Overview

"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. 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. 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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Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd is an independent scholar who lives and writes in Takoma Park, Maryland. Elisabeth Ashby is a seasoned character actor and singer with over two decades of stage experience. Having loved audiobooks since she was a little girl checking cassettes out from the local library, she is thrilled to have found a way to combine her love of performing with her lifelong passion for the written word as a narrator. Originally from Upstate New York, she now lives in Central Virginia with her husband and two cats.

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