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Lovegrove celebrates the culture of the beauty contest from the well-known spectacles of Miss World and Mr. Universe to the flamboyance of Miss Sausage Queen. An irresistible combination of nostalgia and contemporary kitsch, this is a unique study of the human obsession of the beautiful. 250 illustrations.
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political are...
Martin and Genny are back again for another adventure! This time, Genny is entering a beauty contest, and Martin is the judge! Genny tries to campaign and secure her place in the winner's circle with Martin, but he is staying true to his title. When the time comes to judge the beauties, Martin has 3 of his gang members with him to learn, and learn they do! They learn how to correctly judge the girls based on presence and confirmation, not by friendship or closeness. But Genny has a bit of a trick up her sleeve, that gets her banned from the beauty ring for life. Find out what happens, and why she gets banned. And find out if Genny realizes it isn't such a bad thing to get banned from beauty contests.
Love them or loathe them, beauty pageants are still a part of our cultural history. In this book Candace Savage explores this neglected aspect of our recent past to provide a fascinating narrative history of the beauty pageant.'
An intimate look at America's child beauty pagaents. The vibrant portraits of these young contestants twist notions of sexuality and identity, exposing a new perspective on a uniquely American subculture. High Glitz is a subgenre of pagaents characterised by couture costumes,glamour make-up, elaborate hair styles and even dental veneers. The girls are spray-tanned, made-up and groomed to glossy perfection. Anderson captures the results of this time-consuming and often unnerving endeavour in exquisite detail.
During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls wore sexy clothes and high heels; they applied lipstick and other cosmetics. Dressed in provocative attire and in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. Contemporaries debated whether the Modern Girl was looking for sexual, economic, or political emancipation, or whether she was little more than an image, a hollow product of t...
Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation. The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultu...
The Nigerian beauty pageant industry positions itself as working to symbolically restore the public face of the nation while seeking to materially shift the private lives of affiliates on the ground.
As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty emerged as a business. But beauty pageants were more than just frivolous spectacles. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers how colonial power operated within the pageant circuit. Patrizia Gentile examines the interplay between local or community-based pageants and provincial or national ones. Contests such as Miss War Worker and Miss Civil Service often functioned as stepping stones to larger competitions. At all levels, pageants exemplified codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that shaped the narratives of the settler nation. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women, but immigrant women need not apply. Queen of the Maple Leaf demonstrates how these contests connected female bodies to respectable, wholesome, middle-class femininity, locating their longevity squarely within their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies.