Girlhood Beauty Pageants And Power Summary

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Girlhood, Beauty Pageants, and Power: Trailer Park Royalty attempts to inquiry an array of hard-hitting, yet crucial questions necessary to uncover the various complexities surrounding the beauty pageant subculture within what Thompson-Hardy claims to be Southern rural America. Furthermore, the author drew a link between agents of power and structural practices and how they both maintain dominance and shape the subculture to formulate young contestants identities, and overall “girlhood”. Debates and critical discourse are nothing new to child beauty pageant participation, where many point to the organization as the location to blame for its detrimental influence, problematic sexualization of young girls for hopeful monetary gain, and pushed …show more content…

They also never clarified whether their analysis would solely focus on pageants of a smaller scale or rural families who were regular participants and would commute outside of rural places for the sake of pageantry. There also appeared to be no thought in the collection of media that was representative of what they frequently stated to be “Southern rural beauty pageants” let alone contemporary beauty pageant culture as a majority of their media references are dated and may not be adequately illustrative of how beauty pageants and culture operate today. Lastly, it would be erroneous to suggest that media outlets such as movies which are fictional and reality television as well as documentaries which are dramatically edited and produced to promote exaggerated depictions of the topic could effectively get at their top research question of power dynamics within the subculture. This is not to entirely disregard their inclusion of media as it was essential to answer parts of their research, but it did not do justice in answering how real-life experiences with beauty pageantry construct girlhood and identity for rural contestants and their

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