Beauty precarity in a southern Philippine city

Bibliographic Data

ID15543293
AuthorsEfenita Taqueban (University of the Philippines Diliman, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume63
Issue4
Pages494-506
Publication date2025-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1745-5863 • E-ISSN: 1745-5871
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1745-5871.70043
OpenAlexW7117470966
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

Like many cities in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is fast urbanising. Many young people are gravitating to cities to improve their lives and partake of the urban lifestyle. This article examines how young rural‐to‐urban migrant women in southern Philippines negotiate belonging to the city through everyday beauty practices. Situated within urban neoliberal labour regimes, these embodied performances reveal how young women are embracing and contesting the city’s promises of mobility and modernity. Through ethnographic analysis of mall workers’ aesthetic labour, the study demonstrates how beauty practices become spatialised tactics of self‐making—enabling claims to urban identity while reinforcing gendered precarity. Young women workers must sustain a dual fantasy: performing aspirational urban femininity through consumption, while navigating contractual instability and subsistence wages. The analysis advances geographical understandings of how gendered bodies become sites where structural constraints and market logics intersect, producing new subjectivities within Southeast Asia’s rapidly transforming urban landscapes

Beauty · Ethnography · Everyday life · Femininity · Masculinity · Negotiation · Precarity · Situated · Emotional Labor in Professions · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Urban Planning and Governance

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