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"Drag Queens and Beauty Queens is the portrait of the gay community in Atlantic City seen through the lens of two beauty pageants, the iconic Miss America Pageant and its drag counterpart, the Miss'd America Pageant. Both originated and evolved in this oldest of America's resort towns. Beauty pageants are anything but trivial. As public spectacle, pageantry allows for the expression of oppositional values in a context that appears inconsequential, but they are actually highly charged performances of gender, deeply rooted in the social, political, and economic ideals contested within the culture of the time. Both the Miss America pageant and the Miss'd America pageant lie at the heart of gay life in Atlantic City, which centered around the once vibrant and now abandoned New York Avenue. The book contends that the Miss America pageant is admired by the gay community there in general and the gay male and drag community in particular because of its long-standing social and economic interactions with the town, and is understood by gays as essentially a camp performance. Drag Queens and Beauty Queens illustrates the immense influence that the Miss America Pageant had on the construction of gay identity in Atlantic City, and how gay Atlantic City has in turn "queered" the Miss America Pageant"--

Beauty contests --- Gay community --- Drag shows --- Drag balls --- Drag queens --- Drag kings --- Miss America Pageant. --- Miss'd America Pageant.

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Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study. Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.

Beauty contests --- National characteristics. --- Racism in popular culture. --- Popular culture --- Characteristics, National --- Identity, National --- Images, National --- National identity --- National images --- National psychology --- Psychology, National --- Anthropology --- Nationalism --- Social psychology --- Collective memory --- Ethnopsychology --- Exceptionalism --- Miss Universe Pageant. --- Miss America Pageant. --- Taḥarut "Mis Yunivers" --- achievement. --- american women. --- beauty pageants. --- beauty standards. --- beauty. --- bess myerson. --- black miss america. --- cultural criticism. --- disability. --- diversity. --- empowerment. --- ethnography. --- feminism. --- gender studies. --- gender. --- heather whitestone. --- interview. --- interviews. --- jewish miss america. --- liberal feminism. --- miss america. --- national identity. --- nonfiction. --- pageant officials. --- pageant participants. --- pageants. --- race. --- ritual. --- sexuality. --- social issues. --- sociology. --- swimsuit. --- talent competitions. --- vanessa williams.