Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life

ISBN-13: 9780199842803 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 264 str.

UK Oxfor UK Oxford Univ. iversity

Opis

Universities are unlikely venues for grading bodies, beauty, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century, and the cultural power of beauty pageants continues into the twenty-first.

In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. Drawing on archival research and interviews as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting iterations of class, race, religion, culture, sexuality, and gender braided into campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the making of idealized collegiate masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself.

Recenzje

This book is a first. It is ethnography as much as sociology...it is destined to become something of a landmark in Gender Studies.

O autorze

Karen Tice is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Illinois, 1998).