Sarah Banet-Weiser’s study of the intricate performative nature of beauty pageants, aptly titled The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, in particular the complex and complicated essence of the Miss America pageant, broadens the definition of research-significant cultural practices by examining the cultural validity of what may seem to the naked eye as the ‘lowest’ possible context of contemporary cultural production and reception. Banet's reads the Miss America beauty pageant as a “civic ritual”, i.e., a political space where concerns about national identity and cultural aspirations are confronted with all-too-palpable anxieties regarding gender and race, which in turn allows her to challenge our paradigmatic way of thinking about foundational/relevant cultural values and beliefs; what we are left with, after closing in the reading, is a push towards 'a re-think' of the multi-faceted links existing between “the nation” and “the citizen as a subject” amidst the overtly visible policing of sexuality/desire in the consumer-driven reality of post-industrialist American society.
However, playing the devil’s advocate, I wonder about the extent to which a feasible study of popular culture practices, such as Ms. Banet-Weiser’s ethnographically-fed study of beauty pageants, enables ordinary people (outside of the academy), to generate/create/devise meaning(s) for themselves under conditions that they may not necessarily control or influence.
Can such a theoretically-laden text influence “engaging activism” outside the academy? What can be done in the realm of everyday commonality after reading Ms. Banet-Weiser’s text? If the text fosters an awareness to the complex nature of the Miss America pageant, what is then the next logical step for the ordinary citizen as a subject?
The theoretical move that I found particularly motivating in Ms. Banet-Weiser’s work is tied to her use of Benedict Anderson’s now-classic formulation of the nation as an “imagined community”, namely examining the beauty pageants’ re-creation of “a national field of shared symbols and practices that define both ethnicity and femininity in terms of national identity.” (6-7) Building onto Anderson’s foundational theoretical topography, Ms. Banet-Weiser then proceeds to view “nationalism as a specifically cultural artifact…a discourse that meditates constructions of femininity and ethnicity in order to produce a particularly gendered notion of citizenship.” (7)
Thus, she is able to recast the ritualistic nature of the contemporary beauty pageant against the background of other ritualistic practices in/of U.S nationalism, opening up the possibility of seeing this “low entertainment” event as a site of political strife and national containment/reaffirmation. Bearing this in mind, Ms. Banet-Weiser’s interesting spin on Anderson’s template can be reapplied in the examination of other “low-brow” popular culture ritualistic practices, such as Nascar/Indicar/Formula One competitions, hence negotiating the emergence of a needed merge of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of concrete cultural questions.
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