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With a low rate of immigration and a high rate of interracial marriage, Japanese Americans today compose the Asian ethnic group with the largest proportion of mixed-race members. Within Japanese American communities, increased participation by mixed-race members, along with concerns about overassimilation, has led to a search for cultural authenticity, giving new answers to the question, Who is Japanese American? In Pure Beauty, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain tackles this question by studying a cultural institution: Japanese American community beauty pageants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. King-O’Riain employs rich ethnographic fieldwork to discover how these pageants seek to maintain racial and ethnic purity amid shifting notions of cultural identity. She uses revealing in-depth interviews with candidates, queens, and community members, her experiences as a pageant committee member, and archival research—including Japanese and English newspapers, museum collections, private photo albums, and mementos—to establish both the importance and impossibility of racial purity. King-O’Riain examines racial eligibility rules and tests, which encompass not only ancestry but also residency, community service, and culture, and traces the history of pageants throughout the United States. Pure Beauty shows how racial and gendered meanings are enacted through the pageants, and reveals their impact on Japanese American men, women, and children. King-O’Riain concludes that the mixed-race challenge to racial understandings of Japanese Americanness does not necessarily mean an end to race as we know it and asserts that race iswork—created and re-created in a social context. Ultimately, she determines that the concept of race, fragile though it may be, is still one of the categories by which Japanese Americans are judged. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is lecturer in sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
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Mike Thompson
reviewed Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants on February 16, 2018
Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants
Highlights: chapter 1, 4, 5, 8
"The Miss America Pageant was not an example of the general decline of Victorian morality in the 1920s but an attempt to assert a repackaged form of restrictive Victorian gender roles." (chapter 1, Kimberly A. Hamlin)
"Lois Delander, Miss Illinois [1927], was a sixteen-year-old honor student. She had previously won a medal for knowing Bible verses and boasted 'her lips had never touched coffee or tea'."(chapter 1, Kimberly A. Hamlin)
"In the 1920s, crowning a passive, traditional, 'un-painted', and 'unbobbed' girl soothed a nation struggling to accept the changing gender roles brought about by suffrage, world war, and the flapper and provided a cookie-cutter version of America's ideal woman."(chapter 1, Kimberly A. Hamlin)
"In other words, beauty pageants are not about beauty. They are about power."
"She asserts an answer to the question 'what is feminism?' that she says is 'rooted in neither fear nor fantasy... 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression'"(bell hooks)
'[..] particularly when many white people view "racism as the prejudiced behaviors of individuals rather than as an institutionalized system of advantage benefiting white."'
"We are all fed a gourmet diet of Cinderella sagas and Miss America pageants, in which passivity is richly rewarded and beauty transformation buy security and love" (Rita Freedman, Beauty Bound, 1986)
"Children also learn that power and happiness do not come to women through active pursuit and assertive engagement with life, but rather through obedience, servitude, patience, and ultimately, through the magic of cosmetic make-over." (Rita Freedman, Beauty Bound, 1986)
"Once again, with the Miss America contest we have America's vehement preoccupation with innocence, with its inability to deal with the darkness of youth, the darkness of its own uselessly expressed ambition, the dark complexity of its own simplistic morality of sunshine and success, the darkness, righteous rage, and bitter depth of its own daughters."(Gerald Early, 'Watching the Miss America Pageant', 2000)
More stuff:
- Beverly Daniel Tatum - Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race (1977 book)
- bell hooks - Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981 book)
- Rita Freedman - Beauty Bound (1986 book)
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