Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power - Paperback

by Colleen Ballerino Cohen (Editor), Richard Wilk (Editor), Beverly Stoeltje (Editor)

Modern beauty contests were invented by P.T. Barnum in the United States, but in the 20th century pageants and contests have spread across the entire world from Nepal to Tierra Del Fuego. Why are women (and sometimes men in drag) parading on stage such a universally appealing spectacle, attracting an audience in the billions? This book is the first global comparison of pageants from different parts of the world, at the ways each contest is both intensely local and unique, and simultaneously global and remarkable repetitious. The authors use the latest tools of feminist, ethnographic, and literary scholarship to unpack and interpret one of the greatest and most universal spectacles of modern times.

Author Biography

Colleen Ballerino Cohen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies and Director of Women's Studies at Vassar College. Her articles appear in Signs, Social Analysis, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and a special Gender Issue of the Annals of Tourism Research, and in edited collections. Since 1989 she has conducted ethnographic research on national culture and identity in the British Virgin Islands, and is presently completing a book based on this research. Beverly Stoeltje teaches feminism, nationalism, and ritual genres at Indiana University, where she is Associate Professor of Folklore, and is on the faculty of the African Studies Program, Women's Studies Program and the Research Center for Linguistics and Semiotic Studies. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Ghana 1989-90. She has published on Asante Queen mothers, women in the American West, American Rodeo and Festival; she was guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research, Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies, and is currently editing a volume on the Vox Populi. Richard Wilk is a cultural anthropologist, presently an Associate Professor at Indiana University. He has done archaeological, ethnohistoric, ecological, and applied research in Belize for more than twenty years. He has written and edited books on household organization, and is currently completing a textbook in economic anthropology.