Threading meaningful lives: respectability, home businesses and identity negotiations among newly immigrant South Asian women

Abstract

This article investigates how women who have come to the United States as brides of South Asian professionals use threading, a hair removal method, as a home business to negotiate new challenges they face as newly immigrant women. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, the article focuses on how these young women combine their expected roles as wives and mothers in a new country with their own aspirations to win the respect of spouses, in-laws and children via threading. The article demonstrates how these women find meaning and identity through threading and evidences how they negotiate respectability by stressing their connections to home and domestic roles even as they dissociate themselves from beauticians who work at salons. Although they disrupt extant notions of ‘good wives and mothers’, these women nevertheless articulate this disruption within existing models and, more often than not, desire to be the bahu that their mothers-in-law admire.

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