{"id":1299,"date":"2019-03-08T17:09:05","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T17:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=1299"},"modified":"2019-03-08T17:09:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T17:09:14","slug":"project-proposal-the-miss-world-beauty-pageant-a-transnational-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2019\/03\/08\/project-proposal-the-miss-world-beauty-pageant-a-transnational-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"[Project Proposal] The Miss World Beauty Pageant: A Transnational Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Although for many \u2018the Miss\nWorld Beauty Pageant\u2019 is no more than an out-dated guilty pleasure, in its\nheyday the contest was covered by the BBC and drew in over 27.5 million viewers\nfor the 1968 finale.[1]<\/a>\nToday, similar international beauty pageants such as \u2018Miss Universe\u2019 air in\nover 190 countries worldwide and are seen by more than half a billion people\nannually.[2]<\/a>\nThe premise of the contest is simple; \u2018beautiful\u2019 women are elected annually in\ntheir own countries to represent the \u2018face\u2019 of their nation in a competition\nagainst other nations on a global stage. In looking at the Miss World beauty\npageant, we can trace how a single woman can sit at an intersection of local,\nnational and even global identities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst beauty contests have\nhistorical roots stretching back to Greek mythology, the Miss World Beauty\nPageant is uniquely embedded in the British decolonisation period. Originally\ncreated by Eric Morley as a one-off event connected with the Festival of\nBritain 1951, the celebration of the centenary of the Great Exhibition 1851,\ninterest piqued when the Miss Universe competition was announced in the USA in\n1952.[3]<\/a> As\na result, Morley expanded the pageant, and by 1970 58 candidates were competing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tension and turmoil of\nthe 1950s and 60s played out on the Miss World stage during its first 20 years:\npost-war recovery, crumbling empires, and decolonisation. Race and gender\nbecame widely discussed categories of analysis whilst Cold War clashes and civil\nrights movements filled television screens. These phenomena took place on an\nunprecedented interconnected scale in an era of heightened globalisation, mass\nconsumerism, and mass media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research<\/strong> on\nbeauty pageants so far is limited and has focused mainly on contemporary (both local\nand national) ethnographic studies of singular beauty pageants.[4]<\/a> Geographically,\nalthough a transnational cultural study has been done comparing regional beauty\npageants around the world,[5]<\/a>\nironically, international competitions themselves, such as Miss World, have not\nbeen analysed through a transnational lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, global studies of\nnew imperial histories and imperial visual cultures opened up new fields of\ninquiry that go far beyond the traditional colonial archive.[6]<\/a>\nThe extraordinary movements of images across geopolitical borders refuse such\nsimplistic coloniser\/colonised frameworks, opening up a mediated space of the transnational <\/strong>through which rewritings\nof gender, race, nation, citizenship and globalisation are occurring.[7]<\/a> Now,\na more nuanced view of colonialism is emerging as an intricate nexus of mutual entanglements\nand imbrications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leaves a critical research gap<\/strong> for a visual and cultural\nanalysis of the Miss World Beauty Pageant during the decolonisation period through\na transnational perspective. The annual competition is a site in which the meanings\nascribed to individual and collective identities are continually negotiated on\na local, national, and global scale. This makes it an interesting case study to\nlook at as a site where theories of race, gender and nationhood are\nconstructed, enmeshed, and contested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This project aims at filling a key gap<\/strong> by situating the Miss World\nbeauty pageant in global history as a legitimate and relevant matter of inquiry.\nTaking each pageant event as its starting point, the project will look at its media\nreception and how the contestants\u2019 public image was constructed. Then it will\ndraw on the transnational connections of how the winners came to be selected\nfrom their homelands and where they ended up after the competition. While the\nstarting point is the competition itself, the project\u2019s inspiration and analytical<\/strong> angle<\/strong>\nis inspired by global and transnational\nmicro history<\/strong> and postcolonial and<\/strong>\nfeminist theory.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is precisely this\ncrossover between local, national, global identity and issues of race and gender\nthat sparks the following research\nquestions<\/strong>: What does it mean to be a specifically feminine representation\nof a nation? How are race, gender, and nationhood mediated in and through\nwomen\u2019s bodies on a global, public stage? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One tentative hypothesis<\/strong> is that the Miss World beauty pageant\nfunctioned to create a veneer of transnational representation. With each\ncountry lined up side-by-side labelled with a white sash, a powerful visual\nmetaphor is created that resembles an exhibition. However there were also moments\nwhere colonial visual regimes were scrutinized, even challenged, and go beyond\nthe simple \u2018West\u2019 vs. \u2018the rest\u2019 binary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a wealth of exciting\nyet neglected primary source material<\/strong>\navailable including Eric Morley\u2019s biography of the \u2018Miss World Story\u2019, British\nPath\u00e9 newsreel snippets of each year\u2019s highlights and photographs and tabloid\narticles of the winners and contestants. Due to the limited breadth of a\n5000-word essay, the choice to study just 20 years of the competition is on\npragmatic grounds; whist the choice to not undertake a micro-history on\nselected individuals or is due to the lack of source material available on each\nperson.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in\nIndia: Decolonisations, Queer Sexualities, Trans\/national Projects\n(Basingstoke, 2004), p. 41<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> H. Alan Scott, \u201cMiss\nUniverse 2018 in Photos: Catriona Gray of Philippines Crowned\u201d<\/em>, 16 December\n2018, < https:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/miss-universe-2018-pageant-photos-catriona-gray-philippines-1259769<\/a>> [3 March 2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Richard Cavendish, \u201cThe First Miss World Contest\u201d, History Today<\/em> 51 (2001) < https:\/\/www.historytoday.com\/archive\/first-miss-world-contest<\/a>> [3 March 2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> On contemporary studies of beauty pageants see: Sarah\nBanet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in\nthe World<\/em> (California, 1999), Radhika Parameswaran, \u2018Global queens national\ncelebrities: tales of feminine triumph in post liberalization India\u2019, Critical Studies in Media Communication<\/em>\n21 (2004), pp.346-370, Natasha B. Barnes, \u2018Face of the Nation: Race,\nNationalism and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants\u2019 The Massachusetts Review<\/em> 35 (1994), pp. 471\u201392.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> See: Collen\nBallerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoetje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power <\/em>(New\nYork, 1996)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> For details on imperial visual contexts see: David Ciarlo, Advertising\nEmpire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany,<\/em>(Harvard, 2011)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds), Empires of Vision: a reader<\/em> (North\nCarolina, 2014), Raka Shome, Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies, The Communication Review<\/em> 9.4 (2006), pp.\n341-361.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although for many \u2018the Miss World Beauty Pageant\u2019 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-kX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1300,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions\/1300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}