The Rhetoric of Black Bodies

Abstract

What is the significance of a national organization that promotes Americanness, but often fails to reflect the racial composition of a diverse American nation? How has its history of excluding black people helped reinforce negative cultural images of blackness? These questions point toward the complex and changing place beauty occupies in American culture in the midst of the nation’s changing ethnic composition. Despite gains within the past few decades, people of color are still not sufficiently represented in such pageants, which leads to an examination of the following: What female bodies are encouraged or allowed to participate in the pageant? Whose construction of beauty and the beautiful body defines America and its national identity? And what happens with the female bodies that are premarked with nonnational and nonrepresentational beauty?1