However, having just read one of the most fascinating articles on beauty pageants by prominent scholar, Deborah Madsen (titled Performing Community through the Feminine Body: The Beauty Pageant in Transnational Contexts), it was obvious that beauty pageants are more than bikini-clad girls, that it is a platform to epitomize ethnic (national) and gender (sexual) identities.
Maden did not delve into how pageants degrade women and demoralize society. Instead she skillfully weaved the Hollywood hit, Miss Congeniality, and Miss China International to illustrate how sexuality and nationality is cemented on stage.
Indeed, she so eloquently put to words where I had failed as a child to understand the relationship between women and culture. The oft repeated “Nepali bolnu audaina bhane, Nepali ama bhako ke kaam ni?” puzzled the elementary-school girl in me. Never mind that I’d grown up in a Canton-speaking island or that my father was also Nepali.
Inevitably always my mother was blamed for her daughters stumbling through their Nepali. Perhaps it was flattery that women including those traditionally deemed the primary homemakers and caretakers were thrusted the honor (or was it burden?) of shaping their children—instilling values, teaching manners and ensuring their offspring were fluent in the mother-tongue.
Visits to my paternal village offered no clarity either. While the girls and boys of us could run around in shorts, the men drink tea in cotton pants, the women were clad in saris. It seemed families’ honor or communities’ culture was never threatened by men’s attire, as much as by the women’s.
These little daily truths which display the connection between womanhood and protection of culture (in terms of one’s ethnic or national idenitity) are epitomized in beauty pageants.
No one has offered more insight on this relationship than Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. In her 1997 masterpiece, (titled “Loveliest Daughter of our Ancient Cathay!”: Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown Beauty Pageant) Wu analyzed the same phenomenon that we are currently witnessing in Nepal.
Judy Wong, the first Miss Chinatown (1958), later claimed it was less of a beauty contest and "more like a matter of ethnic representation”. Tzu-Chun Wu’ s thoughts on having pageants that exude with ethnic and national pride explain the slew of pageants being organized across the myriad of Nepali communities today.
Beauty pageants around the world are not simply about filling little girls’ heads with dreams of becoming a princess. The fashion industry, the ideal woman, the bridge between the modern and traditional (“ethnic” garb meets evening gown) stem for its capitalist roots.
Action Entertainment Pvt. Ltd and Namaste International Nepalese Event Corporation, organizers of Miss Mongol Nepal-USA 2011, claim their main purpose is to “express the hidden talents that the youth have and to protect culture, language, custom and dress of different communities.” Likewise, ChildforRight.com congratulated the eight-grade student and winner of Miss Newar 2010 Rhimsa Shakya, “This contest is not like the western beauty contests ...The contest also focuses on each contestant’s cultural understanding and the ability to perform cultural dances specific to the Newar caste community”. Similarly, Ashwini Jha of Infinity Entertainment echoed, “The contest [Miss Terai 2011] is held to bring forth the change in society exploring the beauty of Terai when the country’s going through reformation”.
In hosting such ethnicity- and nationality-based beauty pageants within and across national borders, a woman’s body is used to demarcate political power. How else can China’s interference with the Miss Taiwan or Miss Tibet’s participation in international pageants be understood?
Such beauty pageants focusing on ethnic and national pride at best encourage communities to appreciate diversity (Tzu-Chun Wu describes how Miss Chinatown connected the newer Chinese immigrant community to America in the 1950s and today bridges the Chinese Diaspora worldwide). However, at worst, it signifies how a woman is to be the caretaker of culture and a vessel of political activities. Again, whether this is onerous or an honor is debatable.
In addition to ethnic politics being played out on the glittery stage is another identity - that of gender. While national pageants like Miss Nepal did not rule and divide between mulitple people groups, it also did not promote indigenous and minority queens (Only three Miss Nepals till date have not been from the privileged Bahun-Chhetri-Newar people groups.) What they did accomplish was to typify womanhood in stereotypical and ideal terms.
The pre-requisites for the 2012 Miss Nepal application are simple; unmarried 19-25 year olds who have completed their secondary education, are at least 5’4”, attractive, healthy and moral. A Miss Nepal must personify a patriarchal society’s notion of a “woman” – “attractive” and “moral” are key words.
Madsen reminds of Gracie in Miss Congeniality being warned by her pageant guru, “You are not having sex on stage” as she considers her talent for the talent round. An ideal woman ought to be sexually arousing and simultaneously sexually restrained.
The message that regurgitated to society at large, and also to the more vulnerable female tweens, is that a woman is to be sultry but not sexual; pageants are a stage that allows us to examine societal values and priorities.
After a contestant in China was rejected for not being 100 percent natural due to her plastic surgery, a Miss Artificial Beauty was organized. Contestant Liu Xiaojing told the Manila Times, ‘I am now legally a woman, and this contest is my first formal step toward womanhood.’ Gender is performed (sex is given at birth, sexuality is socially constructed), that much is evident from leading scholars as Judy Butler, Candace West and Don H Zimmerman and where is this more evident than on a stage?
A beauty pageant, especially ones that cater to “other” women - those that have gone under the knife and may possess male sexual organs but a female identity - are now beginning to use the same stage that defined the stereotypical and ideal woman to assert their womanhood. Three Nepali competed in the 2007 Miss Lady Boy competition - has Miss Nepal accepted or exlcuded non-traditional women who desire to have their womanhood exuded by performing gender on stage?
Women who had plastic surgery, whose sexual organs were ambiguous, who were physically unappealing and not representative of the majoriy – basically any woman who did not personify womanhood in stereotypical norms – could not traditionally compete for the crown.
Beauty pageants around the world are not simply about filling little girls’ heads with dreams of becoming a princess. The fashion industry, the ideal woman, the bridge between the modern and traditional (“ethnic” garb meets evening gown) stem for its capitalist roots. Ethnicity and sexuality both feed into consumerist demands of each. Indeed, it is a stage for the highly politicized spheres of nationality and gender, two of the most defining and sensitive identities to be contested, claimed and cemented - where a woman, the perfect object for the job, is to protect and promote race and sexuality and traditions.
Perhaps this explains the historical delay in organizing male pageants as well as why they haven’t taken off the same way women’s have - inside and outside Nepal.
sradda.thapa@gmail.com
Related story
#Sexploration Episode 3 Discussion on Gender Markers
_20191222200001.jpg)
