From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife. Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

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.

Genevieve Alva Clutario traces how beauty and fashion in the Philippines shaped the intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation building during the turbulent transition between Spanish, US, and Japanese empires.

A fresh exploration of American feminist history told through the lens of the beauty pageant world. Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the 21st century. Yet they are thriving. America’s most enduring contest, Miss America, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. Why do they persist? In Here She Is, Hilary Levey Friedman reveals the surprising ways pageants have been an empowering feminist tradition. She traces the role of pageants in many of the feminist movement’s signature achievements, including bringing women into the public sphere, helping them become leaders in business and politics, providing increased educational opportunities, and giving them a voice in the age of #MeToo. Using her unique perspective as a NOW state president, daughter to Miss America 1970, sometimes pageant judge, and scholar, Friedman explores how pageants became so deeply embedded in American life from their origins as a P.T. Barnum spectacle at the birth of the suffrage movement, through Miss Universe’s bathing beauties to the talent- and achievement-based competitions of today. She looks at how pageantry has morphed into culture everywhere from The Bachelor and RuPaul’s Drag Race to cheer and specialized contests like those for children, Indigenous women, and contestants with disabilities. Friedman also acknowledges the damaging and unrealistic expectations pageants place on women in society and discusses the controversies, including Miss America’s ableist and racist history, Trump’s ownership of the Miss Universe Organization, and the death of child pageant-winner JonBenét Ramsey. Presenting a more complex narrative than what’s been previously portrayed, Here She Is shows that as American women continue to evolve, so too will beauty pageants.

"Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps is the first major study to consider Black women's activism in rural Arkansas. The text explores Arkansas's rural history to foreground Black women's navigation of racial and gender politics as a means to uplift African Americans, develop opportunities for social mobility, and subvert the formidable structures of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years"--

Pageants and pageantry -- Atlantic City, drag culture, and a community of practice -- New York avenue: where the party began -- Camp and the queering of Miss America -- Show us your shoes, not your midriffs.

Winner of the Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Best Book in Women’s Studies Award From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals—and how the pageant, now in its one hundredth year, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progress Looking for Miss America is a fast–paced narrative history of a curious and contradictory institution. From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change—the post–suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever–changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of television and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations. Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry sponsor to launch the rival Miss USA contest, to the first black winner, Vanessa Williams, who received death threats and was protected by sharpshooters in her hometown parade, Margot Mifflin shows how women made hard bargains even as they used the pageant for economic advancement. The pageant’s history includes, crucially, those it excluded; the notorious Rule Seven, which required contestants to be “of the white race,” was retired in the 1950s, but no women of color were crowned until the 1980s. In rigorously researched, vibrant chapters that unpack each decade of the pageant, Looking for Miss America examines the heady blend of capitalism, patriotism, class anxiety, and cultural mythology that has fueled this American ritual.

How transnational modernity is taking shape in and in relation to Asia Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia considers the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of Asian modernities and the formation of the so-called “Asian Century.” S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu train our eyes on sites as far-flung, varied, and intimate as Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto. They map the transregional connections, ever-evolving aspirations and sensibilities, and new worlds and life paths forged through engagements with fashion and beauty. Contributors consider American influence on plastic surgery in Korea, Vietnamese debates about “the fashionable,” and the costs and commitments demanded of those who make and wear fast fashion, from Chinese garment workers to Nepalese nail technicians in New York who are mandated to dress "fashionably." In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology moves beyond common characterizations of Asians and the Asian diaspora as simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers, analyzing who the modern Asian subject is now: what they wear and how they work, move, eat, and shop.

Southern Cultures Volume 20: Number 1 – Summer 2014 Table of Contents Front Porch by Jocelyn R. Neal "One of the challenges—and, simultaneously, deep pleasures—of studying the South is that the disciplinary walls of the academy neither contain nor constrain the work." Rewriting Elizabeth A Life Lost (and Found) in the Annals of Bryce Mental Hospital by Lindsay Byron "Her name was never to be spoken. Even upon the lips and within the hearts of her own children, remembrance was forbidden. Silence nearly erased her from history." Ghosts, Wreckers, and Rotten Ties The 1891 Train Wreck at Bostian's Bridge by Scott Huffard "When train number nine on the Western North Carolina Railroad tumbled off Bostian's Bridge in 1891, it ignited a media frenzy, as well as a firestorm of outrage, a detailed investigation, a compelling mystery, and a series of unanswered questions." Photo Essay Teenage Pastime by Natalie Minik "When the unlimited energy of adolescence comes to bear on the limited experience of childhood, the results often swing toward one of two poles—an enthusiastic confirmation of the culture a child grew into or a bold rejection of the culture they grew out of." "The Best Notes Made the Most Votes" W. C. Handy, E. H. Crump, and Black Music as Politics by Mark A. Johnson "'Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sidewalks below. Hands went into the air, bodies swayed like the reeds on the banks of the Congo.'" Taking Strong Drink by Bill Koon "Some devout Baptists complained that there was too much booze in a mini bottle for one drink; the rest of us complained that there wasn't enough." South Polls Partisan Change in Southern State Legislatures, 1953–2013 by Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts "At mid-century, the South had no Republican senators and only two Republicans in the 105-person southern House delegation. By 2000, [both] delegations were majority Republican." Beyond Grits and Gravy Maggie and Buck Coal Camps, Cabbage Rolls, and Community in Appalachia by Donna Tolley Corriher "Maggie's neighbor-women saw a young woman just like themselves, with children to feed, trying to build a life, and so they helped her, unquestioning in recognition that she would help them in return. This was so." Not Forgotten Winning Friends and Influencing Dead People by JL Strickland "Joe cackled fiendishly, addressing Vernon through the closed lid. 'Who's got the last laugh now, big boy?'" Mason–Dixon Lines Apple Slices poetry by Todd Boss ". . . flavored of tin from the lip of the cup of a dented thermos passed between us—" Books Elaine Neil Orr A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa reviewed by Fred Hobson Jennifer Rae Greeson Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature reviewed by Michael McCollum Angela C. Halfacre A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry reviewed by Brian Grabbatin About the Contributors