Customer Reviews

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

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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."

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.