Southern Beauty
Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South
Title Details
Pages: 210
Illustrations: 36 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 08/15/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6232-8
List Price: $30.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 08/15/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6892-4
List Price: $30.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 08/15/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6230-4
List Price: $30.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 08/15/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6231-1
List Price: $120.95
Related Subjects
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
Southern Beauty
Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South
The enduring power of a particular performance of southern womanhood to reify race and class
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- Description
- Reviews
Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.
In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?
Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties’ racial work or their investment in it.
With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion—stylized and predictable but ephemeral—has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.
—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
—Blain Roberts, author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South
—Cynthia Shearer, author of The Celestial Jukebox
—Riché Richardson, author of Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body
—Jillian Speck, Georgia Library Quarterly
—Elizabeth Gonzalez, The Public Historian
—Andrew Kettler, The Journal of American Culture
—Eva Gourdoux, OpenEdition Journals