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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Boyd, Elizabeth B. "Southern Beauty: Performing Femininity in an American Region," American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, July 2001.
This dissertation scrutinized the cultural work of three contemporary feminine rituals: the beauty pageant, sorority rush, and the Confederate pageant. These stylized performances are seen to express and reinscribe quite serious regional values-ideas about race, place, and class-in a festive, seemingly frivolous mode. “Southern Beauty” demonstrates that gender performance is necessary to the regional culture-especially to the white South’s continued understanding of itself as distinctive. Feminine performances in the American South, with their cyclical, clockwork-like reappearance and reiteration of an innocent, virginal ideal, continually throw up a time-honored notion of femininity that is white by definition, middle class in nature, and heterosexual in the extreme. If the moonlight-and-magnolias plantation South is a well-acknowledged romantic fantasy, it is nevertheless one with a considerable imaginative hold on the American consciousness and on the region’s actors in particular. The dissertation argues that it is performances like the three discussed that keep this racialized gender daydream alive. Combining Mississippi-based ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and feminist analysis, “Southern Beauty” gives voice to women’s own words about their experience with the myth of the southern lady and the ritual performances that continue to give it life. Oral testimony is framed by scholarship on memory and identity, nostalgia and commemoration on the one hand, and by work on gender in southern society on the other. Scholarship on ritual, romance, performance, and whiteness further inform the analysis. The study considers feminine practices from the Depression-era, Jim Crow South, through the civil rights era, and up to the present. The study limits its ethnographic data to Mississippi, a state representative of the Deep South. Focusing on periods of cultural change, “Southern Beauty” considers how regional race and class relations are constructed by gender performance.
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