Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India
For almost half a century, the Miss India competition has been a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. As India participates increasingly in a global economy, that standard is gradually being shaped by forces beyond the country's borders. Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey's Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent...
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For almost half a century, the Miss India competition has been a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. As India participates increasingly in a global economy, that standard is gradually being shaped by forces beyond the country's borders. Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey's Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent political, economic, and cultural developments.Dewey offers readers an up-close view of the beauty pageant through her discussion of the contestants' intense training program, a process that involves extensive physical, emotional, and cultural transformations. Covering everything from proper table etiquette to preferred skin tone, the author reveals the exacting standards set by pageant officials and reflected in Indian society. Yet she also recognizes the empowerment these women are afforded by their status as beauty symbols in a culture increasingly shaped by the visual influence of national and international media.Making Miss India Miss World constitutes an important cultural critique and an enlightening take on how macroeconomic change affects cultural identity at the individual level.
Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiBeauty as Cultural Performance 1The Lower of the GazeWomen of Substance?: Situating Self under the Gaze 51Watching Miss World 91GenderStri Sakti and the Rhetoric of Women's Empowerment 127GlobalizationStructural Adjustment and "International Standards" 157Miss India and National Identity 195Conclusion: Miss India in the Postliberalization Candy Store 220Glossary 227Works Cited 229Index 235
