(1) Introduction

Door de jaren heen kwamen er uiteenlopende reacties op die schoonheidswedstrijd.

"Robin Morgan, feminist scholar and former editor of Ms. magazine, responded that it was “the classic entity where racism, sexism, and homophobia are merged into one.” (...) Morgan’s critique attacked what she sees as the perennial blond-haired, blue-eyed, heterosexual, Barbie doll-like archetype that the pageant has rewarded for most of its history."(1)

[Boeiend die Morgan. Boek met dat artikel gedownload.]

Ondanks alles - de culturele en maatschappelijke geschiedenis, de schandalen als iemand afweek van de regels - bestaat hij al erg lang: sinds 1921. Een zo'n schandaal:

Noot 4, p.20

"Miss America Organization officials forced 2002 Miss North Carolina winner, Rebekah Revels, to surrender her crown when her former fiancé, Tosh Welch, notified pageant officials that he had topless photos of her in his possession."

"For better or for worse, the pageant reflects commonly held values, beliefs, and attitudes that Americans share about women."(2)

[Ik denk vooral 'for worse' ...]

Het boek kijkt eerst historisch naar het fenomeen.

"Margaret Gorman, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Washington, D.C., became the first recipient of the crown. Her victory inspired the admiration of many Americans who saw in Gorman all the basic virtues of American womanhood. President of the American Federation Labor Samuel Gompers publicly hailed the judges’ choice. Gompers reportedly told the New York Times that Gorman “represented the type of woman that America needs, strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the country rests.” The period immediately after World War I presented challenges to the very fiber of American society; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia called the future of capitalism into question, while new archetypes like the suffragette and the flapper destabilized traditional roles for women. The choice of Gorman harkened back to a more comforting era, and the pageant itself enshrined the notion that women ought to pursue beauty, not sexual pleasure or political power." [mijn nadruk] (3)

[Om maar duidelijk te maken dat die schoonheidswedstrijden voortkwamen uit conservatieve ideeën over hoe vrouwen eruit zouden moeten zien en over hoe ze zouden moeten zijn. Dat zie je ook aan sommige van de regels zoals: de deelnemers moeten ongetrouwd zijn; als je ergens naakt had geposeerd of zo dan had je meteen 'questionable morals'. Onder Lenora Slaughter werd dat nog een tikkeltje erger.]

"Slaughter served as director of the pageant until her retirement in 1967. During her long tenure, Slaughter was credited with restoring and maintaining dignity and morals to the pageant. It was under Slaughter’s reign that contestants were kept at a safe distance from unscrupulous men, including some male chaperons. Contestants also had to sign a clause that assured pageant officials that they had not committed any acts of “moral turpitude.” This document of rules stated in effect that in order to be a pageant contestant, a woman could have never been married, been pregnant, borne a child, been arrested, and so on. Slaughter later inserted another, more controversial rule (although probably not for the time period) into pageant bylaws. This clause stated that contestants had to be in “good health and of the white race.”" [mijn nadruk] (4-5)

"The debate over whether Miss America is representative of the modern American woman began during the 1940s at the onset of World War II. The portrayal of Miss America as a strong, independent, contemporary woman who embodies her current era runs head on into an image that she is an anachronistic, retrograde, docile, and antiquated relic whose time has long passed." [mijn nadruk] (6)

"In the 1960s, for some the pageant became emblematic of the 1950s post-war naive optimism and conservatism that was rapidly being undermined by social turbulence. Perhaps the pageant’s most emblematic moment of the 1960s came in 1968 when 200 angry feminists demonstrated in front of Atlantic City’s Convention Hall while the pageant was in progress. That a group of radical feminists would choose the pageant as a site of protest indicates the cultural power it wielded even during that turbulent moment in American history, and perhaps throughout its over eighty years of existence. The group, known as the Women’s Liberation Front, marched on the Boardwalk, where it was alleged that they burned bras, refused to speak with male reporters, chanted anti-pageant slogans, crowned a live sheep, and tossed bras, girdles, makeup, and hair curlers into a “freedom trash can.” Despite the protestors’ threats to disrupt the telecast, the disturbance was not audible to television viewers; the broadcast continued without incident.
The pageant’s swimsuit competition was no doubt a significant part of what some feminists found (and still find) offensive about the contest. Since the pageant’s inception, it has remained the most popular and perhaps the most highly contested fixture of the contest. The introduction of other elements at various times during the pageant’s history — for example, talent, evening gown, interview, personal platforms — and the quiz has not detracted from the appeal of beautiful young women parading on stage in their swimsuits." [mijn nadruk] (8)

Noot 26, p. 21

Excellent accounts of the 1968 protest, including the infamous “bra-burning” incident, can be found in Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000); Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: The Dial Press/Random House, Inc., 1999); Rita Freedman, Beauty Bound (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995); Banner, American Beauty; and Faludi, Backlash, to name a few. It is interesting to note that at midnight following the 1968 pageant and the feminist protest to the pageant, the first Black Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City “as a direct protest of the pageant.” Nineteen-year-old Saundra Williams was the first recipient of the title. See PBS television program, “Miss America, The American Experience,” 27 Jan- uary 2002, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica.

"Church leaders often spoke out against beauty contests, and, in 1959, the Catholic Church renewed its ban on them, threatening contestants with expulsion from church-run schools or participation in the sacraments."(8)

[Ongetwijfeld alleen vanwege de badpakken.]

Het tweede deel van het boek gaat over Gender, Race, and Identity.

"The Miss America Pageant, with its claims to represent an American feminine ideal, has always raised interesting questions of gender, race, and identity. The chapters in the second part of this book explore these questions as they pertain to the more contemporary history of the pageant."(9)

"As minority women began to win the pageant, the question of what is beauty became even more prevalent. Vanessa Williams’s light-skinned features, Suzette Charles’s biracial background, Debbye Turner’s darker, yet Anglo-looking, features, and Marjorie Vincent’s classic black features were the subject of commentary." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"This desire of many black women to conform to Eurocentric standards of beauty had its roots in the world of the rising black middle class of the 1920s." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"Fair skinned, young, flowing lustrous — typically blond — hair, sensuous but demure, carefully groomed and elegantly gowned, the myth of what constitutes the highest echelon of female beauty and femininity endures through our images of Miss America and Cinderella. As Cinderella endures as an icon of beauty and femininity for young girls throughout the world, so, too, does Miss America construct femininity and beauty for American womanhood." [mijn nadruk] (15)

Het derde deel heet Personal Refections.

"In all of the criticism and scandal surrounding the Miss America Pageant, the hard work and sacrifice of the contestants often is overlooked or forgotten.(...) Pageant participants have trained for many years in areas such as music, dance, physical fitness, and modeling. In recent decades, most are college graduates, many with advanced degrees. They have worked to cultivate their appearance and develop the poise and presence necessary for success in the many levels of the Miss America program." [mijn nadruk] (16)

"One of the major appeals of the pageant is the sense that the contestants represent old-fashioned, small-town America and its values." [mijn nadruk] (16)

[O, en dat zijn vast heel progressieve waarden ... ]

"It cannot be denied that, for many Americans, the pageant is seen as either culturally irrelevant or as an anachronism and a throwback to the supposed wholesomeness of the 1950s and early 1960s — a time when uniform suburban homes, white picket fences, three kids, a doting June Cleaveresque wife, and a strong, confident, responsible husband went to work everyday wearing one of the two gray flannel suits he owned. This imagined society with white, middle-class, largely Protestant, heterosexual, able-bodied people considered the norm made others seem either invisible or unimportant. With the advent of the twenty-first century, this is still the mind-set that many individuals associate with the pageant." [mijn nadruk] (18)

"The women’s liberation movement argued the obvious: If beauty pageants were substantially more than girl-watching exercises, then there would be pageants for men, too."(19)

"Some critics argue that pageants and pornography have many parallels. These individuals believe that both institutions aid one another by denigrating and degrading the female body and instilling feelings of low self-esteem in women of all races and ages." [mijn nadruk] (19)

"Such ambivalence about the role of the pageant in American culture reflects the continuing conflict society experiences when female beauty is equated with competitiveness and must be judged." [mijn nadruk] (19)

(25) Part I - History

(27) 1 - Bathing Suits and Backlash - The First Miss America Pageants, 1921–1927 [Kimberly A. Hamlin]

"Unlike the suffrage pageants that preceded them in popularity and renown, the first Miss America Pageants pitted woman against woman and judged participants on physical attributes. Women did not participate as part of a larger political movement; contestants competed as symbols of their cities or states." [mijn nadruk] (28)

"In contrast to the suffragists’ pageants, the Miss America contest did not celebrate women’s history, solidarity, or new opportunities, nor did it encourage feelings of liberation or agency among participants. Instead, it encouraged women to vie for male approval based on physical appearance and to view their looks as their most important assets." [mijn nadruk] (28)

[Dat zegt dus alles. Die insteek is dus compleet anders, het gaat ineens om mannelijke goedkeuring op basis van uiterlijk. Lekker belangrijk ... ]

"Pageantry magazine lists a mind-boggling twenty-three national beauty pageants in the United States alone, not including Miss America, most of which have state preliminaries and subdivisions for Miss Teen, Miss, and Mrs. categories — titles for which thousands of women and girls compete each year."(29)

"Producers and advertisers knew that beautiful, scantily clad women sold tickets and products and, to them, the ideal Miss America would do just that. To pageant promoters and their audience, however, the ideal American woman was demure and interested only in marriage, not in a career or in seeking public acclaim for herself. In short, the early Miss America Pageants, from 1921 to 1927, provide a window through which to view the struggle to define women’s proper place in society at a time when traditional gender roles were in upheaval." [mijn nadruk] (29)

[Mij lijkt dat allebei die benaderingen niet deugen.]

"The invention of the Miss America Pageant, one of America’s most popular and enduring traditions, is evidence of a pervasive postsuffrage backlash and America’s anxiety over changes in gender roles wrought by women’s participation in politics and public life, the emergence of the flapper, and the growing commercialization of beauty." [mijn nadruk] (29)

[In essentie dus een conservatieve reactie van mannen en veel vrouwen.]

"The relaxed spirit of the decade may have allowed for such an event to take place, but the rhetoric of the pageant and the type of women selected as Miss America testify to the overall conservatism of the event and the widespread desire to reinstate a modest, asexual, domestic woman as the American ideal, an ideal recently complicated by, to name a few, Freud, World War I, and suffrage. By tracing the pageant’s inception, structure, and reception, and, most important, by looking critically at the winners of the 1920s pageants, this chapter makes the case that we might instead view the pageant as a revolt, conscious or otherwise, against women’s increased independence and presence in the public sphere. " [mijn nadruk] (30)

[Dit is de kern van de zaak.]

"Survey any popular magazine of the 1910s and 1920s and one is sure to find articles, cartoons, and poems grappling with changes in domestic life and gender roles."(31)

"In the midst of this cacophonous debate, a dominant voice emerged. It told women that, despite their newly won suffrage, growing presence in the workforce, and progress toward personal liberation, the ideal place for them was in the home. Advertisements, books, magazines, newspapers, and movies all carried the message. As historian Lois Banner explains, “the premise that women had achieved liberation gave rise to a new antifeminism, although it was never stated as such. . . . [I]t involved the creation of a new female image, certainly more modern than before but no less a stereotype and still based on traditional female functions.” Corporations and government officials launched a veritable public relations campaign to popularize this new image and lure women back to the home. For example, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill authorizing Mother’s Day in 1914, when suffrage loomed on the horizon, reminding the nation of women’s primary role. One historian refers to the 1920s as an “early version of the feminine mystique” because popular media, government, and advertising agencies presented a unified message that “women should stay home to pursue domestic tasks and to consume commercial goods.” Indeed, consuming goods and purchasing new, time-saving appliances was one of the primary ways in which advertisers attempted to convince women, who often controlled the family’s purse strings, that their place was in the home." [mijn nadruk] (31-32)

[En wie brachten die boodschap? Precies ... ]

"By consistently selecting the contestant who least resembled a “flapper” or “new woman,” the pageants of the 1920s promoted a standardized and retrograde ideal of womanhood and sent important messages to women and men across the country."(32)

"Just as women liberated themselves from the corset, a new and even more oppressive tradition asserted itself: the bathing suit competition." [mijn nadruk] (33)

"From descriptions of Gorman’s appearance and stature, it is apparent that the judges were not interested in celebrating the new, emancipated women of the 1920s but in promoting images of the girls of yesterday: small, childlike, subservient, and malleable. (...) Beyond legitimizing the pageant and allaying middle-class reservations about it, Gorman’s selection and her similarities with Pickford testify to the pageant’s conservative and reactive nature." [mijn nadruk] (35-36)

"Atlantic City historian Charles Funnell notes that the promoters of the early pageants “tended to select girls with conservative hair styling who would not identify Miss America with flaming youth. Bobbed hair handicapped any entrant, for it was thought to be bold in tone, and judges were convinced that the traditional long hair of the Victorian woman was an essential part of ‘natural beauty.’”" [mijn nadruk] (38)

"The judges were looking for the contestant whose looks and persona radiated a particular type of womanhood — innocent, traditional, and nonthreatening — and whose image would convey certain behavioral codes to the rest of America." [mijn nadruk] (39)

"As the pageant’s popularity increased, so, too, did protests against it and other beauty contests. Immediately following the 1923 pageant, the Ocean City Camp Meeting Association, a Christian group, adopted a resolution condemning Atlantic City’s bathing review. The resolution warned: “the danger lies in taking girls of tender years and robing them in attire that transgresses the limit of morality. The effect on them and the publication of their photographs in the newspaper are to be highly deplored. The saddest feature of the affair is the willingness of a few businessmen to profiteer on the virtues of those tender years.”" [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Weer een religieuze groep die jongere vrouwen wil beschermen. De argumenten die zo'n groep daarvoor gebruikt zijn altijd verkeerd: de suggestie van onschuld en onbedorvenheid, de suggestie te weten wat moreel juist is, etc.]

"Deford argues that the first three winners are “prototypes of the dominant strain” of winners. That is, they were “shy . . . with no sustaining interest in pageants or any other form of publicity; but for this one incidental burst of fame [they are] never again in the public eye.” He goes on to claim that most winners settled down, married, and lived happily ever after. His summary of the typical Miss America testifies to the conservative vision of American women that the early pageant promoters attempted to ingrain in American popular culture. The early Miss America Pageants popularized the image of the traditional Victorian woman who wore her hair long and espoused no personal ambitions or aspirations other than to be a good wife and mother as an example for the nation to see and emulate. It was not long, however, [1925] before contestants began using the title “Miss America” to their benefit." [mijn nadruk] (41)

"By 1925, many elements of the pageant were blatantly commercial."(42)

"Thus, the pageant ended up encouraging what it had attempted to throttle — the rise of independent, ambitious women in the public sphere. The pageant always had been about parading young women in their bathing suits in order to attract business, and it always had been profitable. What it had not been until the mid-1920s was a vehicle by which women could gain financial independence and notoriety. As contestants began to capitalize on the profit and fame the title “Miss America” could bring them, Atlantic City leaders suspended the pageant indefinitely." [mijn nadruk] (44-45)

[Typisch.]

"Although distinct from efforts to reinstate a wholesome, domestic feminine ideal, the widespread commercial objectification of women in the 1920s also can be seen as a backlash against women’s increasing personal and political agency."(45)

"In other words, beauty pageants are not about beauty. They are about power."(46)

"To those who argue that women willingly participate in beauty pageants and that this is somehow empowering, or at least rewarding, for them, Bourdieu would reply: “it only has to be pointed out that this use of the body remains very obviously subordinated to the male point of view.”" [mijn nadruk] (46)

(53) 2 - Miss America, Rosie the Riveter, and World War II [Mary Anne Schofield]

"So in 1941, 1942, and throughout the war years, exactly which type of woman was the “dream girl” so desired by the serviceman? By the American advertising and government propaganda machine? Was it Rosie the Riveter, or was it Miss America? Was she “useful,” or was she “beautiful”?"(55)

"Did the increase of Rosies affect the definition of American femininity during the war years, thereby creating a crisis in American womanhood? The answer is no; the advertising and propaganda campaign waged by the cosmetic industry, popular culture, and the government allowed America’s women to be both beautiful and useful, a feminine beauty and a wench wielding a rivet."(55)

[Hoe dan ook werd ze gebruikt om de doelen van mannen te dienen. En meteen na de oorlog mocht Rosie the Riveter weer terug naar de keuken. Zie voor bronnen noot 9, p. 65.]

"Targeted by the advertising industry and told that overalls and makeup, glamour and the factory assembly line could mix: they applied lipstick and powdered their noses before riveting. They learned to be beautiful, attractive, and efficient Rosies and pro-active beauty queens. And they did so because the advertising campaigns of the public and private sector, the government and the cosmetic industry, supported the propaganda machine that said that femininity and war work went together. In a word, the American beauty had to work and Rosie had to be beautiful."(56)

[Ik bedoel maar ... ]

"The OWI decided to use the immense popularity of the Miss America Pageant for wartime propaganda. Ignoring a precedent for no pageant during wartime (it had been suspended from 1928 to 1932 and again in 1934 because of protests from conservative church groups), the official online site of the Miss America Organization records that in response to the war situation ... " [mijn nadruk] (59)

"The Miss America Pageant officials, then, took the crisis of the war years and turned the events to the benefit of the pageant, ultimately transforming Miss America “into an emblem of patriotism and national pride”; she became “enshrined in the nation’s imagination as America’s ideal woman.” Selling war bonds and boosting troop morale was the tangible contribution the pageant made, but why did the Miss America Pageant continue during these war years?" [mijn nadruk] (60)

"Lois W. Banner argues that “[d]espite pretensions to intellect and talent, physical beauty remained the overriding feature of the ideal American beauty,” which would clearly place the continued existence of the pageant during World War II as a national need to control and maintain the status quo of the male objectification of the female body. The pageant allowed men to know what they were fighting for."(60-61)

[Dat lijkt mij ook.]

"Sex erupted into the public discourse through such media as the advertising industry, the cosmetics industry, and the fashion industry, but most especially with the Miss America Pageant because, first and foremost, the Miss America Pageant was and is about beautiful, young female bodies. As Banner noted: “Even when later pageants added a talent division and gave scholarships as prizes, the review of the contestants in bathing suits was still the most important part of the competition.” It was not until 1948, post–World War II, that a Miss America was crowned not wearing a bathing suit." [mijn nadruk] (61)

"So the first postwar Miss America returns to the private, domestic sphere. The returning veterans force the majority of the Rosies out of their public workplace and back into the domestic domain."(63)

"... it is clear that as early as 1947 the image of the woman in coveralls, with her curls caught up in a bandana, had been replaced by the image of the young suburban wife with a cinched waist and billowing skirts.” The cinched waist and the billowing skirt is another version of the beauty queen; her runway is now the sidewalk to her front door." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"The triumph of Miss America over Rosie the Riveter is the triumph of the doctrine of normalcy, economic security, and social order. It is about the restoration of the “American Ideal” no matter how engineered and calculated. It is the return to the family, the domestic sphere, prosperity, and two washes in the morning and a bridge party at night, according to social historian Ruth Schwartz Cohan." [mijn nadruk] (64)

"Historians would like us to believe that World War II actually changed the position of American women. But truth to tell, by examining the duality of the two images of Miss America and Rosie the Riveter, it is clear that a transformation did not take place. The icon of femininity triumphed in the postwar years as America returned to normalcy."(64)

(65) 3 - Miss America, National Identity, and the Identity Politics of Whiteness [Sarah Banet-Weiser]

"Rather, through the stories of two individual Miss Americas, Bess Myerson and Heather Whitestone, we witness how a utopian fantasy of national identity, structured by whiteness, is produced in two very different historical moments. These moments reveal much about how American popular culture produces representative bodies and, specifically, how these two moments in the Miss America Pageant contribute to a broader national politics that consolidates whiteness as a dominant ideology.
The politics of whiteness, as much recent scholarship has demonstrated persuasively, exists as a normative power in the sense that it presents itself as the “normal” state of affairs. It also exists as an institutionalized structure of government regulations and policies, cultural privilege, and political entitlement."(68)

"This ideal, historically and currently, has been bounded by whiteness; even as the pageant accommodates “difference” (as in women who identify or who are identified as different from white women), whiteness remains the standard against which all other racial categories are measured."(69)

(91) Part II - Gender, Race, and Identity

(93) 4 - The Rhetoric of Black Bodies - Race, Beauty, and Representation [Valerie Felita Kinloch]

"This chapter focuses on black bodies competing in a traditionally white event that has disfranchised black people from the pageant’s inception in 1921 to the tumultuous 1960s, when the first Miss Black America Pageant was held. Power, race, and national standards of beauty can best be understood, according to scholar Stephen Haymes, by “look[ing] critically at the relationship between black cultural identity and white consumer culture.” The cultural denigration of black bodies results in part from the tension between the actual and the imagined constructions of women, beautiful women, and white female beauty standards."(94)

"In her 1986 study, Beauty Bound, psychologist Rita Freedman writes: “The mind does not remain a blank slate for very long. An idealized image of beauty is soon etched upon it. In our culture, this image is built on a Caucasian model. Fairy-tale princesses and Miss Americas have traditionally been white. This fair image weighs most heavily on the brown shoulders of minority women who bear a special beauty burden. They too are taught that beauty is a feminine imperative. They too set out in search of it, only to discover that failure is built in for those whose lips smile too thickly, whose eyelids fold improperly, whose hair will not relax enough to toss in the wind, whose skin never glows in rosy shades.” In the dominant public sphere, the democratic and capitalistic society that relentlessly classifies people by sex, race, and age, nonwhite women, according to Freedman, are excluded from representations of beauty, and “black women speak of feeling downright ugly at some point in their lives.”"(94)

"The 1960s Black Power revolution challenged black people to “decolonize” their minds and dispense with their sense of inferiority instilled by the history of oppression and white supremacy. Black women wore Afros, celebrated different shades of blackness, and embraced their striking black features. In her 1994 text, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, feminist scholar bell hooks addresses the process of decolonization as a way to resist insulting values of a white culture by insisting that black people see themselves outside of such values." [mijn nadruk] (95)

"The racist stereotypes of black women as “ugly, monstrous, undesirable,” as hooks explains, were challenged when eighteen-year-old Saundra Williams, a college student, was crowned the first Miss Black America. In her excitement, she said, “With my title, I can show black women that they, too, are beautiful.” Then in 1969, Dr. Zelma George, director of the Cleveland Job Corps for Women, was appointed the first black judge of the Miss America Pageant; the next year, Cheryl Browne of Iowa became the first black contestant in the pageant’s history."(96)

(111) 5 - Princess Literature and the Miss America Pageant [Iset Anuakan]

"Women’s appearance is the continual subject of weights and measures. The standard ideals lean toward narrow definitions, conventional guidelines that feminist writings have protested against since the 1950s."(111)

"The crown created opportunities for them to hopscotch onto stage, screen, and magazine covers. What is troubling is that commercial media — from film to television to print — rarely represents these women as less than perfect, as human beings with foibles and flaws. Instead, their faces and bodies are presented to the public with sex appeal and provide limited versions of body types, hairstyles, and racial differences. Often, their unique strengths, talents, and personal triumphs are hidden from the cameras. These images contribute to teenagers’ impressions of success in society." [mijn nadruk] (112)

"Teen girls realize the images are unrealistic, a consequence of using enhanced photography to attract readers. They are aware that fashion publications embellish the lifestyles of wealthy celebrities, but many tend to evaluate themselves, physically and emotionally, according to the mediums." [mijn nadruk] (112)

[Dat begrijp ik nu niet. Je weet dat het niet echt is en toch wil je zo zijn? Ik denk dat die tienermeiden weten dat het deels wél echt is. We weten immers allemaal dat sommige mannen en vrouwen mooier zijn dan andere, zelfs zonder opmaak of wat ook. En we zouden zelf ook graag zo mooi zijn, omdat we allemaal eerder denken aan de voordelen die dat biedt dan aan de nadelen die er ook aan vastzitten. Waar je dus wel een enorme hekel aan kunt krijgen is dat die media maar blijven benadrukken dat uiterlijk het allerbelangrijkste is en dat je liefst ook zo moet zijn.]

"The suggestion that women can solve their problems by catching a suitor draws on feminine power of seduction. That myth — that women have the power to control their circumstances with their feminine wiles instead of with brains, talent, and persistence — plays at the current juncture of pageant aims. Advertising that the Miss America Pageant is “The World’s Leading Scholarship Provider” is linguistic window dressing. Many of the winners apply part of their $200,000 winnings toward college education, but their interests in professional careers tend toward exclusive areas of entertainment, not academic ones." [mijn nadruk] (120)

(125) 6 - Wiregrass Country - Pageant Competitions, or What’s Beauty Got to Do with It? [Jerrilyn McGregory]

"In Wiregrass Country, beauty pageants are the cornerstone of most community-based festivals. Festival parades do not come close to the level of the televised variety. However, they do engage the same social functions as ways of creating and celebrating community."(126)

"Beauty, as reified through pageantry, is overdetermined by its construction of femininity in relation to the societal markers of modesty, domesticity, and delicacy. Beauty pageants prop up the old cult of true womanhood without significantly rewriting the script. The cult of true womanhood refers to a nineteenth-century culturally sanctioned belief in a feminine ideal. Foremost, it decreed the necessity of chastity, piety, and submissiveness as norms for women. In addition, the physical appearance and behavior of most contestants are aesthetically situated within certain “normative” standards."(127)

(135) Part III - Personal Reflections

(137) 7 - I Was Miss Meridian 1985 - Sororophobia, Kitsch, and Local Pageantry [Donelle R. Ruwe]

"My understandings of the body, gender performance, and sisterhood were shaped in surprisingly positive, perhaps even feminist ways by my experiences in the local and state levels of the Miss America Pageant system. Although I do not insist that the American beauty pageant is a cultural and aesthetic gem that must be preserved at all costs, I do insist that we who are feminists and scholars challenge the blanket assumption that the effects of the beauty pageant system are only destructive and antiprogressive. I ask two fundamental questions in this chapter: Can the lived experience of the pageant, as distinct from the imaginary ideal promoted by the pageant, be empowering to the individual women who participate? I suggest yes and, in the first section of my chapter, offer my own lived experience as an anecdotal example." [mijn nadruk] (137-138)

[Ze vond het zelf leuk, dus wat is er dan op tegen? Niet het beste staaltje argumentatie ... ]

"My second question arises from the first. Although I understand why mainstream feminism is uninterested in acknowledging that the lived experience of the pageant can produce positive effects, why have feminist scholars not even examined the actual material practice of local and regional pageants? I offer several explanations for this lack of analysis in my conclusion: sororophobia and kitsch attribution."(138)

[Al die feministes die tegen schoonheidswedstrijden zijn, zijn gewoon jaloers. Ook al zo'n indrukwekkend argument.]

(153) 8 - My Miss Americas - Pedagogy and Pageantry in the Heartland [Mark A. Eaton]

Een persoonlijk verhaal van iemand die werkte op Oklahoma City University (OCU) waar ze ontzettend veel energie stopten in het opleidingen tot schoonheidskoningin. Iemand die gaat van een hekel hebben aan die 'pageants' naar het kunnen waarderen op basis van ervaringen met een paar van de meiden die deelnamen.

"Any successful critique of the Miss America Pageant, it seems to me, must be tempered by an awareness of what the pageant means to the young women who compete, just as any nuanced understanding of female identity must acknowledge and come to terms with the thriving cosmetics, dieting, and fashion industries. Outmoded as such conceptions of beauty and femininity may seem in our postfeminist age, there is just no getting around the fact that the Miss America Pageant exemplifies, after all, our culture’s complex, overdetermined relationship to beauty. A sort of “kitsch microcosm of a conflicted country,” Richard Corliss remarks, “Miss America is America.”"(156)

[Dat niveau ... Ze vinden het toch leuk, dus wat is er op tegen? En hoe kun je nu tegen iets zijn wat zo Amerikaans is? Zou zo iemand van principiële standpunten gehoord hebben die individuele ervaringen overstijgen en niet chauvinistisch zijn?]

(171) 9 - Waiting for Miss America [Gerald Early]

Over zwarte vrouwen die Miss America (willen) worden.

[Een journalistiek ervaringsverhaal van iemand die zelf een zwarte man is.]

"Although in one very obvious way it is very wonderful now that black mothers can tell their young daughters, “Yes, my darling, you, too, can become Miss America,” one wonders what might be the larger psychic costs demanded by this bit of acculturation. Despite the fact that I do not wish my daughters to grow up desiring to be Miss America, I take a strange pleasure in knowing that the contest can no longer terrorize them; and this pleasure is worth the psychic costs and dislocations, whatever they might be. After all, black folk knew for a long time before Henry James discovered the fact that it is a complex fate to be an American"