CLASS DESCRIPTION
 
For over a century, beauty pageants have been a complicated and contested celebration of national identity. From the launch of Miss America in 1921 to Miss World (1951) and Miss Universe (1952), race, class, faith, fashion, and gender identity have all played a crucial role in the evolution of pageantry internationally.
 
Through her lecture ‘Beauty Pageants and National Identity’, Margot Mifflin will identify how, modeled on Miss America, other U.S. pageants sprang up as regional expressions of cultural pride, such as Miss Chinatown USA, Miss America Latina, and Miss Navajo Nation--which requires speaking Navajo and butchering a sheep. Mifflin will discuss the rise in beauty contests that were launched in reaction to Miss America’s persistent racism, such as Miss Black America (1968), and pageants honoring trans-global identities, such as Miss World Muslimah. Pageants have both empowered and damaged women and introduced subversive winners who used their titles for political purposes. As such, the lecture will also spotlight gay and trans contestants who are changing the pageant world internationally, even as the newly minted “Miss AI” competition reinforces, through artificial intelligence, a stereotypical ideal womanhood.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER
 
Margot Mifflin (she/her) is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo (PowerHouse Books, 1997, 2013). Her 2009 biography The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books) was a finalist for the Caroline Bancroft History Prize and is under option by MGMT Entertainment. Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood (Counterpoint Press, 2020) is a cultural history of the Miss America Pageant; it won the Popular Culture Association's Best Book in Women's Studies Award. Mifflin is a professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
 
INSTAGRAM: @mmifflin
FACEBOOK: @margot.mifflin
BSKY: @mmifflin

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This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in December 2024. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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