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The Most Beautiful Girl in the World : Beauty Pageants and National Identity by Banet-Weiser, Sarah is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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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

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

Author

Banet-Weiser, Sarah

Publisher

University of California Press

Published

1999

Language

EN

ISBN

9780520217911

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Anthropology, Science, Sports

Updated

2026-03-24