Abstract
Even as beauty pageants have receded from Americans’ public consciousness, they continue to captivate audiences worldwide. Oluwakemi Balogun’s book, Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, captures some of the magic and glamour of beauty pageants while also demonstrating their effects and relevance on national and global politics and economics. Beauty Diplomacy offers an engaging investigation of the beauty pageant industry in Nigeria, tracing beauty pageants through the realms of entertainment and business as well as soft power and diplomacy. The monograph advances a growing body of work on beauty as a site to explore the tensions between globalization and national identity. Balogun’s contribution locates beauty pageants within a specific political, historical, and economic context in Nigeria amid a trajectory of “rising Africa.” At the same time, she problematizes the straightforward progress narrative that this label might suggest. Beauty Diplomacy demonstrates how there is much of symbolic and substantive import in pageantry.
Nigeria hosts several beauty pageants, aiming to attract attention by appealing to different niches. Beauty Diplomacy describes two pageant organizations: the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria, which touted its ties to international pageants, and Queen Nigeria, which emphasized representing and unifying the nation. Comparing them illustrates the variety of aims and interests behind pageants. As Balogun reminds us, beauty pageants are competitions, culminating in the crowning of winners.
Beauty can be a unifying force for an emerging nation by showcasing unity in diversity, staging coexistence and harmony. The notion of beauty diplomacy emphasizes the positioning of women as cultural ambassadors within a diverse nation and to other nations. This positioning further allows a country to adopt and assert a position of global relevance and stature. Balogun argues that “nation-states are defined in part through embodied debates about globalization and the cultural politics of nation-building” (p. 228). This argument is abundantly supported in the Nigerian case, but it also speaks to the experiences of other emerging nations. When Nigeria seeks success on the global stage of beauty pageants, it is not emulating the West, but rather turning to countries like India or Venezuela for inspiration. Beauty Diplomacy connects the micro and macro levels of beauty culture while also drawing attention to the mediating efforts of industry and nation; Balogun describes beauty diplomacy as providing “a middle-out rather than a top-down perspective” (p. 18), with the industry selectively allying with the state to advance its aims and skirting the state when it believes that would better serve its purposes.
Beauty pageants are also sites of contestation about globalization and national identity. Some feminist scholars have criticized international beauty pageants for exporting western beauty ideals from the United States to the rest of the world. Balogun offers evidence that Nigerian beauty contestants and their groomers and handlers pursue a different set of beauty ideals to appeal to an international audience. However, she also points out that the participation of emerging nations like Nigeria in international beauty pageants can broaden perceptions of beauty and increase awareness of what the country has to offer; at least some ethnic authenticity is desirable, as a marker of exoticism, but also as a marker of difference to be consumed. Accordingly, even as they globalize, nationalize, or regionalize notions of appearance, beauty pageants have also revived interest in some traditions and local handicrafts in Nigeria.
The staging of particular beauty pageants provides the opportunity for national and global reckonings about a country’s position on the world stage. This is made especially clear in the book’s last chapter, which discusses the 2002 Miss World pageant that was slated to occur in Abuja, Nigeria. The unraveling and cancellation of the pageant, after protests from contestants and human rights organizations, illustrates how pageants are not just an economic matter for individuals or host countries, but also very much affect cultural and political perceptions of a place. Beauty Diplomacy illuminates Nigeria’s symbolic political and economic status within Africa and its anxiety about failing to live up to its economic and political potential as well as its connections to the larger world.
Of course, beauty pageants are displays of ideal femininity. Balogun shows how beauty is wrapped up in assumptions about class, racial and ethnic authenticity, and morality as much as physical appearance or national identity. Throughout Beauty Diplomacy, the sometimes-contradictory gendered expectations of beauty contestants are on stark display. Beauty pageant events like cooking competitions enshrine particular versions of femininity that may be at odds with the actual experiences and class status of contestants. In the Queen Nigeria pageant, for instance, the cooking challenge includes shopping in a local market as well as preparation of a traditional dish representing contestants’ Nigerian state—even as many middle-class Nigerian families rely on domestic workers for cooking and increasingly patronize fast food restaurants. Domesticity is constructed as an integral part of Nigerian womanhood and is literally staged for evaluation in the pageant.
At the same time, beauty pageants offer unique economic trajectories for young women, including the prospect of upward mobility. Accordingly, contestants invest considerable resources in adjusting their appearance and deportment to boost their likelihood of visibility and victory. Balogun describes the community it takes to create a pageant winner in Nigeria, from groomers, make-up artists, and photographers to the “sponsors” who finance contestants’ expensive runs. For pageant winners, a new journey of navigating gendered and classed expectations begins; they have to live up to the glamorous image indefinitely, without necessarily having the financial resources to do so. Participating in the public sphere and leveraging their moral authority for the possibility of upward economic mobility, beauty queens must toe a difficult line, with missteps resulting in charges of elitism or sexual promiscuity. Beauty queens manage these tensions in different ways: many remain in Nigeria pursuing careers in fashion, beauty products, media, or other domains, though some leave Nigeria in pursuit of regional and global fame in similar industries.
Ultimately, however, beauty is not universally acclaimed by Balogun’s respondents, even as a strategy for improving Nigeria’s image. Several respondents express ambivalence about beauty pageants and contradictory attitudes toward pageant contestants. In some cases, this ambivalence reflects uneasiness about young women striving for upward mobility. But these attitudes also echo and are complicated by attitudes toward the nation and the past.
Beauty Diplomacy is based on more than 12 months of fieldwork that Balogun conducted around Nigeria. She incorporates interviews with an array of industry players as well as those less directly involved for context on beauty pageants’ perception within Nigeria. Throughout the monograph, she provides compelling reflections on how she leveraged her positionality in interactions with respondents to better understand the complex social dynamics that she seeks to explain.
It can be challenging to trace how abstract concepts like globalization or nationalism appear in everyday life. But beauty pageants are an excellent site to explore cultural meaning-making. Beauty Diplomacy is a welcome addition to scholarship in global and transnational sociology as well as sociology of the body, embodiment, and gender.