Beauty Queens on the Global Stage Gender, Contests, and Power

Biography

Colleen Ballerino Cohen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies and Director of Women's Studies at Vassar College. Her articles appear in Signs, Social Analysis, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and a special Gender Issue of the Annals of Tourism Research, and in edited collections. Since 1989 she has conducted ethnographic research on national culture and identity in the British Virgin Islands, and is presently completing a book based on this research. Beverly Stoeltje teaches feminism, nationalism, and ritual genres at Indiana University, where she is Associate Professor of Folklore, and is on the faculty of the African Studies Program, Women's Studies Program and the Research Center for Linguistics and Semiotic Studies. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Ghana 1989-90. She has published on Asante Queen mothers, women in the American West, American Rodeo and Festival; she was guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research, Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies, and is currently editing a volume on the Vox Populi. Richard Wilk is a cultural anthropologist, presently an Associate Professor at Indiana University. He has done archaeological, ethnohistoric, ecological, and applied research in Belize for more than twenty years. He has written and edited books on household organization, and is currently completing a textbook in economic anthropology.

"The traditional feminist analysis certainly informs these essays, but it gains complexity from its incorporation into a broader scheme. In adddition, the book's international slant highlights an array of tensions that fade into the background when gender is the primary focus." -- Washington City Paper
"To put it mildly, once you enter this book, you're not in Kansas anymore--or Vermont, Florida or Maine. Th eissues raised here are far more subtle, sophisticated and cosmopolitan than whether that blonde from Fargo can sing. . . . Every year about this time, we 're forced to think about Miss America. . . . Beauty Queens on the Global Stage sends the mesage that if we really need to expend some brain power in that direction, we ought to put on our thinking tiaras and really do it." -- Philadelp[hia Enquirer
"This volume provides just the kind of new perspective on discussions of local-global phenomena that is required." -- Daniel Miller,
"Judges, sponsors, viewers, finance ministers and the would-be queens are on show here as they all contest the meaning of nation, market, and the democracy via the medium of feminine beauty. Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje lift the curtain for us on this power-infused international political stage." -- Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War
"It is precisely because this coherent, challenging collection--ranging from the whimsically autobiographical to the polemically theoretical--addresses a nominally `trivial' topic that it successfully reveals active cultural reformulation among people and peoples commonly denied the capacity for independent agency. The gendered character of these contests lends them enormous potential as sites for the contestation of power and authority, in a world widened far beyond local horizons but accustomed to local and bodily frames of reference." -- Michael Herzfeld, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
". . . the book presents an intriguing--and perhaps politically ugly--face, one that can hardly be found in any contest." -- The Women's Review of Books