Beauty, Bodies, and Boundaries: Pageants, Race, and U.S. National Identity.

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine relationships among race, gender, and U.S. national identity using twentieth- and twenty-first-century beauty pageants as case studies. Each chapter focuses on the decade surrounding an important formative moment in U.S. pageant history: the first Miss America Pageants in the 1920s; the first Miss Universe and Miss USA Pageants in the 1950s; the first Miss Black America and other national of-color pageants in the 1960s; and the panethnic pageants Miss Asian America, Miss Black USA, and Miss Latina US in the present. Through close readings of pageant program books, newspaper articles, photographs, and ethnographic field data, this dissertation historicizes racial formations in the United States and theorizes how national identity is constituted through ideal femininity, in both embodied and rhetorical ways. Pageants are the only cultural institution annually endowing one woman and her racialized, gendered, and classed body, the power to represent an entire nation. Thus, this study argues that popular culture, and pageantry in particular, is an important site for the production of race, gender, power, privilege, and nation. It argues further that pageantry is intricately linked with U.S. colonialism, empire, and global capitalism. Finally, this study argues that communities of color have utilized pageants strategically, by insisting on the centrality of people of color to U.S. national identity, and by re-imagining the nation as a transnational space where people of color are not systematically excluded. While pageantry studies may be considered an emerging field, the vast majority of the literature focuses on the well-known, longstanding, majority-white Miss America Pageant. Those texts that do examine beauty contests in communities of color tend to look at pageants in which contestants are considered, and even required, to be of a single ethnicity. No currently existing literature does the work of this dissertation, which tells the histories of various of-color pageants in the twentieth century and investigates panethnic pageants in the present day, using ethnicity as a tool to trouble existing notions of what constitutes a nation.