Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual and Memory in the Modern South. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022, 191 p.
Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual and Memory in the Modern South. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd. Athens: University of Georgia Press, ISBN 9780820362328, 191 p.
Index terms
Mots-clés :
bal des débutantes, beauté, concours, performance, race, sororités, southern studies, Sud des États-UnisKeywords:
American South, beauty, contest, debutante ball, gender, performance, race, sorority rush, southern studiesEditor's notes
Index nominum
Christopher Lloyd, Steven E. Nash, Charles Reagan Wilson
Full text
1The connection between the South of the United States and the topic of memory has been an inexhaustible object of study. Over the past decade, Southern Studies scholars such as Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart (Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the American South, 2019) and Susan T. Falck (Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865–1941, 2019) have explored the intricacies of memory in the American South from a historical standpoint, while Christopher Lloyd’s Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (2018) focused on the effects of racial violence on the representations of the body in the 21st century. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd’s Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual and Memory in the Modern South both belongs to this tradition and renews it thanks to its chief focus on performance. Indeed, a Southerner herself, Boyd chose to turn her attention to the highly competitive milieu of the South and the place of women in this system. This interdisciplinary analysis sheds light on the powerful influence of gender performance on the notion of region: Boyd argues that sorority rush, debutante balls and beauty pageants – the three types of performance studied in Southern Beauty – all play a paramount role in the construction and in the conservation of the South. Over the course of an introduction, three chapters and an epilogue, the author makes use of oral history, firsthand observation and archival research so as to deliver a compelling account of gender performance in a much-fantasized region.
2As Boyd writes, “[w]here less is spoken, more is performed” (10). This paradox acts as a guiding thread in Southern Beauty. By definition, performance is hyper-visible: whether it happens on stage or on university grounds, it always takes place out in the open. According to Boyd, it is precisely this accessible, unmistakable nature which has fostered backward-looking narratives: gender performances have allowed young White females to build and solidify a narrative ingrained in the Lost Cause ideology. Indeed, the introduction provides a historical overview of such performances, starting right after the Civil War. Then, tableaux and pageants staged by women idealized the antebellum period; and “[a]s Lost Cause commemorative events dwindled with the passing of the last Confederate veterans, public performances of White femininity increasingly assumed the mantle of regional representation” (20). White southern women carried on the legacy of the Confederacy and reprised the roles of the Belle or of the Southern Lady, two powerful female archetypes embedded in the culture of the region. They performed a sense of place, and granted stability to an identity that was eventually challenged by an era of change in the relations between blacks and whites (with the end of segregation) and between women and men (with the rise of second-wave feminism).
3Entitled “Sister Act,” the first chapter is dedicated to sorority rush as a “feminine stratification ritual” (38). With sororities of the University of Mississippi (Kappa Delta House and Alpha Omicron Pi House, Chi O House) as examples, the author asserts that southern sorority rush, in spite of its apparent fluff, momentarily resurrects the antebellum Southern lady and reaffirms class and race structures. Boyd first describes the process (young females are invited to rush, then actives make cuts until the final ceremony in which girls are officially accepted into the sorority) and then provides a historical account of rushes in the South. She traces back the beginning of sorority rush to the later part of the nineteenth century, when women would form literary college societies to imitate men’s. By repeating the same ritual annually, sorority rush maintains the antebellum order, making “Old South exis[t] ephemerally in the New” (41).
4The ritualistic nature of sorority rush is also to be found in beauty pageants, which work in similar ways: their annual display acts as a regular reminder of southern hierarchies. This performance is at the heart of the second chapter, “Miss Demeanor.” Opening on the Miss Alabama 2007 contest, the chapter provides a description of the event as well as interviews of contestants and a historical overview of both southern and national beauty pageants. Just like sorority rush enacts a biased perception of southern history imbued in nostalgia, “the southern historical pageant amounted to an elaborate spectacle of social position that distorted history in favor of an idealized version of the past” (74). With its May Day celebrations, Twelfth Night parties and Mardi Gras balls, beauty pageants are a true “regional pastime” (70). As a matter of fact, the “cult of beauty” is inherent to Southern identity. Boyd reminds the reader of Charles Reagan Wilson’s demonstration in Judgement and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1995) and argues that “[i]n beauty pageants the expectations associated with White southern womanhood – virtue, purity, deference were mapped and measured on the body” (71). Such contests provided a sanctified space for the Lost Cause ideology to prosper in plain sight, despite the harsh critics of second-wave feminism and the 1968 Miss America protest. Pageants did operate some changes to pass as feminist, but they remained conservative to the core: they became “postfeminist” (84). The chapter also delves into the issue of race in southern beauty pageants as they too continued to display white beauty above all. The contests gradually granted more space to black women, but the latter were still seen as a “visual aberration” (85). All in all, the second chapter follows the same pattern as the first one and delivers a convincing study of beauty pageants in the light of gender, race, ritual, and memory.
5“Hoop Dreams,” the last chapter of Southern Beauty, pursues the exploration of the enactment of Southern identity but shifts its focus to southern balls and tourism. The opening scene is that of a Confederate Pageant in Natchez, Mississippi. The tableaux presented between 1932 and 2014 amounted to a romantic fantasy which represented the city as “a place of gentility, festivity, and harmonious social relations” (107). The chapter studies the performances aimed at tourists and the representational challenges they faced over the years, especially in regards to the depiction of race (the cast was all-white until the 1960s). Boyd notes that the pageant was both aimed at tourists and at the citizenry of Natchez: the idealized version of antebellum history displayed in the show allowed spectators to reaffirm ideas about the “moonlight and magnolias” South and was an opportunity for southerners to claim their southernness. In her comparison of sorority rush, the beauty pageant and the Confederate Pageant, the author argues that physical beauty was especially important in the latter because the performance “explicitly tied remembrance to gender performance” (110). This performance is, according to Boyd, woven into a larger “pilgrimage movement” (115): Southern sites such as plantation homes and Civil war battle sites as well as Confederate Pageants are all part of an Old South experience offer. From Natchez to the bigger picture of southern tourism, the chapter explores the role of Confederate Pageants on a national and a very local scale, offering a precise account of the impact of this type of performance on society.
6Southern Beauty focuses on the frivolous, a sub-history which tells an alternative story, but is anything but frivolous. Boyd provides the reader with a clear, well-written analysis which definitely fills a gap in the field of Southern studies. In addition, the book echoes and illuminates contemporary audiovisual productions, from Insatiable (Lauren Gussis, 2018-2019), a TV show set in Georgia and revolving around beauty pageants, to HBO’s Bama Rush (Rachel Fleit, 2023), a documentary about sorority rush at the University of Alabama. Southern Beauty is a very much welcome addition to Southern studies and will be of interest to scholars and non-scholars alike thanks to its accessible prose, its rich bibliography, the diversity of the techniques employed, and the relevance of its object of study. Indeed, in the epilogue, Boyd embeds the rituals she analyzed in the context of the Charleston (2015) and Charlottesville (2017) attacks and of George Floyd’s murder (2020). She concedes that despite these terrible events and the tearing down of Confederate monuments, gender performance remains mostly unchanged in the South. Nevertheless, as the title of the epilogue, “Resilient Routine”, suggests, the performances under study can be altered and have the power to “change the South” (146). Boyd allows the reader to dive deep into an overlooked part of history and society, and proves that looks do matter.
References
Electronic reference
Eva Gourdoux, “Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual and Memory in the Modern South. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022, 191 p.”, Caliban [Online], 71-72 | 2024, Online since 20 August 2024, connection on 12 May 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/13342; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12dmx
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