Friday, 14 March 2008

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

14 comments:

  1. wow gene! your sense-making makes beauty pageants as social phenomenon worthy of critical investigation. i hope to see this published one day hehehe

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  2. Thanks Pam. Btw, thanks for that inquirer article on mimilanie marquez. I watched her interview on GMA 7 at kakaiba talaga siya. You'll just love melanie for her confidence in spite of her mangled English. Naisip ko lang, habang nagkakagulo ang mga 'English-loving' Filipinos sa pagkapanalo ni Janina, ang ating Presidente naman at natutuwa at for a moment our attention digressed from the issues hounding the NBN-ZTE deal at Spratlys! Hahaha!

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  3. let's hope the attention digression doesn't last long. however, there's another big event coming tomorrow. this time, it's for the barako's of our society: Pacquiao vs Marquez. one good thing with Pacquiao matches is that there is almost zero traffic and no crimes committed while Pacquiao is punching away at his opponent.

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  4. you're right sir gene that more than anything, it is a social-contest...plainly that the elitists are abhorring the fact that a marginalized "young, ordinary, and vulnerable" 17-year old can be entitled to such a prestigious and elitist position. now i think the rich are trying to "mold her into one of them" (by ms. vivienne tan's grant of a scholarship to janina as i heard on the news) so that her social status quo will not remain as marginalized for long.

    btw, i am guilty of being a so-called intellectual elitist in a majority of ways. but i would appreciate an enlightenment as to why i should veer away from such notions of the intellectual elite. =)

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  5. Thanks for your thoughts Reina. You asked, why should one veer away from intellectual elitism? One, because it is an unstable position and therefore reeking with insecurity. This insecurity is a major reason why the intellectual elite tend to sustain, produce, and reproduce inequality in a lot of spheres. Two, it is also delusional to think that one is cut above the rest or that one is superior and therefore has the privilege to speak for others. There is indignity in speaking for other people. It is presumptuous, it is unfair, and it is the reason why dominant ideas 'that history has already passed by' remain to circulate (e.g., English as the language of superiority.).
    Your observation that 'the rich are trying to mold (Janina) into one of them' is an evidence that beauty pageants remain a contested site and that it is still largely controlled by the rich and powerful. However, that doesn't stop participants like Janina to come up with creative strategies of resistance so that they do not end up reproducing what the elites have been holding on too all along.

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  6. *wipes nose from the glorious nosebleeding experience of reading this blog*

    I miss you, sir. Truly. And I pity my brother for not being your student kahit sa SPCM man lang. He knows you though he has only seen one icebag or was it Tarugo with you in it. I have painted in my brother's mind a picture of my alma mater as something that is larger than life. And of course because my mother has a crush on you *now I know why I had a gay bf, love for gays run in the family* she still asks me about you. Our entire family adores you, I believe. For this I truly pity those who would never have S.navera stories.

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  7. Thank you nina rita (aka uplbchic). Nakakatuwa naman ang family mo. Send my regards to your mom and to your brother who I'm sure is goodlooking (I hope I don't sound like a pedophile).

    By the way, I must not forget to mention that the blog has been partly inspired by Dr. T. Ruanni Tupaz's suggestion that I should extend my earlier blog to a 'sociopolitical analysis' of the recent Binibining Pilipinas beauty pageant. He did a paper on language and class (language wars in the Philippines) and although my memory fails me in recalling his assumptions, I think it has been one of the inspirations of this paper. Kaya Sir Tops, kung nababasa mo man ito, eto na ang aking modest attempt. Hahaha!

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  8. Well, I'm not sure if you're aware of this ensuing antagonization of the elite: http://www.delfindjmontano.blogspot.com/ but it somehow fits the description you put there as "a welcome threat that makes the play messy, dynamic, and definitely exciting!" :D

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  9. I was introduced to that site last week and since I could hardly relate to what party animals like Celine Lopez and Tim Yap do (the excesses of the rich and (in)famous), I didn't bother to take a serious look at it. But I must tell you I definitely enjoyed the male bodies splattered on the virtual pages. Haha.
    I'm sure there are other taken-for-granted notions in everyday life that are more worthy of critical investigation. People who appear in society pages have always appealed to me as irrelevant. Conrado de Quiros, in one of his pre-Gloria Macapagal Arroyo articles, regard them as his pet peeves.

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  10. Irrelevant is an apt word for that. I hardly read the papers. I'm sure the Lifestyle section has its helpful moments of information dissemination, but not everyone can relate to 3am cocktail parties in Italian suits. It's so easy for people to bring down a few grammatical issues like what transpired during the Bb Pilipinas pageant and yet ignore the fact that spoiled brats get to have their own newspaper columns and write about nothing just because they can.

    I think your two blog entries are the only ones I have seen that came to the defense of the pageant fiasco. Keep writing these powerful entries. We need this kind of angle. :D

    Yes, the bathtub shot in that mad blog was riveting. Haha.

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  11. Gene, umabot ka na ng acknowledgement. Mukhang nagkaka-identity crisis ka sa thesis mo ah hehehe Kung ayaw ni Lazar, isulat mo pa rin sa isang papel..."Language and class in the Philippines: A sociopolitics of beauty pageants". :) Kung gusto mong sumaya si Lazat, lagyan mo ng gender hehehe

    BTW, Bea Lorente's Ph.D. thesis on language and migration (which broadly has a similar framework as yours above) has just won the NUS Best Thesis award for Humanities and Social Sciences. It would be good if you and Aileen can follow suit!!! Yakang-yaka, Gene!

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  12. Wow! Congratulations to Bea. I only saw her once when she attended the seminar on 'living English' by two visiting american university professors at the department. Grabe naman. Nakakapressure. Yung straight A nga na sinimulan ni Aileen medyo nakakalagas na nang hair, yung thesis award pa. Hahaha!

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  13. Bravo, gene!! I like how you see the unorthodox victory of a non-elite pageant queen as a subversion of an idealized and perhaps elitist notion of "beauty and brains". I really think you have enough literature review and data to pursue a study on beauty pageants. ;)

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  14. -- kulang na lang field work! ;p

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