BEAUTY PARLOURS AS A SITE OF SUBVERSION FOR WORKING-CLASS WOMEN OF CHUNGI AMER SIDHU

This research investigates how working-class women who own beauty parlours in Chungi Amer Sidhu navigate gendered spatial norms, community expectations, and classbased constraints to carve out a fragile yet significant presence in a male-dominated urban marketplace. While marketplaces in South Asian cities are conventionally framed as masculine public spaces, where women’s mobility is scrutinised and conditional, this study examines how parlour owners tactically negotiate belonging, respectability, and visibility to sustain their businesses. Drawing on six months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and case studies of three parlour owners, the study explores how these women reconcile their economic roles with dominant ideals of domesticity and respectability. The findings reveal that parlour owners rely on a combination of spatial concealment, discursive strategies, and the integration of domestic practices into the workspace to legitimise their presence. Parlours are strategically located in the interior of plazas, hidden from the direct male gaze, and their interiors are deliberately domesticated through children’s presence, household chores, and relational performances of femininity. These behaviours construct the parlour as an extension of the home rather than a transgressive public-facing enterprise. Simultaneously, the research highlights how these spaces function as a semi-public “third space” for neighborhood women, offering recreation, sociality, and emotional relief that is otherwise inaccessible within rigid gendered boundaries. However, access to this leisure is highly regulated by community norms, age hierarchies, and notions of respectable femininity. 

Ultimately, the beauty parlour emerges as both a product of constraint and a site of subtle subversion, allowing women to earn, socialise, and inhabit public space, yet only through constant negotiation and selfregulation. This study contributes to broader anthropological conversations on gendered urban space, respectability politics, and everyday forms of agency among workingclass women in contemporary Pakistan.