Becoming politicians: Indigenous pageants as training sites for public life

Abstract

AbstractFeminist scholars typically analyze beauty pageants as spaces where women are objectified, sexualized, and pressured to conform. Yet, many in the Ecuadorian Amazon say that Indigenous pageants are ideal places to begin a career in politics. While interviews with pageant contestants reveal that many do not imagine themselves as politicians, examining Indigenous pageants as sites where women fashion new versions of themselves—versions that are more comfortable speaking in public, performing stereotypical Indigeneity, and taking bold stands on political issues—we can understand them as sites of “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017). Rather than simply emphasizing the desires of contestants, as other approaches to becoming have done, we analyze a series of additional, intersecting desires—international, national, capitalist, Indigenist, and familial—that work to shape pageant performances and performers. Building on Saba Mahmood's work, we emphasize the social embeddedness and construction of desire rather than its opposition to subject formation.