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This chapter provides an overview on the durability and elasticity of campus pageants over time and their various facelifts. It includes a fieldwork vignette to illustrate the investments made in campus pageantry and gendered performances as well as the divergent agendas of supporters and contestants. As locally-situated expressions of student life and institutional politics, campus pageants channel the tensions of beauty and popular culture and norms for academic distinction. Pageants help to bring to the surface the ways beauty and embodiment infiltrate all aspects of higher education. Since campus beauty pageants rarely lend themselves to one coherent narrative, they help to reveal shifting performative constellations of gendered collegiate excellence as well as socially-located discourses of communal solidarities, class mobility, and cultural education. This chapter introduces the concept of “platforming” to capture the deliberate and ongoing process of self-making and the “doing” of gender, race, and class evident on campus campuses.

This chapter examines the extent to which participants have transformed the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. beauty pageant in San Francisco since the late 1960s. While many contestants achieved their personal agendas through the competition, their entries were also manipulated and exploited by ethnic leaders and community and family members in order to fulfill various purposes. In 1958, community leaders created an ideal Chinese American femininity through the national ethnic beauty pageant. Many contestants entered the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. beauty pageant to pursue personal interests, which either overlapped or conflicted with the interests of other Chinese Americans who held a stake in the event. The pageant produced the “model minority” image, which conformed to mainstream gender norms, consumption values, and work ethics, as well as Confucian hierarchy and obedience. This served to negotiate the Chinese American racialized and gendered position, to maintain male patriarchal control, and to attract tourists to Chinatown. Moreover, ethnic and feminist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s motivated liberals, radicals, and feminists to see the pageant as a battleground for ethnic pride and gender equality.

In 1958, seventeen contestants from California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Connecticut came to San Francisco to compete for the first national “Miss Chinatown U.S.A.” beauty pageant, held at the Great China Theatre in Chinatown. Ethnic beauty pageants such as Miss Chinatown U.S.A. were the highlight of the contemporary Chinese New Year Festival. Contestants had to participate in various festival events: in addition to competition night, they had to attend a coronation party, a fashion show, and ride on a parade float. Another requirement was to appear in the events sponsored by their family associations. These activities turned contestants into ethnic celebrities. By redefining womanhood, ethnic leaders rearticulated their ideal Chinese American: women and men who were equipped with certain cultural traits such as middle-class gender ideals, higher education, and work ethics that promoted economic success. Moreover, they observed Confucian ideas such as filial piety and gender hierarchy. Through this model minority identity, ethnic leaders attempted to transform Chinese Americans into ethnic minorities and integrate them into mainstream America.

This chapter examines the complex ways in which the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States construct cultural identities and imagine their lost nation through beauty pageants. In response to exclusionary practices that disqualify Asian women from representing the “nation” by virtue of their race, Vietnamese Americans have organized their own beauty pageants to provide alternative spaces that give “ethnic Vietnamese” women the opportunity to participate and to reign as beauty queens for their ethnic community. This chapter argues that young women play an essential role in the imagined community because they simultaneously represent tradition and modernity in beauty pageants, which not only stage gender politics of the community but also dramatize the various ways in which Vietnamese American citizenship is realized through the performances of young female Vietnamese bodies. It suggests how the bodies of Vietnamese women symbolically invoked nostalgia and become a medium through which cultural nationalism was forged.

This chapter explores why young women join beauty pageants, why locals watch these events, and what role drama and scandal play in these contests. It points out that to the women of the Virgin Islands, pageants are a part of their culture itself, and the subjectivity of beauty allowed women of any background in the Virgin Islands to compete and win. It explains that the public are interested in the failure and downfall of contestants, showing that most audiences are not entirely concerned with beauty. It adds that audiences look forward to blunders, as public failure draws the contestant closer to the audiences because failure humanizes the contestant’s image.

Beauty is about economy; nevertheless, it is also about ideology. This chapter discusses the political implications of China’s booming beauty economy. A main driving force of cosmetic surgery in China is pragmatism. This pragmatism is not only produced by the instability of the transitional Chinese social structure, but is also channelled by the Chinese Communist Party’s pragmatic ideology as exemplified by its ”cat theory” and “xiaokang” concepts. It affects an individual’s choice to undergo cosmetic surgery and the state’s policy of developing its beauty industry. Moreover, using the Miss World competition and the ceremony hostesses of Beijing Olympics as examples, the author discusses how beautiful female bodies have been appropriated into a nationalist agenda in China. Female body image and alteration practices have become both a reflection of personal identity, and a site of ideological contestation, of which state power and market forces reconfigure their power structures to form a new bodily regime.

Chapter 8 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can provoke unexpected affective communities of sense. It explores visual body politics through the unlikely juxtaposition of young women (1) wearing Islamic veils and (2) participating in beauty pageants. These two practices are exemplary cases of the visibility strategy, especially where veil-wearing’s invisibility tactic makes women hypervisible. The chapter uses the conceptual dynamic of concealing/revealing to analyze how various groups—women and men, states and corporations—expend resources performing, policing, and resisting such sartorial practices. Using examples from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the chapter first decodes how many women see it as an individual choice, then considers how the male gaze and the white/colonial gaze can shape these choices. Finally, the chapter examines how these sartorial performances visually construct the social and the international: you don’t just take the veil, the veil also takes you, in an experience that is creative as well as disciplinary. Because these are not just visual performances, but also involve touch, the chapter develops the idea of visual artifacts as material modalities and multisensory spaces.

This chapter focuses on the Islamic fashion industry and how some women have adopted fashion as an expression of individuality or as a strategy of resistance toward conservative interpretations of Islam. It examines criticisms against veiling fashions, particularly by conservative Muslims who view the very idea of Muslim fashion as a threat to the practices of devotion and to Islamic core values. It first traces the history of the Islamic fashion industry and the rise of the Muslim middle class before turning to the shopping habits of Muslim women with regards to fashion. It then considers the way Euro-American fashion designers adapt to Islamic fashion; the emergence of fashion design in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; and Muslim and Middle Eastern designers' development of their own fashion lines, brands, and styles. It also looks at other fashion-related trends that target Muslim women, from swimwear and hair salons to fashion shows, fashion magazines, beauty pageants, and Muslim dolls.

This chapter maps the relationship between expressive practices and femininity, focusing on the performative presentation of femininity through dance and, particularly, the Miss Cook Islands beauty pageant. This beauty competition and others like it display the contradictions inherent in performing femininity. On the one hand, women who join such competitions have the potential to become individual paragons of Cook Islands femininity. They are simultaneously required to maintain their modest, self-effacing characteristics, which represent group values. In this opposition, expressive practices play a mediational role, enacting an interplay between individual distinction and group affiliation. Evaluations of femininity (encompassing physical and moral comportment) are conjoined with ideas about race, community, kinship, and family.

The chapter outlines the growth of the Women's Liberation Movement from being confined to one small room to nationwide and then international coverage. The lawmakers rushed to catch up with the Women's Liberation and this led to many laws being formed in favor of women. Several unions were also formed for union women who demanded liberation for themselves. Zapping the Miss America Beauty Pageant was another achievement of the women's movement. The chapter also gives details about the first national conference which indicated the growth of the new women's movement. With the rise of the movement between 1968–1970 women all over the nation rose up and fought against male chauvinism with much passion and unity.

In February 1953, the first Chinese New Year Festival Committee placed an announcement in the major San Francisco Chinese American newspapers. One of the reasons for hosting the Chinese New Year Festival was to unify non-communist Chinese Americans. This announcement explicitly situated the ethnic festival in a Cold War context; it was clearly a response to the direct impact of American foreign policy on the ethnic community. Whereas most literature on the model minority myth and the general history of Chinese Americans tends to concentrate on the class dimension, this book explores Chinese New Year celebrations and ethnic beauty pageants and parades, addressing class differences within the community and arguing that gender and sexuality are inseparable from ethnic-identity formation. Transnational politics and economies affected Chinese American identity formation and the Chinese New Year celebration. This book demonstrates how certain Chinese American community leaders created, manipulated, and marketed group identity. It also considers how globalization and transnational queer activism affected the ethnic celebration, and how commercialism and the mass media entered the terrain of ethnic-identity formation.

Chapter 3 explains how the Black Press featured the overt display and sexualization of black women’s bodies in the context of bathing beauty contests and recreation on public beaches and pools. The Black Press worked to transform pernicious notions of heterosexual black women as ugly, mannish, and uncivilized and meet their readers’ imagined desire for respectable and sexual images of African American women. However, chapter 3 also argues that this transformation was dependent on the demonization of black lesbians whom the Black Press cast as dangerous and predatory. Chapter 3 concludes that black bathing beauties’ photographs challenged vicious white stereotypes and aided a new generation of African American women’s attempts to reconstruct their public image even as they rendered the black lesbian as the embodiment of depravity.

This chapter discusses the change in how beauty pageants were held in the Virgin Islands, in light of the country’s economic progress. During the late 1940s, pageants in the Virgin Islands adapted portions of contests from the Caribbean, South American, and European pageant model. As the Virgin Islands continued to become more familiar with Western aesthetic practices, it started changing beauty pageants into a venue where economy, nation, and aesthetics converged in the body of a young black female. It points out that islanders finally started to become more interested in beauty, aiming to become as fashionable as their white counterparts.

This chapter examines the larger issues subsumed by the beauty pageant industry in the Virgin Islands, focusing on its relationship with economics, entrepreneurship, and political emergence for the women of the Virgin Islands. It explains that when the Virgin Islands started negotiating with the U.S. for their autonomy, the federal government responded in racist colonial language. The U.S. was concerned about the Virgin Islands’ regard for women’s worth, moral predisposition, and their roles within and without the family, and about their beauty pageant events. Instead of being curtailed and limited by American colonial policies, the women of the Virgin Islands shifted their focus to intraisland relationships, continuing the Islands’ pageantry. The Virgin Islands developed popular pageants dependent on the accumulation of charitable donations, which determined the popular and the powerful among the Islands. The chapter notes that these fund-raising events influenced the perception of women, class, and power, in the Islands.

What is everyday life like for the second-generation African-Irish youth? This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of an African beauty pageant in Ireland and shows the complex interactions between generations across gendered and cultural lines. This chapter teases out the lived experiences of parenting and of growing up in African-Irish families – from parents’ hopes and fears for their children to young Nigerian and Congolese children's expressions of identity, difference and conformity.

This chapter delves into Colombia’s so-called trash literature, particularly Gustavo Bolívar’s widely criticized bestseller novel Sin tetas no hay paraíso (2005), in order to explore the encounter between women and narco money. It examines how various narcos came to finance beauty pageants in Colombia, how they allured attractive women with promises of fame and wealth, and how they transformed the female beauty ideal, insisting on plastic surgery that exalted voluptuousness and excess. Of questionable literary value, Sin tetas nonetheless became a poignant social testimony on the destructive forces present in narco societies, where the least privileged pay the highest price. Its insight into corruption and ultimately the demise of working-class youth who sacrifice themselves in exchange for the short-lived intoxication of consumerism, immediately connected with Colombian (and worldwide) audiences, as confirmed by the popularity of the Sin tetas franchise (it appeared as a film and various telenovelas throughout the Hispanic world).

Sono Osato starred in the original production of On the Town as the character Ivy Smith, also known as “Miss Turnstiles,” beauty queen of the subway. As a teenager in Chicago, Osato was hired by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as they travelled through town, and she had a remarkable career in dance before moving to Broadway. Her father Shoji Osato was a Japanese national, and her mother was of European-American ancestry. During World War II, Shoji Osato was detained as an “alien enemy,” and FBI files chronicle his ongoing persecution, despite the lack of evidence linking him to treasonous intentions. In On the Town, the racial identity of Sono Osato was handled carefully, presenting her as both an all-American girl and an exotic temptress. In an era with virtually no Asian Americans on Broadway, it was remarkable that Osato starred in On the Town without public objection.