elimination of their job as an aim, these unfortunately come across as personal

opinions rather than worked-out positions sustained throughout the book.

The authors maintain that there are similarities, on the one hand, between the

tourist and the prostitute and, on the other hand, between the tourist and the

prostitution client. Both these are important to the extent that they help us to

regard prostitution not as something unique in society, but rather as an activity

sharing features with other social and symbolic activities.

The idea of de-differentiating the prostitute and the tourist, both understood as

occupying liminal spaces in contemporary society, is carried on through the

analysis of identity in a socio-psychological frame (Chapters 2, 3 and 4). While

this does not emerge as being a very productive argument, the comparison between

the tourist and the prostitute client leads to more specific conclusions. For

instance, the same motivations for taking a holiday, it is argued, also emerge as

relevant in visiting a sex worker. In the tourist industry what is sold is often a

mixture of assault on and confirmation of sexual and relational identity – the

tourist is already a potential sex tourist. Interesting examples are taken from

travel companies’ advertising campaigns. They show the construction of a holiday

as a dense space for relational and sexual experiences.

Contemporary forms of holidays and contemporary forms of prostitution are considered

within the tradition of social spaces of licentiousness – spaces that constitute some sort

of ‘safe’ assaults on the normal order. The authors offer an historical overview, paying

interesting attention to colonial representations, in order to reveal the attitudes on both

sides of the relationship between tourists and women in the destination countries.

On the whole, a number of interesting suggestions emerge from the book but they

are not fully carried through. This is particularly regrettable in the debate on sex

work which is already quite confused, to the political disadvantage of the workers.

Giulia Garofalo
doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400248

The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and

national identity

Sarah Banet-Weiser; University of California Press, California, USA, 1999, ISBN: 0-520-21789-6

d32.50, 0-520-21791-8, d12.95 (Pbk)

In The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity,

Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that the beauty pageant is a central site for ideologies

of gendered citizenship and racialized national subjectivity. Primarily focusing on

the annual Miss America pageant, Banet-Weiser’s monograph is an important

feminist review 81 2005 book reviews132



contribution to gender studies, cultural studies, and American studies. Combining

archival analysis with ethnography, Banet-Weiser’s interdisciplinary examination of

the Miss America pageant expands upon feminist scholarship in the field of popular

culture.

As a ‘civic ritual’, a ‘mass-mediated spectacle’, and an instance of commodity

culture, Banet-Weiser notes that beauty pageants have often been discussed in

one of two ways. First, by many feminist scholars, beauty pageants are trivialized

as sites of spectacular commodity culture, within which women’s bodies are

displayed, exchanged, and consumed by an (inter)national audience. Second, by

conservative supporters of the pageant, the contests are arenas for the production

of narratives of autonomy and patriotic national subjectivity. In contrast to these

dominant discourses on pageantry, Banet-Weiser argues for a more complex

analysis of agency and subjectivity. Drawing upon interviews with pageant

contestants and organizers, Banet-Weiser demonstrates how the Miss America

pageant (which, importantly, functions as a major educational scholarship fund)

engenders multiple narratives of the national body.

Banet-Weiser analyses three critical moments in the history of the Miss America

pageant: the nomination of Vanessa Williams as the first black Miss America in

1984; the crowning of Bess Myerson as the first (and only) Jewish Miss America in

1945; and the selection of Heather Whitestone as the first Miss America with

disabilities in 1995. The crowning of these three contestants, Banet-Weiser

suggests, articulates profound disjunctures in nationalist representations of the

United States. If the seemingly democratic selection structure of the pageant

epitomizes the virtues of American liberalism, then these three winners are

ostensibly demonstration of the fact that America, and Americans, triumph over

differences of race, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Yet as Banet-Weiser

demonstrates, the selection of these contestants, and their treatment by the news

media thereafter, makes visible the failure of US multiculturalism. As the story of

Vanessa Williams makes amply clear, race and queer sexualities occupy an

especially difficult location at the pageant, as such differences are simultaneously

elided by, and made explicit within, the rhetorical organization of the pageant.

While Banet-Weiser delineates the contradiction between ‘strategies of assimila-

tion’ and ‘eroticizing difference’ (p. 135) that inform the Miss America pageant,

her reading is limited by her insistence that Williams, Myerson, and Whitestone

merely reinscribe the ‘primacy of whiteness celebrated within the pageant’ (p.

125). Rather than confirming whiteness as the primary ideological discourse of

Miss America, how else may we theorize the importance of Myerson, Williams, and

Whitestone as representative figures of the nation? In what ways do their

incorporation and eventual selection as winners of the Miss America pageant

demonstrate the primacy of ‘difference’ – racial, religious, and physical – as a

constitutive feature of US liberalism? Are there modes of performance that enable

book reviews feminist review 81 2005 133



us to understand how the pageant can simultaneously identify and disidentify with

nationalist ideologies of America?

Banet-Weiser’s discussion of the talent show and question-and-answer session

provides one way of rethinking the equation between Miss America and national

narratives of whiteness. Far from being a rote dialogue between pageant

organizers and contestants, the question-and-answer session is in fact critical

to providing ‘the architecture for the construction of the contemporary ideal

female subject y she is intelligent, goal-oriented, independent, feisty, and

committed to individualism’ (p. 88). Enunciated within a patriarchal (and

paternal) liberal discourse of individual subjectivity, the contestant who

participates in the question-and-answer session is both encouraged to speak, at

the same time that her speech is regulated by what Banet-Weiser calls

‘rehearsed spontaneity’. The pedagogical inculcation of contestants into

dominant discourses of taste (and therefore class) illustrates the manner in

which Miss America attempts to consolidate middle-class narratives of American

selfhood. At the same time, the contestants’ insistence on their capacity for

choice in these two segments of the pageant implies that contestants actively

negotiate their own desires and pleasures vis-à-vis the demands of pageant

organizers, thus embodying contestatory notions of agency. In this reading of

Miss America, the pageant does not hegemonically reproduce, or succeed in

disciplining, representations of gender, race, and sexuality. Rather, the

contestants re-inflect these narrative structures in order to realize new forms

of embodied agency. As contestants actively re-make themselves and the

meaning of the pageant, Miss America proves to be an ambivalent site on which

the ‘national dilemma’ (p. 9) of American multiculturalism and femininity

remains unresolved.

Bakirathi Mani

doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400249

Action chicks: new images of tough women in popular culture

Sherrie A. Inness (editor); Palgrave, London, 2004, ISBN: 1-4039-6396-7, d12.99 (Pbk)

Action Chicks is the latest in an impressive list of books in girls’ studies edited by

Sherrie A. Inness, Professor of English at Miami University, USA. It picks up on

themes of some of her earlier works, especially Tough Girls (1999), by investigating

the latest action heroines of (mainly US) popular culture. As with other Inness-

edited texts, Action Chicks brings together a diverse group of contributors, mainly

emerging academics, to provide fresh and engaging commentary on the meanings

of women as action heroines in TV, film, comics and toys. The key concern of this

feminist review 81 2005 book reviews134


	The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and national identity