimized. It has been rightly criticized (Skeggs 2004; Adkins 2005) for ignoring structural power. What is missing in Hakim, and what the Northeast Indian case makes visible, is that erotic value is not a property of individual bodies but a relational effect produced at the intersection of racial classification, gendered desire, and market structure.
2.3. Differential Inclusion and Necropolitics
Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) concept of differential inclusion describes how migrant bodies are incorporated into political and economic systems not through full membership but through graduated modes of access that simultaneously include and subordinate. Northeastern migrants in Delhi are Indian citizens but are racially marked as not-quite-Indian, a condition that produces both exclusion (housing discrimination, street harassment, the ‘chinky’ slur; McDuie-Ra 2012; Haokip 2021) and perverse inclusion (premium erotic value precisely because of that otherness). They are included in Delhi’s economy as racial others, and their inclusion is conditional on performing that otherness.
Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics extends Foucault’s biopolitics to theorize conditions under which certain populations are consigned to ‘death-worlds,’ zones of social death, disposability, and slow violence. We do not claim that the women we studied inhabit death-worlds in Mbembe’s fullest sense. But we do argue that the conversion of racial phenotype into erotic commodity involves a form of slow necropolitical extraction: the women’s bodies are valued precisely for the racial features that, in other contexts, mark them for discrimination, violence, and social exclusion. The intimacy economy does not liberate them from racial subordination; it monetizes it. The same face that is spat at on the metro is kissed in the hotel room, and both acts emerge from the same racial logic. This is necropolitics operating not through sovereign killing but through the eroticization of disposability.
3. Fieldwork: May 2025 to January 2026
3.1. Access and Positionality
Ruth (the lead author of this study) is a Northeastern woman. This fact is both the condition of possibility for this research and its most significant methodological complication. Her own phenotype, the same features that constitute skin capital in the field we studied, granted her a degree of trust and legibility that a non-Northeastern researcher would almost certainly not have achieved.
Fieldwork began in May 2025, when she relocated to a paying-guest accommodation in Munirka, a neighborhood chosen because of its high concentration of Northeastern student-migrants and its proximity to several of the spa parlors and outcall networks she would eventually study. Access was mediated by a Mizo women’s church fellowship group that operated an informal support network for Northeastern women in precarious situations. Over the first three months, she attended fellowship meetings, accompanied women on errands, shared meals, and gradually became known as “the one writing a paper.” By August 2025, she had been introduced to women who were, or had recently been, engaged in paid intimate labor.
3.2. Participants
Nineteen women participated in semi-structured interviews. All were from the three states of Manipur (nine), Nagaland (five), and Mizoram (five). Ages ranged from nineteen to twenty-nine (median: twenty-three). All had migrated to Delhi for higher education; fourteen were currently enrolled in undergraduate or postgraduate programs, three had dropped out, and two had completed degrees but remained in Delhi. Fifteen were actively engaged in paid intimate labor at the time of interview; four had exited within the previous eight months. All the interviews were conducted between August 2025 and January 2026.
The women earned anywhere between INR 30,000 and INR 320,000 each month (median INR 90,000). What is noteworthy is that this is several times more than the median starting salary for a Delhi graduate, which is INR 20,000 to INR 25,000 per month, a wage asymmetry that in itself may have its own structural logic of entry (Hamilton et al., 2023).
This group of migrant women must be distinguished from the widely documented phenomenon of trafficking young women from insurgency-affected regions in Northeast India and other regions such as Bastar in Chhattisgarh (Rai 2021). The participants in this study accessed these forms of intimate labor through volitional pathways, though volition is not necessarily a fixed or stable construct in the context of structural constraints (Weitzer 2010). Most participants came from lower-middle-income households in rural areas of the Northeast. There were, however, notable exceptions: a minority came from comparatively affluent backgrounds. These cases suggest that economic need alone cannot explain participation. Instead, psychosocial factors such as exhibitionism and sexual self-determination may also be at work, as identified in studies of online intimate labor economies in the West (Hamilton et al. 2023; Jones 2016; Brooks 2026). Further noteworthy is the testimony offered by participants regarding the apparent increased desire for Northeastern women in some establishments as consumers, potentially indicative of racialized desire hierarchies in the economy, what might be termed an ethnic “whorearchy” in the terminology of Zhang (2024). This, thus, could be the reason for an overrepresentation of Northeastern and to an extent Nepali, and this warrants further research that is beyond the scope of this paper (Ruth 2026).
3.3. Data Collection
Interviews lasted between ninety minutes and four hours. Twelve were audio-recorded with consent; seven were documented through contemporaneous handwritten notes. All were conducted in private settings chosen by the participant, typically a cafe, a park, or the participant's own room. Languages used were English, Mizo, and Meiteilon, often in rapid alternation within a single utterance.
In addition to interviews, we conducted approximately 350 hours of participant observation across the following sites:
All names are pseudonyms. Identifying details (specific neighborhoods, institutional affiliations, physical descriptions) have been altered or composited. Two participants requested that specific anecdotes be attributed to fabricated composite identities; we have honored this.
3.4. Ethics and Discomfort
All the participants were informed about the purposes of this study, and informed consent was taken. All names and location details presented here are anonymized.
Several interviews contained descriptions of sexual acts, client behavior, and emotional states of such specificity that we experienced visceral distress during and after them. We have retained this specificity in the analysis where it is analytically necessary, where sanitizing the account would obscure the mechanism we are trying to describe. The reader should understand that explicitness is not gratuitous. It is the data. The discomfort it produces in the reader is itself analytically relevant: it is the discomfort the women manage professionally, every day, as a condition of their economic survival.
4. The Price of Phenotype
4.1. Rate Differentials
The most empirically unambiguous finding is economic. Northeastern women command substantially higher rates than non-Northeastern women operating at comparable tiers of Delhi’s intimacy market. We triangulated this through three data sources: participant self-reports, rate cards observed in spa parlors, and pricing discussions on Telegram channels.
Table
| Service category | Northeastern women (INR) | Non-Northeastern women (INR) |
| Spa ‘full service’ (1 hour) | 5,000-15,000 | 2,000-6,000 |
| Outcall (2-3 hours) | 10,000-25,000 | 5,000-12,000 |
| Overnight ‘GFE’ package | 20,000-60,000 | 8,000-25,000 |
The table shows approximate rate ranges, mid-tier market segment, South/East Delhi, 2025. Based on participant reports (n=15), observed rate cards (n=3 establishments), and Telegram channel data (n=5 channels). ‘GFE’ = girlfriend experience.
4.2. What Clients Are Buying
The Telegram channels we observed provide a remarkably explicit record of what clients value and why. Reviews are structured around categories that foreground racial phenotype:
“SP” [Service Provider] name: Lily. State: Manipur. Complexion: very fair, proper chinky look. Body: slim, small frame, smooth skin. GFE level: 9/10. She wore the outfit I brought (school uniform). Didn’t break character. Felt like dating a Korean girl. Worth every rupee. Will repeat.” – Telegram channel review, observed October 2025.
The language is instructive. “Proper chinky look” indicates that the client is purchasing not sex in the abstract but sex with a body that displays specific racial markers. “Felt like dating a Korean girl” reveals the transnational fantasy structure: the client is not desiring a Manipuri woman as such but a racial image, Korean, Japanese, East Asian, that the Manipuri woman’s phenotype is made to approximate. The “school uniform” detail points to the intersection with anime and K-pop fetish cultures, which provide the specific visual scripts through which Northeastern bodies are consumed.
Bourdieu’s field theory is illuminating here. The intimacy economy functions as a semi-autonomous field with its own internal logic of valuation. Within this field, racial phenotype operates as a form of capital that is misrecognized (in Bourdieu’s technical sense) as erotic attractiveness. Clients do not say: “I am paying a premium because of her racial features.” They say: “She’s hot,” “She’s exotic,” “She’s different.” The racial basis of the valuation is naturalized as personal preference. This misrecognition is essential to the field’s functioning. If the racial structure were made explicit, the fantasy would collapse. The field depends on the denegation (Bourdieu 1977) of its own logic.
5. Phenotypic Labor: Manufacturing the ‘East Asian’ Body
Skin capital, though ascribed, is not passively possessed. It must be activated through what we call phenotypic labor: the deliberate work of curating, enhancing, and performing one’s racial appearance to maximize its market value. This labor has material, aesthetic, and affective dimensions.
5.1. The Material Regime
Participants described elaborate grooming regimes oriented not toward generic beauty standards but toward the amplification of racially specific features:
I use Korean skincare, the 10-step routine, toner, essence, serum, everything. Not because I care about Korean skincare. Because my clients care. I need my skin to look like a K-drama actress. I spend maybe 4,000-5,000 a month on products. It’s an investment. My skin is literally my income. – Ngaihlun, twenty-two, Lunglei, Mizoram.
I got circle lenses, the colored contacts that make your eyes look bigger, like anime eyes. I straighten my hair every two weeks. I bleach my arm hair. One client told me he didn’t like body hair because ‘Asian girls are supposed to be smooth.’ I spent 12,000 on laser sessions after that. He didn’t even become a regular. – Kimkim, twenty, Ukhrul, Manipur.
The labor extends to the management of smell, taste, and voice. Three participants described altering their diets before client sessions:
No ngari, no akhuni [fermented soybean], nothing with strong smell. I eat bland food, rice, dal, maybe some chicken. I chew mint gum. I spray Japanese cherry blossom perfume. I become scentless. Or rather, I become the scent they expect. A Northeastern girl who smells like Northeastern food breaks the fantasy. I have to smell like a department store. – Thangi, 27, Imphal, Manipur.
This is phenotypic labor in its most literal form: the physical body is modified, maintained, and managed as an asset. It requires financial investment (cosmetics, treatment, clothing), temporal investment (hours of grooming), and a specific form of racial literacy, an understanding of which phenotypic features are valued, by whom, and how they can be amplified or approximated. Wacquant’s boxers invest in their bodies through training; these women invest in their bodies through racialized aesthetic regimes. The logic is structurally identical. The content is radically different.
5.2. The Performative Dimension
Phenotypic labor extends beyond the material body to encompass what Goffman (1959) would call impression management, but impression management organized around racial signification. Participants described learning to perform a curated version of ‘East Asianness’ that corresponded to client fantasies:
I downloaded K-dramas and watched them like homework. I learned the names of BTS members. I can say a few phrases in Korean, oppa, saranghae, basic stuff. One client wanted me to call him oppa during sex. I did. He tipped 5,000 extra. I don't even like K-pop. – Malsawmi, twenty-three, Aizawl, Mizoram.
There’s a costume rotation. Schoolgirl uniform, the Japanese kind, with the short skirt. A Qipao once. Nurse outfit but the sexy version. ‘Traditional Korean dress,’ a client bought me a hanbok once, but cheap, from Amazon. I have a drawer full of costumes. None of them are from my culture. Nobody has ever asked me to wear a puandum [Mizo traditional wrap]. Nobody wants that fantasy. – Lalmuanpuii, twenty-three, Aizawl, Mizoram.
The last observation is analytically crucial. The clients do not fetishize Northeastern culture. They fetishize Northeastern phenotype as a signifier for a different culture entirely, Korean, Japanese, Thai. The women’s actual ethnic identities (Mizo, Meitei, Ao, Sumi) are irrelevant to the transaction; what matters is the visual surface. This is skin capital in its purest form: value inheres in the skin, not in anything beneath it. The self is irrelevant. Only the surface is purchased.
This produces a distinctive form of alienation, not Marx’s alienation from the product of labor, but alienation from one’s own phenotype. The face in the mirror belongs to the market. Lalmuanpuii again:
Sometimes I look at myself after removing all the makeup and the lenses and I think, who is this? This face has made me maybe 15 lakhs [US$16,500] in two years. But it doesn’t feel like my face anymore. It feels like an asset. Like a shop. I live behind the shop.
6. Field Architecture: Platforms, Parlors, and the Infrastructure of Racial Desire
The intimacy economy in which skin capital circulates is not a unitary market but a structured field, in Bourdieu’s sense, with its own positions, hierarchies, entry conditions, and logics of competition. We identified four interconnected sub-fields through which Northeastern women’s intimate labor is organized and exchanged:
This layered infrastructure produces what we call structured invisibility: the economy is legible to participants and clients but illegible to outsiders, law enforcement, and, crucially, to the women’s own families and academic communities. This is not mere secrecy. It is a systemic property of the field, maintained through encryption, coded language, spatial segregation, and the mutual interest of all parties (workers, clients, managers, landlords) in avoiding detection.
7. Living in the Double Bind: Dissociation, Agency, and the Limits of Choice
Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) concept of differential inclusion is nowhere more visible than in the daily lives of our participants. They are included in Delhi’s social fabric as racial others, discriminated against in housing, harassed on public transport, denied service at restaurants, and simultaneously included in Delhi’s erotic economy as racial others, desired, paid premium rates, treated as ‘exotic.’ The same phenotype that produces exclusion in one register produces inclusion in another. This is not a paradox. It is the structure of differential inclusion: the terms of incorporation are themselves the instruments of subordination.
Monday to Friday I’m the ‘chinky girl’ who can't get an auto-rickshaw because drivers think I’m from some other country. Saturday night I’m the ‘exotic beauty’ who gets 30,000 for pretending to be someone’s Korean girlfriend. Same face. Different price. Delhi loves my face and hates my face at the same time. I’ve stopped trying to make sense of it. I just make money from the contradiction. – Mercy, twenty-four, Dimapur, Nagaland.
The psychic cost of inhabiting this contradiction is severe. Fourteen of nineteen participants described symptoms consistent with dissociative experiences, a sense of splitting between the ‘work self’ and the ‘real self’ that extended beyond the pragmatic compartmentalization common among sex workers globally (Sanders 2005). What is distinctive here is that the dissociation is racial: it is not merely ‘me at work’ versus ‘me at home’ but ‘the version of my race they desire’ versus ‘the version of my race I live.’
When I’m with a client I become . . . empty. Not sad, not happy. Empty. Like my face is a screen and they’re watching their own movie on it. I’m behind the screen. Sometimes after, when they leave, it takes me an hour to come back. I sit on the bed and I don’t know who I am. Not dramatically. Literally. For a moment I genuinely don’t know if I’m Hoihnu or the character I was playing. Then I shower, I eat, I call my mother, and I’m me again. Until next time. –Hoihnu, twenty-five, Kangpokpi, Manipur.
This resonates with Du Bois’s (1903) double consciousness, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” but with a material twist. Du Bois described a phenomenological condition; what we are documenting is a labor condition. The double consciousness is not simply experienced; it is performed for pay. It is the work itself. Skin capital can only be converted into economic capital through the sustained performance of self-as-other, and this performance exacts a dissociative toll that constitutes what we would describe, following Mbembe (2003), as a form of slow social death, not the annihilation of the body but the gradual erosion of the self's coherence under the weight of its own commodification.
And yet, the ‘and yet,’ is essential: the women are not simply crushed by this structure. They navigate it with intelligence, calculation, and dark humor. They set prices, refuse clients, choose when to enter and exit the economy, invest their earnings in education and family. Several participants described their intimate labor in explicitly entrepreneurial terms:
This is a business. My face is the product. My body is the factory. I am the CEO. I don’t need a pimp; I don’t need a manager. I have a phone, I have Telegram, I have a good moisturizer. That’s my startup. Three years, I save enough to go home and open a cafe in Aizawl. That’s the exit strategy. I’m not a victim. I’m an entrepreneur operating in a racist market. I didn’t create the racism. I’m just . . . monetizing it. – Zovi, twenty-six, Aizawl, Mizoram.
To dismiss this as false consciousness would be analytically lazy. To celebrate it as uncomplicated empowerment would be politically naïve. What is required is a framework that can hold both: the genuine agency of strategic calculation and the structural coercion of a racial economy that limits the options within which that agency operates. Skin capital names exactly this: a form of capital that is real, it produces real economic returns, and yet is extracted from a condition of racial subordination that the women did not choose and cannot, individually, dismantle.
8. Phenotype as a Means of Production
We want to conclude with a provocation. If we take the concept of skin capital seriously, if we accept that racial phenotype functions within this field as a convertible, deployable, value-generating asset, then we must also accept that phenotype functions as a means of production. In classical Marxian terms, the means of production are the instruments and materials through which labor produces value. In the economy we have described, the Northeastern woman’s face, her eyes, skin, bone structure, hair, is the instrument through which intimate labor produces economic value. She does not merely use her body to work (as all laborers do). Her body’s racial appearance is the work. The phenotype is not the worker. It is the factory.
This has unsettling implications. If phenotype is a means of production, then the women who ‘possess’ it are in a peculiar position: they own their means of production (unlike the classical proletariat) but only because they are racially marked (unlike the classical bourgeoisie). They are simultaneous owners and dispossessed. Their capital is their stigma. Their asset is their wound. They profit from the very condition that harms them.
We do not believe our existing sociological vocabulary is adequate to this condition. The concepts of sex work, racial discrimination, emotional labor, and bodily capital each illuminate a part of it. None captures the whole. Skin capital is an attempt, necessarily preliminary, necessarily incomplete, to name the whole: the place where race becomes Eros becomes money becomes survival, and where the question of whether the women are free or unfree ceases to be answerable in binary terms.
The nineteen women we interviewed are still in Delhi, as of this writing. Some are still working. Some have exited. All carry their capital with them, in their faces, which are their fortunes and their burdens, which are desired and despised, which are, in the most literal and most metaphorical sense, their skin in the game.
9. Scope for further Research
The participant profile in this study raises several research questions that transcend the parameters of the present research project. First, the prevalence of participants with affluent economic backgrounds requires dedicated research: motivation, identity, and the subjective experience of participation in the absence of economic desperation both challenge the trafficking paradigm and the survival labor frame simultaneously. Second, the proposed ethnic-demand premium based on participant testimony requires comparative research on the experiences of Northeastern and non-Northeastern women within the same informal sector economy, including earnings, working conditions, and differential vulnerability to exploitation (Ruth 2026). Finally, the most theoretically demanding challenge, which we call conceptual translation, requires sustained, self-reflexive work. It means testing analytic vocabularies developed for digital sex economies in the Global North against the embodied, racialized, and place-bound realities of erotic labour in an Indian metropolis. Practically speaking, this involves putting concepts like agency, stigma, and the "whorearchy" under close empirical and conceptual scrutiny to see whether frameworks that assume digitally mediated, individualized agency and relatively mobile stigma still fit when workers’ physical presence, racialization, and the material constraints of informal urban labour markets are central. Often, those tests show that Western-derived categories need substantial reworking, and sometimes must be set aside, because physicality, race, and place fundamentally reshape power, labour relations, and meaning in an Indian metropolis (De Gioannis, 2026).
The project was led by Laldinpuii Ruth, who conceptualized and designed the research, undertook all necessary clearances, undertook the in-person fieldwork (May 2025 to January 2026), and was responsible for all aspects of interview recording and transcription, primary coding and analysis, and manuscript writing. The research was also supported by Shlok Goenka, who was involved in co-design, undertook digital ethnography (Telegram channels, rate cards), was responsible for all aspects of digital corpus management and archiving, and made significant contributions to the manuscript. All authors were involved in interpreting results, writing, and revising the manuscript.
Laldinpuii Ruth graduated with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Sociology from Amity University and Delhi University, respectively. She is originally from Lawngtlai, Mizoram. Her research and teaching interests center on gender, migration, and feminist theory in Northeast India, with a particular focus on embodied racialization and intimate economies; and northeastern experiences in Northern India. Her work has been presented at the annual conference of the Indian Sociological Society and at regional workshops hosted by institutions such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She has also delivered lectures at V.K Tawna College and Hrangbana College. Her recent presentation at the Sociological Association of Northeastern India, “Post-Romantic Autonomy and the Quiet Revolt of Small-Town Women,” examined how young Indian women in rapidly transforming towns are renegotiating femininity beyond the binaries of tradition and cosmopolitanism.
Shlok Goenka is an undergraduate at Manipal University Jaipur, where he studies physics, computer science, and mathematics and aspires to research in quantum physics and classical mechanics. He also pursues interests in linguistics and philosophy through the online community he founded, Sanskrit Server.
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