Sun, Yuqi;
(2025)
The beauty mirage: affective labour and precarious leisure of China’s rural-to-urban migrant women.
Leisure Studies
10.1080/02614367.2025.2558578.
(In press).
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Abstract
This study examines the complex interplay between affective labour and precarious leisure among young rural-to-urban migrant women employed in Beijing’s beauty service industry. By conceptualising leisure as fragmented moments of respite and sociality that occur within and around the workplace, the paper contends that these women strategically perform urban femininities to attain empowerment and transcend the devalued identities associated with their rural backgrounds, while their opportunities for leisure remain limited by work demands and structural inequalities. The beauty salon emerges as a paradoxical site, where apparent autonomy and pleasure are intertwined with disciplinary practices, surveillance, and the commodification of intimacy. Through analysis of participants’ daily negotiations, the study shows that leisure extends affective labour, further blurring work-life boundaries and exposing empowerment as an illusion maintained by exploitative structures. By foregrounding the gendered and hukou-based dynamics that constrain leisure, this research calls for a re-examination of leisure experiences and labour rights for marginalised migrant populations.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The beauty mirage: affective labour and precarious leisure of China’s rural-to-urban migrant women |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/02614367.2025.2558578 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2025.2558578 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Leisure; rural-to-urban migrant women; beauty service work; labour; China |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10213427 |
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