Southern Beauty

Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South

By: Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd

Narrated by: Elisabeth Ashby

Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance.

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties' racial work or their investment in it.

Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion—stylized and predictable but ephemeral—has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

©2022 The University of Georgia Press (P)2022 Tantor

Needs an editor

Rambling observations.
No insight on how to make southern society better.
The book seemed more about her issues.
No interviews with any of the people she is condemning but tells us what these people are thinking.
I wish I hadn’t bought the book.