Beauty Salons and Women’s Agency in Hyderabad, India
(Southwestern University)
Beauty salons are sites where ideas about race, class, gender, nationality, and increasingly, globalization, come into conversation with one another. While feminist theory debates the ways in which women can use beauty and beautifying as feminist practices to challenge patriarchy, ideas about race, class, and nation equally powerfully shape aesthetics and practices of beauty. Through an ethnographic study of three beauty salons in Hyderabad, India, each catering to different socio-economic classes, I explore how women negotiate post-colonial cultural and racial pressures, global discourses about female beauty, nationalist sentiments, and classist notions. My findings suggest that the beauty salon provides a space for female agency, but that this agency is also constrained by discourses of race, class, and nation.