Overview

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.

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9780820362311

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Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd documents how performative southern rituals fulfill imaginative needs of the present by distorting the past. This book is not salvage ethnography but something much smarter, as she captures the necessary and sometimes painful dialogues about our shared racial past and the possibilities for reconciliation.--Cynthia Shearer author of The Celestial Jukebox Boyd's arguments about the significance of gender performances to regional identity and memory are persuasive. As she writes, these performances do important memory work, through processes of both remembering and forgetting.--Blain Roberts author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South Southern Beauty is written with verve and takes a subject that is easily dismissed and transforms it into a revealing spotlight on the performance of gender in the contemporary South.--W. Fitzhugh Brundage author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

Boyd's arguments about the significance of gender performances to regional identity and memory are persuasive. As she writes, these performances do important memory work, through processes of both remembering and forgetting.--Blain Roberts author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South Southern Beauty is written with verve and takes a subject that is easily dismissed and transforms it into a revealing spotlight on the performance of gender in the contemporary South.--W. Fitzhugh Brundage author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

Author Information

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd is an independent scholar who lives and writes in Takoma Park, Maryland.

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