‘Be Graceful, Patient, Ever Prayerful’: Negotiating Femininity, Respect and the Religious Self in a Nigerian Beauty Pageant

Abstract

Beauty pageants in Nigeria have become highly popular spectacles, the crowned winners venerated for their beauty, success and ability to better society through charity. This paper focuses on the Carnival Calabar Queen pageant, highlighting how pageants, at the nexus of gender and the nation, are sites of social reproduction by creating feminine ideals. A divinely inspired initiative of a fervently Pentecostal First Lady, the pageant crowns an ambassador for young women's rights. While the queen must have ‘grace and beauty’ and be ‘ever prayerful’, the discussion unravels emic conceptions of feminine beauty, religiosity and respectability. Yet, young women also use pageantry as a ‘platform’ for success, hoping to challenge the double bind of gender and generation they experience in Nigeria. The discussion pays particular attention to how young women, trying to overcome the insecurities of (urban) Nigerian life, make choices to negotiate individualism with community, and piety with patriarchy. Ethnographically, this paper situates beauty pageants in the region's past and present practices that mould feminine subjectivities. Contributing young women's experiences to recent literature on the temporalities of African youth, the paper's explicit focus on how new subjectivities form through action illuminates important themes regarding agency, resistance and notions of the religious self. In doing so, it furthers current analyses of Pentecostalism, seeking a more nuanced understanding of gender reconfiguration and demonstrating how religious subjects can be formed outside church institutions.

Beauty and the Bikini: Embodied Respectability in Nigerian Beauty Pageants

“…In terms of personal subjectivity, scholars have emphasized the importance of complicating agency, in conversation with a larger feminist critique that primarily views beauty contests as reinforcing the sexualized objectification of women's bodies (Arnfred 2015;Banet-Weiser 1999;Cohen et al 1996;Craig 2002;Oyěwùmí 2005). Juliet Gilbert (2015) argues that contestants of the Carnival Calabar Queen (CCQ) contest gain some personal success through developing patronage networks, although they still must navigate economic insecurity, patriarchy, and gerontocracy in urban Nigeria. Sabrina Billings's (2013) work on Tanzanian beauty pageants connects linguistic politics to pageantry, highlighting how contestants use English in competitions to position themselves as elite and cosmopolitan, hoping to eke out successful lives amid structural inequalities.…”

“…A common theme that runs through beauty pageant scholarship is a focus on how pageants consolidate and challenge boundaries of respectability through morality, chastity, and admiration. For example, Gilbert (2015) notes that the CCQ beauty queens craft feminine selves as Godfearing, caring, and hopeful for the nation. Thomas (2006) focuses on racial respectability in interwar South Africa through debates over women's bodies.…”

Classified beauty: Goods and bodies in Brazilian women’s magazines

“…For instance, beauty ideals constructed in women’s magazines, particularly in advertisements, are examined in countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States (Frith et al., 2005; Jung and Lee, 2009). Also, the representations of young Nigerian women as conceived by beauty pageants and expressed by magazines is the focus of a recent ethnographic study (Gilbert, 2015). These multiple cultural contexts, their similarities and differences in relation to Brazil, may offer grounds to further inquiries and investigations.…”

“Let Alone at Miss Universe”: Siera Bearchell as Embodiment of Cultural Resistance of Femininity in Miss Universe

“…Meanwhile, Gilbert's research tries to investigate how femininity is negotiated in beauty pageant. Since femininity may also refer to women's domestic matters or women becoming "angel of the house" (The Gale Group, 2019), Gilbert (2015) has argued that the way women become the angel of the house as a symbol of femininity can be negotiated through the constant performance of making the pageantry as a platform for This research attempts to examine that Si era Bearchell, as the Canadian plus size contender in Miss Universe pageant, in some ways, embodies the cultural resistance of femininity. This research focuses on the plus size side as a form to counter the normalization of American slender ideal glorified within the Miss Universe pageant.…”