Overview

The southern beauty is alive and well in the twenty-first century American South — and so is a particular silence. All across the region young white women routinely turn-in renditions of femininity more in keeping with nineteenth century gender ideals than twenty-first. In popular performances that gestured toward the southern past, the southern beauty performed choreography of exclusion, consolidating privilege and reiterating race in a near absence of scrutiny. Chances are, you never noticed. That is precisely the point. Southern Beauty explains the long presence of this unlikely figure — and the widespread studied attempts over time to ignore her. Built on a foundation of ethnographic—including more than sixty interviews—and historical research, Southern Beauty explores three popular feminine rituals: sorority rush, the beauty pageant, and an Old South tourist production. All feature a cast of southern beauties with distinct traces of an imagined past. Boyd investigates these rituals for their cultural memory work over time — for the role they played in promoting particular remembrances of the southern past.

Full Product Details

9780820362328

Table of Contents

Reviews

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

Author Information

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

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available