The devil wears nada: Female employees’ hidden transcripts and public responses to inessential esthetic demands

This study examines how reluctant female employees discuss and respond to the inessential esthetic demands that they receive from their bosses, through an anonymous online forum as well as at real-life work settings. Sub-study 1 analyzes the corpus “r/antiwork”, to identify the hidden transcripts of employees after inessential esthetic demands. It identifies four discursive practices involved in Reddit threads – “Construction of the ‘Other’”, “Reinstatement of normative views through individualistic rhetoric”, “Rhetoric of choice feminism”, and “Rhetoric of feminist consciousness”. The discourses also included potential responses to the esthetic demands – resistance, compliance or acquiescence, satirical compliance, and malicious compliance. Sub-study 2 involves the analyses of a small-scale survey. The survey confirms the findings of sub-study 1 and also identifies significant relationships between how employees feel when they encounter esthetic demands and how they respond to them. The reasons behind employees’ reluctance to report such demands to HR are also detected. This study contributes to the esthetic labor literature by introducing the concept of "inessential esthetic demands," thereby broadening the field beyond customer-facing roles, while also advancing understandings of workplace resistance, feminist organization studies, and gender dynamics in organizations.