Lecture presented at the University of Zurich, October 2005,

for the National Launch event, Network Swiss Graduate Programme in Gender Studies

Performing Community through the Feminine Body: The Beauty Pageant in Transnational Contexts

Deborah L. Madsen, University of Geneva

For Thanh-Huyen Ballmer-Cao

As you know, the focus of effort in the Geneva/Lausanne component of the Swiss federal école doctorale in Gender Studies concerns the (re)structuration of the private and public spheres. This problematic is one that has concerned feminist scholars in American cultural studies for some time. The development of women’s liberation in the United States has been, in important ways, told as a narrative of ‘separate spheres.’ The condition of women in nineteenth-century America, for example, has been described in terms of the ‘cult of True Womanhood,’ where women were located in ‘female, domestic, sentimental, collective private spaces (basically the world of the home), and men in the individualistic, public sphere of commerce, politics, and reason’ (Davidson & Hatcher, 8). One of the moves that distinguishes First and Second Wave American feminism from our present Wave (whatever number we might have reached) is the breakdown of this paradigm with the attendant questioning of its assumptions and consequences. The notion that male versus female is a transparent binary, ignoring issues of class, age, race and so on is questioned hard by contemporary feminist scholars who seek to understand the complex ways in which the public versus private spheres are not easily separated. One of the most influential theorists in this field in recent years has been Judith Butler, whose theory of gender performance offers a fruitful avenue of approach to the separate spheres paradigm. It is this performative approach to the relations between private and public that I want to consider today, in the context of the transnational beauty pageant, an arena where ‘private’ or subjective gender identities are publically performed. Further, I want to suggest that the beauty pageant is more than a staging of gender categories but also offers us a spectacle of the disciplined feminine body as an icon of national and community identity.

Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity describes the paradoxical condition of dependence of male authority upon acceptance by the female of the passive subject position (as the Other) in relation to a position of male dominance. Taking this relation as a starting point, Butler asks, ‘what configuration of power constructs the subject and the Other, that binary relation between “men” and “women,” and the internal stability of those terms?’ (p. viii). Butler points out that the relation is based upon the presumption of heterosexuality - a male subject desiring a female object. Knowing this relation as an instance of heterosexuality then causes us to assume that the ‘beings’ involved ‘are’ male and female, and so Butler destabilizes these assumptions by asking what happens when the female position is occupied by a female impersonator? This upsetting of the opposition between the natural and the artificial replaces women’s reproductive characteristics with only the cultural markers of gender and suggests that gender is ‘a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real’ (p. viii).

I will come back to this idea of female impersonation later, but here it is in the concept of gender identity as a cultural performance, a matrix of signifiers that enables members of a cultural group to ‘read’ the signs of gender and to be read as a gendered subject, that I want to stress. Butler takes as one of her key assumptions the idea that the vocabulary of gender should be seen as a series of relational terms, having little meaning outside a network of social relationships. Thus, Butler suggests that feminism should refuse ‘to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view’ (p. viii). This timeless, universal, gender ‘essence’ shared by all women of all times and places is an illusion, and a distracting one. What it distracts us from is questioning ‘the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’ (Butler’s emphasis, p. ix).

In what follows, I want to look at the ‘gender effects’ of the beauty pageant as a cultural ritual: it is significant that these competitions are named for the spectacle and ritual they stage. For a pageant is no simple contest: it is a highly formalized display that serves particular cultural purposes. One such purpose is to stage and resolve conflicts concerning the public status of women and the commodification and objectification of femininity. In recent popular films that deal with the beauty pageant scene, like Miss Congeniality (2000) and the sequel Miss Congenialty 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005), feminist criticism of beauty contests itself becomes a cultural conflict in search of resolution. Let me remind you of the first major demonstration against the Miss America pageant: in 1968 a group of feminists conducted a well publicized protest in Atlantic City. They crowned a live sheep to dramatize the objectification of feminine bodies and, in what they called a ‘freedom trashcan,’ they burned instruments of female torture such as girdles, bras, and hair curlers (see Wu, n.p.). Incidenatllay, it was from this demonstration that the dismissive term for feminists, ‘bra-burners,’ originated. These women condemned the beauty pageant as a ‘meat market’ where women are put on display as consumable sexual objects. Organisers of such contests, however, were careful to downplay the sexual element of the pageant, stressing instead the existence of a feminine community where ‘personality’ and the development of self-esteem is more important than sexuality. In the movie Miss Congeniality -- and the title here already places an emphasis on ‘personality’ -- organisers repeatedly stress the status of the pageant as a scholarship competition. The protagonist, played by Sandra Bullock, is an undercover FBI agent who unwillingly undergoes transformation into a beauty pageant contestant in order to foil a plot to explode a bomb during the crowning of Miss United States. This character, Gracie Hart, initially thinks of the contest as a ‘meat market’ but she is slowly won over to the idea that the pageant promotes a community of women, as she moves towards becoming ‘Miss Congeniality’.

The definition of the award of ‘Miss Congeniality’ offered on the official Miss USA website reads as follows: ‘The award reflects the respect and admiration of the contestant’s peers, who voted for her as the most congenial, charismatic and inspirational participant.’ Gracie’s transformation into femininity, as she learns the appropriate cultural markers and gestures she must perform, is ‘inspirational’ not only to her peers in the contest but also to the viewer, who is assumed to be initially hostile but shares in Gracie’s gradual persuasion that the pageant offers a positive and nurturing feminine environment. So the movie incorporates the conflicted reception of beauty pageants in contemporary Western culture and offers us the spectacle of reconciliation. What impresses Gracie is the discipline and restraint that the contestants willingly undergo.

(Here I showed a film clip: the first part of scene 14 of Miss Congeniality)

Several kinds of discipline are enacted in this scene: first, the difficulty Gracie experiences as she tries to navigate her way down the steps in high heels and a tight dress; second, the denial of food; last, the imperative that she must have ‘a talent,’ with the implication that her talents as a highly trained FBI agent do not count as talents within the context of staged femininity. But Gracie learns to focus her talents or perhaps to discipline them in the course of her socialization so that she becomes ‘a lady.’

This is a key term in the film narrative and the implications of this term, ‘a lady,’ are manifold. The word is repeated as naming the ideal condition to which Gracie must aspire: even the patronizing pageant director (played by Candice Bergen), who has remained sceptical about Gracie’s capacity for transformation, exclaims at the end ‘Why look at you, you’re … a lady’; and after Gracie’s crowning as Miss Congeniality the credits roll to the sound of Tom Jones’ song ‘She’s a Lady.’ Let’s pause for a moment to consider the lyrics that are sung at this crucial closing moment of the happy ending. Gracie is held in the embrace of the co-worker for whom she has harbored romantic feelings throughout the movie (played by Benjamin Bratt, in the clip we just saw); she has the approval of her pageant peers; she has uncovered and arrested the bad guys; and her achievements are placed in context by lyrics that go like this:

Well she's all you'd ever want

She's the kind they'd like to flaunt and take to dinner

Well she always knows her place

She's got style, she's got grace, she's a winner.

She's a Lady. Whoa whoa whoa, she's a Lady

Talkin' about that little Lady, and the Lady is mine.

Well she's never in the way

Something always nice to say, Oh what a blessing.

I can leave her on her own

Knowing she's okay alone, and there's no messing.

She's a Lady. Whoa whoa whoa, she's a Lady

Talkin' about that little Lady, and the Lady is mine. …

In the first verse, this ‘Lady’ is objectified as the property of a man who uses her for conspicuous display. And what does she display? Submission to his authority (she knows her place), modesty in her demands, the ability never to be assertive (she always has something nice to say), obvious sexual attractiveness twinned with modesty (even when alone she never ‘messes’). These are the qualities that Gracie has learned to adopt in the course of the film narrative and they are qualities endorsed by the pageant from which she has learned them.

In particular, Gracie learns the value of respectability, described by Sarah Banet-Weiser as one of the most important guiding principles of the Miss America pageant, as it promotes itself: mediating the discourse of sexuality through understandings of girl-next-door ‘ordinariness.’ One of the oppositions set against middle-class respectability is the insinuation of Gracie’s trainer, Victor (played by Michael Caine), that she is low-class ‘white trash.’ Recall that in the argument about her ‘talent’ Victor suggests that eating with her mouth closed, i.e. the most rudimentary display of etiquette, would constitute a talent for Gracie and when Gracie haltingly suggests that there is something she can do but hasn’t done since she was in school, Victor cuts her off with the dismissive remark, ‘You are not having sex on stage.’ A ‘lady’ is sexually restrained (there’s no messing, Tom reminds us) but the very mention of sexual activity staged as a public spectacle raises only to dismiss the very real connections between beauty pageants and the pornography industry. So what constitutes the ‘ordinary’ in the context of a beauty pageant raises complex questions about heterosexuality (especially because Victor is explicitly characterized as gay and one of the unsuccessful contestants makes an impromptu speech about her lesbianism), femininity, class, sexuality, and the performance of those values in the public space. The pageant, as I have said, is a public spectacle that performs various cultural functions including the affirmation of community values and civic pride.

Lois Banner, in her history of beauty pageants in America, notes that in order to find mainstream acceptance, promoters of these contests found a way to combine popular culture entertainment with elite culture festivals, in a national setting that represented young women as symbols of national pride, power, and modernity. For instance, the Miss America pageant distinguishes itself by claiming, ‘other pageants are looking for a model, but Miss America is looking for a role model.’ The commercial motivation of promoters (who fund the event through sponsorship), and of the contestants themselves, is obscured by a discourse of idealism and, specifically, nationalism. The liberation that Gracie confesses she finds in the feminine community of the pageant is mirrored in a national community by the Statue of Liberty motif used in the crowning ceremony scene. Each contestant is dressed as a living Statue of Liberty, a living monument to iconic American liberty and national identity. Liberation in gender terms becomes then inseparable from liberation in nationalistic terms. As she becomes, or discovers, her ‘true’ womanhood, so Gracie becomes a true American. But again, the subjective value of national identity becomes ‘real’ only when performed in a public space and in this public sphere the nature of national identity becomes ambiguous, when an individual must represent the abstract value of ‘nation.’ This is one of the contradictions embodied by the beauty pageant entrant: she must be ordinary and representative yet exceptional, ‘one in a million’ yet also ‘one of us.’

Take the example of the 2004 Miss Universe beauty pageant, which featured a special award for ‘the delegate who displayed her country's pride and spirit best in costume.’ Miss USA, Shandi Finnessey, appeared wearing a body-length war-bonnet style costume. She also wore straps studded with circular metal medallions – and her competitor’s sash.

In this, one of the official photographs of Miss USA, it is significant that the image of her disembodied face appears projected against the US flag. She is shown in three-quarter profile, with her blonde hair cascading down to her shoulders. Here she is the all-American girl, but she is also is the same woman who wears faux Native American regalia. She is performing a kind of cultural authenticity that gestures towards the ‘original’ inhabitants of US territory and attempts a seamless identification of this origin with the contemporary nation state, symbolized by the flag. These icons of ‘Americanness’ are performed through the spectacle of the feminine body openly on display and in performance.

Miss USA’s gesture towards native ethnicity raises the issue of ethnic beauty pageants which, especially in the context of the Chinese diaspora, are on the rise. At a time when beauty pageants such as the Miss Universe competition generally are losing popularity, these contests have found a new locus of approval in places like China. Indeed, China has hosted the Miss Universe pageant for the past three years. Recently, the Chinese beauty scene hit the headlines with the staging of a Miss Artificial Beauty pageant in Beijing, about which I will speak in a moment. In this transnational context, issues of gender, sexuality, and nationalism are played out in bold terms.

As June Gong, the first winner of Miss Chinatown U.S.A. in 1958 explained, the pageant was not so much ‘a beauty contest’; it was ‘more like a matter of ethnic representation’ (Wu, n.p.). The performance of feminized ethnicity, here Chineseness, is a key component of the beauty pageants that take place every year throughout the Chinese diaspora. Indeed, one could argue that the very existence of a Chinese diaspora – a transnational network of communities linked by their common cultural affiliation to China – depends upon such rituals as these beauty pageants to sustain a sense of common Chineseness. As I make these remarks, you should insert scare quotes enclosing such terms as China and Chineseness because, of course, what constitutes China as a nation state and Chineseness as an ethnic category is a set of unstable definitions. These contested definitions inevitably find their way into the staging of beauty pageants that unashamedly adopt nationalistic rhetoric and ideals as part of their rationale. The Miss Chinatown contest, for example, was heavily sponsored by the Republic of China (ROC) as the Taiwan-based Nationalist government sought means to retain the support of overseas Chinese communities for itself, and its own interpretation of Chineseness, at the expense of the mainland PRC. Miss Chinatown is one of a network of regional beauty pageants that brings together representatives of diasporic Chinese communities across the world.

Miss New York Beauty Pageant 2005

Miss Malaysia Chinese International Crowning 2001

Miss Malaysia Chinese International pageant 2001

Regional finalists compete in a transnational pageant such as Miss Chinese International or Miss Chinese Cosmos. Images of recent Miss Chinese International feature contestants from Canada, USA, Australia, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

Newly crowned Miss Chinese International Li Yanan Leanne, 20, from Vancouver, Canada, (center) 1st runner-up Fala Chan, 22, from New York, U.S. (left) and 2nd runner-up Jessica Young, 19, from Melbourne, Australia, pose for a picture minutes after the Li was announced as the winner of the beauty pageant, in Hong Kong Saturday night, Jan. 29, 2005. [AP]

China Daily, 30 January 2005

Miss Chinese International winner Linda Chung (C) from Vancouver is congratulated by first runner-up Mandy Cho (L) from Hong Kong and 2nd runner-up Carlene Ang Aguilar from Manila at the Miss Chinese International pageant in Hong Kong January 17, 2004. Twenty Chinese contestants from around the world participated in the beauty contest.

China Daily, 18 January 2004

These contests claim to promote pride in Chinese culture but the Chineseness of the pageant and its contestants is compromised by images such as this photo of Miss Chinese International 2004, posing in the competition that has been most contentious throughout the history of beauty pageants : the swimsuit competition.

Canadian Linda Chung, from Vancouver, British Columbia, poses during the Miss Chinese International pageant in Hong Kong late January 17, 2004. Chung was crowned Miss Chinese International on Saturday after beating 19 other Chinese contestants from around the world. China Daily, 18 January 2004

Here, wearing a bikini and stiletto heels, Miss Chinese International presents an image that appears more western than Chinese. The question that arises concerning how ‘Chinese’ are the criteria used to judge such a pageant as this is further complicated by the use of competitions such as the ‘Alluring Eyes Award’ that is one of the categories of competition in the Miss Malaysia Chinese International pageant. This category is suspect because the single most popular form of cosmetic surgery in Asia is the operation to make almond-shaped eyes more round, and western. The next most popular cosmetic intervention is surgery to narrow the face and make cheekbones more prominent. The Manila Times in 2004 claimed that: ‘The (Chinese) government said the country’s fast-growing cosmetic surgery industry rakes in $2.4 billion a year as patients rush to go under the knife to widen eyes, narrow faces and fill out lips and breasts, emerging as renzao meinu—man made beauties.’ So the standard of beauty being judged in these pageants is, in nationalistic terms, suspect. But this is not simply a case of western versus Chinese concepts of beauty ; the entire understanding of what is meant by Chinese is placed in question by these diasporic pageants.

The Miss Chinese Cosmos pageant, not to be confused with Miss Chinese International, is a contest created and broadcast by Rupert Murdoch’s Hong Kong-based Chinese TV channel, Phoenix TV. In keeping with the diasporic or ‘greater China’ theme of its mission statement, this beauty pageant is open to Chinese girls all over the world. The only requirements are for the entrant to be Chinese and also to have a good command of the Mandarin language. This requirement that the contestants speak the Mandarin dialect, excludes from the competition all those Cantonese, Fukkien, or Hokkien speakers who, for historical reasons, comprise the bulk of overseas Chinese communities. These are also the communities with well-established historical ties to Taipei as opposed to Beijing. So a very particular kind of Chineseness is promoted by these pageants, with specific allegiances to Chinese political states (ROC or PRC) but also, I would argue, with specific grounding in one kind of Chinese ethnicity: Han Chinese ethnicity. This emphasis on a specific kind of Chinese ethnicity becomes clear as we analyze two recent controversies in the pageant world.

First, in 2003, China obstructed the participation of Taiwan's representative in the Miss Universe contest. Chen Szu-yu, who registered with the Miss Universe contest authorities as ‘Miss Taiwan,’ was required to wear a name sash reading ‘Miss Chinese Taipei’ after Chinese authorities intervened, arguing that Taiwan is a disputed territory of China and therefore cannot be represented as a nation state.

Chen Szu-yu (陳思羽), who registered with the Miss Universe contest authorities as "Miss Taiwan," was ordered to wear a name sash reading "Miss Chinese Taipei" on May 17 2003 after Chinese authorities intervened.

Second, in 2005 Miss Tibet was excluded from the Miss Tourism pageant in Malaysia and also from Miss Tourism World in Zimbabwe. Chinese officials complained that a woman who lives in India, in Dharamsala where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based, cannot represent a province of China.

AFP Photo/File - Chinese pressure sees Miss Tibet ousted from Malaysian beauty pageant

Organiser of the pageant, Alaric Soh, told Tibetan officials that the Chinese embassy in Malaysia had objected to the participation of a Miss Tibet. Soh tried to solve the dispute by re-naming ‘Miss Tibet’ as ‘Miss Tibet-China’ but this solution was unacceptable to Tibetan organisers. These political interventions on the part of the Chinese government suggest a concerted effort to ensure that the Chineseness performed in transnational beauty pageants conforms to clear but partial ethnic and national definitions.

We might ask, then, what is the relation of gender categories to these nationalistic and ethnic categories? Miss Tibet and Miss Taiwan, representing disputed sites of Chineseness are excluded from the ritualized performance of Chinese femininity displayed in the beauty pageant. Who else is excluded? Another disagreement with the organisers of an international pageant arose when Chinese organizers allowed a transsexual woman to enter a regional competition that would allow the winner to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. However, the attempt by a woman who underwent extensive cosmetic surgery in preparation for her appearance in a Beijing pageant caused her to be disqualified – and her case motivated the staging of the recent Miss Artificial Beauty pageant in Beijing, where competitors had to provide written evidence of cosmetic surgery.

Contestants in the Miss Artificial Beauty Pageant, Beijing 2004

Oldest contestant in the Miss Artificial Beauty Pageant 2004,

62-year-old Liu Yulan

"The pursuit of beauty is eternal. Cosmetic surgery shouldn't just be something that belongs to the young," said Liu Yulan

The winner, who had surgery to widen her eyes and narrow her face, again raises questions about the westernization of Chinese standards of beauty.

Winner of the Miss Artificial Beauty 2004 pageant

Feng Qian

Ms Feng said she was proud of her glamorous, albeit artificial looks, achieved through botox injections and surgery to widen her eyes and remove fat from her cheeks and waist. "This is recognition of the girls like us," she added.

But it is the contestant who shared the award for Best Media Image who raises more interesting questions about the performance of racialized gender in this pageant.

Miss Artificial Beauty 2004 contestant, transsexual Liu Xiaojing shared a prize for Best Media Image

Liu Xiaojing was the only transsexual entrant in the pageant and her presence highlights the performance of specific cultural codes and gender markers by all contestants in the pageant. We can return to Judith Butler’s question concerning what happens when the position of ‘the female’ is occupied by a female impersonator? The opposition between natural and artificial is upset as women’s ‘natural’ sexual characteristics are replaced with cultural markers of gender. Liu Xiaojing told the Manila Times : ‘I am now legally a woman, and this contest is my first formal step toward womanhood.’ The prospect that the pageant validates a femininity created by surgery and makes it real – more real than the surgery alone could accomplish – underlines Butler’s point about the importance of the desiring gaze and the inherent instability of gender categories. But this gender instability is somehow not so important in the view of Chinese pageant organisers who are willing to allow ‘artificial’ women to compete but exclude artificial ‘beauties.’ So men who become women are legitimate but women who change their physical characteristics are not. Why? I want to suggest that within the discourse of Chinese Nationalism, in the PRC and throughout the Chinese diaspora promoted by the PRC, markers of one specific kind of Chineseness or Chinese ethnicity are privileged : markers of Han ethnicity are more importantly preserved than are the cultural markers of gender. In other words, whether a contestant is a Han woman or a Han man performing as a Chinese woman is irrelevant so long as ‘Chinese’ is synonymous with Han. What cannot be tolerated are surgical interventions that make a non-Han woman look like a Han woman. That is to say, the grounding of Chinese nationalism in ‘natural’ or blood or inherited ethnic characteristics is of paramount importance, more important than interventions that might disrupt the ‘natural’ grounding of gender categories. The performance of gender is permitted but the performance of ethnicity is not. Nationalistic identities must be ‘authentic’ and grounded in stable, physical, ‘natural’ markers of ethnicity. The feminine body then becomes the contested site of national/ethnic defnitions and power relations.

In conclusion and to return again to Judith Butler: she reminds us that we are distracted if we go about seeking the origin or ground for ‘natural’ femininity and especially if we seek this ‘womanness’ in the context of a domestic sphere or feminine community. What we must attend to are the effects of gender : the cultural markers that perform femininity and masculinity in a complex interplay of private and public. What the beauty pageant offers is an instance where the false assumption of gender origin (or any identity origin) is unmasked and the cultural markers of gender (and nationalism and class and race and so on) are laid bare before us. The spectacle of the beauty pageant can then be appreciated as the performance of the subjective in the space of the public sphere.

WORKS CITED

Banet-Weiser, Sarah, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World : Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley & London : University of California Press, 1999).

Banner, Lois, American Beauty (New York : Knopf, 1983).

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York : Routledge, 1990).

Davidson, Cathy N. & Jessamyn Hatcher, ed. No More Separate Spheres ! … A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham & London : Duke University Press, 2002).

‘"Manmade beauties" get chance in China pageant,’ The Manila Times, Tuesday, December 14, 2004. http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2004/dec/14/yehey/top_stories/20041214top7.html Accessed 7 October 2005.

Miss Congeniality (2000) dir. Donald Petrie. Warner Brothers.

Miss Congeniality 2 : Armed and Fabulous (2005) dir. John Pasquin. Warner Brothers.

Miss USA website, http://www.missusa.com/ Accessed 7 October 2005.

Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, ‘"Loveliest daughter of our ancient Cathay!": representations of ethnic and gender identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. beauty pageant,’ Journal of Social History,  Fall, 1997 . http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_n1_v31/ai_20378640 Accessed 7 October 2005.