Book Review. Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life

Abstract

While much has been written about beauty pageants and their history in America, author Karen Tice focuses her efforts on the neglected spectacle of campus pageantry. Her book Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life, “attempts to redress a lack of attention and understanding of the dynamics of race, gender, and class in variant student cultures by exploring campus beauty pageantry on both historically Black and predominantly White campuses” (p. 9). Queens of Academe is written in an engaging manner that uses humor as a way to pull the reader into the surprisingly complex subject of campus beauty pageants. This use of humor is immediately evident in some of the chapter titles, such as “Cleavage and Campus Life,” and “Beauty and the Boar.” The latter is the title of the opening chapter in which Tice relates the uproar that ensued at a private religious college after a beauty contestant performed a lasso routine as her talent, lassoing a lifesized stuffed pig. In spite of this eyebrow raising introduction to the world of college beauty pageants, Tice’s aim is not to belittle the enterprise of pageantry, nor its participants. Rather, Tice situates her book “within the wide-ranging feminist project of theorizing gendered, classed, and racialized bodies and debates about beauty” (p. 10). Beginning with a detailed history of beauty pageants in general, Tice explains how the nation’s obsession with beauty and the feminine ideal permeated the college campus, resulting in colleges hosting beauty pageants as early as the 1920s. By tracing the development of beauty pageants on historically Black campuses and universities (HBCU) and predominantly