Queens of academe
Subtitle: beauty pageantry, student bodies, and college life
By: Karen Tice
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
ISBN-13: 9780199842780; 9780199842803
Subjects: Beauty contestants; Women college students; Beauty contests; Universities and colleges; Sociological aspects
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Beauty and the boar; title: Cleavage and campus life; title: Pride and pulchritude: campus pageant politics, 1920-1980; title: Making the grade in the new millennium: beauty, platforming, celebrity, and normativity; title: "We are here": pageants as racial "homeplaces" and ethnic combat zones; title: Class acts and class work: poise and the polishing of campus queens; title: Flesh and spirit: bibles, beauty, and bikinis; title: Afterward: class work/homework.