Although for many ‘the Miss World Beauty Pageant’ is no more than an out-dated guilty pleasure, in its heyday the contest was covered by the BBC and drew in over 27.5 million viewers for the 1968 finale.[1] Today, similar international beauty pageants such as ‘Miss Universe’ air in over 190 countries worldwide and are seen by more than half a billion people annually.[2] The premise of the contest is simple; ‘beautiful’ women are elected annually in their own countries to represent the ‘face’ of their nation in a competition against other nations on a global stage. In looking at the Miss World beauty pageant, we can trace how a single woman can sit at an intersection of local, national and even global identities.
Whilst beauty contests have historical roots stretching back to Greek mythology, the Miss World Beauty Pageant is uniquely embedded in the British decolonisation period. Originally created by Eric Morley as a one-off event connected with the Festival of Britain 1951, the celebration of the centenary of the Great Exhibition 1851, interest piqued when the Miss Universe competition was announced in the USA in 1952.[3] As a result, Morley expanded the pageant, and by 1970 58 candidates were competing.
The tension and turmoil of the 1950s and 60s played out on the Miss World stage during its first 20 years: post-war recovery, crumbling empires, and decolonisation. Race and gender became widely discussed categories of analysis whilst Cold War clashes and civil rights movements filled television screens. These phenomena took place on an unprecedented interconnected scale in an era of heightened globalisation, mass consumerism, and mass media.
Research on beauty pageants so far is limited and has focused mainly on contemporary (both local and national) ethnographic studies of singular beauty pageants.[4] Geographically, although a transnational cultural study has been done comparing regional beauty pageants around the world,[5] ironically, international competitions themselves, such as Miss World, have not been analysed through a transnational lens.
Recently, global studies of new imperial histories and imperial visual cultures opened up new fields of inquiry that go far beyond the traditional colonial archive.[6] The extraordinary movements of images across geopolitical borders refuse such simplistic coloniser/colonised frameworks, opening up a mediated space of the transnational through which rewritings of gender, race, nation, citizenship and globalisation are occurring.[7] Now, a more nuanced view of colonialism is emerging as an intricate nexus of mutual entanglements and imbrications.
This leaves a critical research gap for a visual and cultural analysis of the Miss World Beauty Pageant during the decolonisation period through a transnational perspective. The annual competition is a site in which the meanings ascribed to individual and collective identities are continually negotiated on a local, national, and global scale. This makes it an interesting case study to look at as a site where theories of race, gender and nationhood are constructed, enmeshed, and contested.
This project aims at filling a key gap by situating the Miss World beauty pageant in global history as a legitimate and relevant matter of inquiry. Taking each pageant event as its starting point, the project will look at its media reception and how the contestants’ public image was constructed. Then it will draw on the transnational connections of how the winners came to be selected from their homelands and where they ended up after the competition. While the starting point is the competition itself, the project’s inspiration and analytical angle is inspired by global and transnational micro history and postcolonial and feminist theory.
It is precisely this crossover between local, national, global identity and issues of race and gender that sparks the following research questions: What does it mean to be a specifically feminine representation of a nation? How are race, gender, and nationhood mediated in and through women’s bodies on a global, public stage?
One tentative hypothesis is that the Miss World beauty pageant functioned to create a veneer of transnational representation. With each country lined up side-by-side labelled with a white sash, a powerful visual metaphor is created that resembles an exhibition. However there were also moments where colonial visual regimes were scrutinized, even challenged, and go beyond the simple ‘West’ vs. ‘the rest’ binary.
There is a wealth of exciting
yet neglected primary source material
available including Eric Morley’s biography of the ‘Miss World Story’, British
Pathé newsreel snippets of each year’s highlights and photographs and tabloid
articles of the winners and contestants. Due to the limited breadth of a
5000-word essay, the choice to study just 20 years of the competition is on
pragmatic grounds; whist the choice to not undertake a micro-history on
selected individuals or is due to the lack of source material available on each
person.
[1] Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India: Decolonisations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 41
[2] H. Alan Scott, “Miss Universe 2018 in Photos: Catriona Gray of Philippines Crowned”, 16 December 2018, < https://www.newsweek.com/miss-universe-2018-pageant-photos-catriona-gray-philippines-1259769> [3 March 2019]
[3] Richard Cavendish, “The First Miss World Contest”, History Today 51 (2001) < https://www.historytoday.com/archive/first-miss-world-contest> [3 March 2019]
[4] On contemporary studies of beauty pageants see: Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (California, 1999), Radhika Parameswaran, ‘Global queens national celebrities: tales of feminine triumph in post liberalization India’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004), pp.346-370, Natasha B. Barnes, ‘Face of the Nation: Race, Nationalism and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants’ The Massachusetts Review 35 (1994), pp. 471–92.
[5] See: Collen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoetje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York, 1996)
[6] For details on imperial visual contexts see: David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany,(Harvard, 2011)
[7] Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds), Empires of Vision: a reader (North Carolina, 2014), Raka Shome, Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies, The Communication Review 9.4 (2006), pp. 341-361.
I think your project idea is really interesting. One of my friends was talking to me last night about how authors tended to view women of other cultures as beautiful when they admired those cultures, and ugly when they didn’t like those cultures. I actually brought up what I remembered of your project in the context of this conversation.
My friend made a good point that I would agree with and that might be relevant to your project. This point is that cultures do not always find features associated with another ethnic group beautiful purely in the context of imperialism. My friend is doing his dissertation on the crusades and said that Arab writers at the time often commented on the exotic beauty of Frankish women. Considering these writers were not in Christian controlled territory this isn’t some externally imposed imperialist beauty ideal.
In a similar vein the discussion of skin lightening is often position in the context of racism and imperialism. While this context is certainly relevant it is far from the only relevant factor. Light skin has been prized in Asia for a long time, because it supposedly showed that the person did not have to go out and work in the sun. It used to be valued in Europe for much the same reason. I think one could argue that in many cases colonial contact exacerbated this already present unhealthy beauty standards in addition to adding new ones.
One beauty trend directly linked to foreign western intervention is double eyelid surgery in Korea. Korea currently has one of the worlds highest rates of plastic surgery. Double eyelid surgery was invented by an American plastic surgeon after the Korean war because he thought that bigger eyes would make Korean business men seem more awake when they were doing deals with westerners (yes I know that sounds super racist, it is). He did not actually get very many business men customers, but the surgery became very popular with prostitutes trying to appeal to western men. It went from there to becoming shockingly common in Korea today.