Beauty pageants: subversions, reaffirmations

This is somewhat a rejoinder to the post I made on March 11. The issues that I am going to raise are actually a bit marginal to the main issues I foisted earlier.

Thanks to Aileen for taking special notice of the idea that beauty pageants can actually become a site to challenge linguistic dominance. Now, I’m beginning to seriously consider the idea that the pageants do more than that. Pageants can actually be seen as a contested site, a site of struggle between social actors including the so-called elite and the marginalized (This may sound contrived – and please pardon me on this – but this is helping me rehearse my mind for the paper I am writing for my graduate module – not related to pageants, though.).

My point is that pageants cannot just be seen from a monolithic standpoint or be viewed simplistically as anti-women (usually by critics of post-feminism) or  pro-female empowerment (by delusional owners of beauty pageant enterprises and a lot of post-feminists of course). Somebody has raised in one of the forums that the Philippine’s crazy passion for beauty pageants is a ‘subversion of the semi-feudal society’ – which may be the case – but the analysis needs to be ‘complexified’ (I’m afraid Lorie and Angie will raise their eyebrows for this word!) as there are a lot of nuances involved in the pageant arena. The case of Janina San Miguel winning a crown may be a case in point (notice the hedging as I cannot be categorical at this point).  She comes from a simple family (she says in a TV interview that her father is a jeepney (or is it taxi?) driver), perhaps a marginal group who may have little access to public platforms where members can articulate their own views about themselves and their relation to their immediate and remote contexts. The beauty pageant, though produced, owned, and controlled by the social elite (e.g., Madam Stella Marquez de Araneta and company, corporate sponsors, Ambassadors and popular public personalities as judges) and though driven by elitist interests (the dole out mentality euphemized as charity is just screamingly obvious), becomes a venue where young women from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds can create small but ‘revolutionary’ steps to redefine their identities and articulate/express (in a variety of ways – mangled English, native tongue, grace under pressure, self-affirmation in the face of mockery) their often muted/silenced viewpoints or perspectives.  

There is no denying though that the pageant is largely controlled by elitist/dominant discourses – hyper-sexualized women strutting on stage, formulaic questions and answers that reaffirm social hierarchies, dominant beliefs and values – but the women who participate in this arena can not be simply regarded as unthinking subjects that are duped to reproduce dominant perspectives. In fact, the answers of candidates 8 and 18 to their respective questions (one on the most difficult problem she has faced and the other on her concept of a perfect family) were answers that challenged the prevailing idealized notions of family in the Philippine context. Both girls come from ‘broken families’ and have been very honest about how they see or appreciate such condition in a different way.  They have somehow broken a type of essentialism and this makes them less pageant patty.

Janina San Miguel’s victory, because of her inelegant English (I find her answer “My family is the most important persons (sic) in my life" acceptable. At best, it is indirect and enthymematic if seen through the lens of classical rhetoric. In other words, she allows her audience to infer from her utterance which is a mark of a genius! Hahaha. Of course, this is contrived, because I have become a fan and staunch supporter of Janina), has disturbed quite a number of people, especially members of the so-called intellectual elite who perpetuate the language ideology that English is a superior language or that knowledge of English makes one intellectually superior. Her victory was seen not just as a fly in the ointment but as a subversion of idealized notions of ‘beauty and brains’, of the perfect female representative of the Filipino race. Janina somehow represents the subject position of the marginalized – young, ordinary, vulnerable.  How can she possibly snatch a crown previously worn by English-speaking mestizas or morenas (think of Ruffa Guttierez, Karla Bautista, Mafae Yunon) trained from the elite schools of the country or overseas? She is the subversion of the idealized Miss Philippines-World candidate and that is utterly unacceptable to some members of the intellectual elite (not that a lot of them care about beauty pageants.).

This is not to downplay the idea that asymmetrical power relations exist in beauty pageants – the elites like Donald Trump, Julia Morley, and Madam Stella own, produce, dictate the ideas that ought to circulate in their respective (business) enterprises. This does not however mean that the candidates, their trainers, the noisy and vibrant communities of pageant fans driven by communal/consensual dreaming, and the audience at large do not have the power to redefine (in the words of Homi Bhabha, ‘insinuate, interrupt, interrogate, and antagonize’) the dominant discourse/s of the elite. They have the power, and although they may be constrained to use it, they pose a welcome threat that makes the play messy, dynamic, and definitely exciting!

Photo credits: Boyet Blas for mabuhaybeauties.com

Binibining Janina and her majesty's 'Living English'

So-called ‘English communication skills experts’ in the Philippines are having a field day mocking the newly crowned Binibining Pilipinas-World, Janina San Miguel.  I must admit that I too cringed at the thought of her representing the Philippines in the world's oldest and biggest beauty pageant to be held in October this year. The video clip of her Q and A during the pageant is of course the current object of mockery and derision among (pwede bang amongst para beauty pageant patty?) Filipinos back home and in diaspora.

While struggling to write my analysis and discussion for my independent research project, I thought of scribbling down my two cents worth on this matter (which is embarrassingly of great importance to people who regard pageants as part of their communal dreaming!):

Well, Janina San Miguel’s utterance is what some applied linguists would call ‘living English’. I’d say it is an example of English in use by ‘subalterns’ or ‘postcolonial subjects’.  At best, it is a modest form of resistance against the colonial tongue (I kind of loved it when she maintained her poise and exuded that annoying smugness – or should I call it chutzpah? – after her last clause, ‘…but I said dot (with emphasis) my pamily is the most important persons (very alliterative!) in my (with matching prolonged diphthong [ai]) life’). Janina has disturbingly ‘recontextualized’ English – has ‘colonized’ it so to speak – to the consternation of those who adhere to the unstable notion that there is only one way of speaking English, and that is, by using the Standard World English (which is a very contentious construct anyway.).

I would have loved, though, to see a more radical form of resistance in Binibining Pilipinas Beauty Pageant which seems to put a lot of premium on English speaking skills (On the contrary, international beauty pageants do not necessarily require English proficiency. The last two Miss Universe winners – from Puerto Rico and Japan – had atrocious English skills when they won. Puerto Rico’s English was horrible in her interview clip in the Miss U website but she won, anyway. She spoke Spanish on the pageant night.).I would have been very impressed if the 17-year old Janina spoke in Taglish or used code meshing the way Binibining Pilipinas World Marilen Espino did in the national pageant in 1992. That would have been very ‘revolutionary’ of Janina. And that would have been, to my mind, permissible since she is not in the context of an English classroom with an English teacher warped in shaky paradigms of second language teaching. Hahahaha!

I guess Janina just didn’t have the presence of mind or didn’t have the character to rock the ‘establishment’ during the pageant. Seriously, Janina should just have been given the first-runner up honors because that means she can still compete in the future and be better prepared for the Q and A. Or she should have just been given a Binibining Pilipinas International title since Miss International just requires delegates to present prepared speeches during the pageant. But then, the decision has been made and whether ‘English-loving’ Filipinos like it or not, she is going to represent the Philippines in Miss World in Ukraine (barring unforeseen circumstances, of course). She is one lucky bi…girl!

Go Janina! Go for Miss World! You have my support (as if it mattered.)! Hahaha!