Product Description

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 arena deserving of serious study.
Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1053327 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 290 pages

Review
"A book that illuminates the beauty pageant as one of the best places to view the tensions surrounding the construction of gender. . . . A thoughful and readable book. Scholars interested in the dynamics of gender and race in popular culture will find the book especially useful."--"American Journal of Sociology

From the Back Cover
"This is work in the best tradition of cultural analysis, refashioning a seemingly banal cultural object into a newly complicated and eye- opening thing. Best of all, not only is this a theoretically astute and original treatment, but the behind-the-scenes vantage on beauty pageant culture and personalities makes this a compelling, and dare I say entertaining, read."-- Laura Kipnis, author of Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America

About the Author
Sarah Banet-Weiser is Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California.

Customer Reviews

how cultural studies is done well
Taking the Miss America pageant as both an object of study and a lens through which to view issues of race, class, and gender, Banet-Weiser explores how social conditions and concerns are "mediated in and through women's bodies." She attempts to navigate such disparate positions as a feminist abhorrence toward Miss America and a conservative celebration of the pageant, weaving together interviews and criticism and attending to the relationship between contestants' on-stage performances and private identities. Banet-Weiser notes that people dismissed the idea of beauty pageants as object of scholarly pursuit as either too frivolous and meaningless to warrant intellectual attention, or so blatant a reinscription of dominant ideology as to be untheorizable; Banet-Weiser's description of the dismissals of her intended scholarship also provide a barometer for the problems one faces producing a theory of some aspect of popular culture. She acknowledges her own involvement in the dominant beauty system at the outset and keeps us cognizant of her pursuit of "a way to critique cultural discourses and practices that objectify, alienate, or otherwise fragment the female body without treating the contestants themselves as somnolent victims of false consciousness."

A Very Enjoyable Read, But Analysis is Often Illogical and Misguided
Having recently finished "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," I can say with satisfaction I sincerely enjoyed reading it, with a few criticisms. The definite highlight of the book was Banet-Weiser's fieldwork with actual beauty pageant contestants and the ways in which she brought revealing new insights into the swimsuit, talent, and interview portions of the competition. I found her parallels between the works of Foucault and her analysis of the swimsuit competition in pageants to be especially enlightening. Nonetheless, when she strays too far from drawing clearly defined parallels and dealing with the factual information she gleaned from her fieldwork, she often begins to make logically faulty conclusions, especially when it comes to issues involving race, assimilation, and culture, areas in which the strength of her conviction is not matched by the logic of her assertions. On the whole, though, I found the work to be well-informed, thought provoking, and even fun to read. If you are at all interested in the culture surrounding beauty pageants, I would reccomend that you read this work.