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Zusatztext This book is a first. It is ethnography as much as sociology...it is destined to become something of a landmark in Gender Studies. Informationen zum Autor Karen Tice is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Illinois, 1998). Klappentext Higher education is an unlikely venue for showcasing ideals of femininity, yet campus beauty pageants have increased in popularity in a cultural marketplace conjoining personal empowerment with beauty and style. Karen Tice examines the desires and racial and political agendas that propel students onto collegiate catwalks. Zusammenfassung Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity. In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants such as "Miss Pride" and "Best Bodies on Campus" as well as why websites such as "Campus Chic" and campus-based etiquette and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and, sometimes, racial and political agendas to resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting terrain of class, race, religion, sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of education, feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity, class, and popular culture have on students, idealized masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Beauty and the Boar Chapter 2. Cleavage and Campus Life Chapter 3. Pride and Pulchritude: Campus Pageant Politics, 1920-1980 Chapter 4. Making the Grade in the New Millennium: Beauty, Platforming, Celebrity, and Normativity Chapter 5. "We Are Here: " Pageants as Racial "Homeplaces " and Ethnic Combat Zones Chapter 6. Class Acts and Class Work: Poise and the Polishing of Campus Queens Chapter 7. Flesh and Spirit: Bibles, Beauty, and Bikinis Chapter 8. Afterward: Class Work/Homework Endnotes Bibliography ...