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ELIZABETH B. BOYD
American and Southern Studies
Project Title: Southern Beauty: Region, Remembrance,
and the Feminine Ideal
Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a regional
gender ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency.
This project considers how three contemporary feminine rituals – sorority
rush, the beauty pageant, and the Confederate Pageant at Natchez,
Mississippi (a tourist production associated with the city’s antebellum home
tour) – interact with nostalgia to construct an imagined community of
privilege and whiteness. In this interdisciplinary study, femininity is a
powerful representational vehicle within the South’s racially charged visual
culture. Re-inscribing quite serious regional values in a festive, seemingly
frivolous mode, gender performance is necessary to the culture – to the
white South’s continued understanding of it as set apart. If the romantic
South is a fantasy, it is nevertheless one with a considerable hold on the
American imagination and on the region’s actors in particular. Southern
Beauty explores how nostalgic notions of race and region – of whiteness
as
southern-ness – are performed on and by the contemporary feminine body. By
examining the public performances of an elite subculture – those white,
middle- to upper-class young southern women whose bodily practices are
crucial to maintaining regional hierarchies of race and class – I reveal a
choreography of femininity central to reproducing southern distinctiveness.
My method is ethnographic, drawing on taped interviews with participants in
each of the three rituals, and on my own observation of the rituals. I frame
my informants’ testimony with the growing body of literature on collective
memory and identity, nostalgia, and commemoration, on the one hand, and the
diverse scholarship on gender in southern society, on the other. Feminist
theory, performance and tourist studies, works on collegiate culture and
emerging scholarship on whiteness and on gendered space further inform the
analysis.