Beauty Queens on the Global Stage

Gender, Contests, and Power

Author: Colleen Ballerino Cohen
ISBN: 9780415911535

Beauty pageants--as competition and performance--are wildly popular cultural events world-wide. They have, however, received surprisingly little scholarly attention. What literature there is on beauty pageants has mostly been limited to American pageants. This collection brings together studies of pageants in fourteen different cultures. The chapters range from studies of community queen pageants in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Andalusia and rural Minnesota, to studies of international contests held in Thailand, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Tonga and Tibet, and include a study of a Moslem Philippine transsexual beauty queen contest, and an ethnographic account by a contestant in the Miss Moscow 1989 pageant. These essays discuss the ways gender ideologies are represented and reinforced in beauty pageants and highlight the cultural specificity of notions of beauty and femininity that figure in the selection of pageant queens. We see the strategic and political uses to which pageants are put

Publisher: Psychology Press
Publish Date: 1996

Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / General, Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Body image)