Lipstick tales Beauty and precarity in a southern Philippine boomtown

This research looks at young women and their cosmetic practices in a swiftly-urbanizing southern Philippine boomtown, using a phenomenological approach. Four analogously situated groups of young women are presented by way of focused ethnographies. In the first, sales girls in a cut-throat service sector, where the service they provide involve face-to-face contact with customers, find their physical appearances becoming an element of the products they sell. In the second, call centre agents work in a stressful environment where affect is a main part of the work. Invisible to their customers, their faces become the focus of the ‘self’ and the site for redemption. Both represent the trend of labor in the city and offer a case for how everyday beauty practices are often compelled by modern day workplaces and become part of performances of self-making. The other two speak of the experiences of largely ‘invisible’ young figures, members of sexual and ethnic/religious minorities who are often under-regarded but who ‘stick out’ navigating the normative gender ideations of Filipino society--young lesbians and Muslim students. They show how young people develop notions of modern selves that are often lived and experienced in synthesis and tension. Altogether the four groups suggest cosmetic practices as tactical creativity reflecting part of the story of how young women’s bodies, gender and class reveal the broader social order and conditions in the urban Philippines, and as subjects in the global marketplace.