“I want to … let my country shine”: Nationalism,development,and the geographies of beauty

Abstract

There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts.

Keywords

Geographies of beauty Africa feminist geography pageants tourism development

Let the Pearl Shine: Introducing Miss Tourism 2017

In the mountains of Kabale, Uganda, the crowd awaits. Local elites, celebrities, and government officials, including the Minister of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, enjoy a beauty pageant. The 2017 Miss Tourism Kigezi pageant is held in a beautiful region in the furthest southwest corner of the country. Guests sit at white cloth tables, cheering, sometimes jeering, drinking local wine adorned with the pageant’s slogan: “Let the Pearl Shine.”

Behind the scenes, young women work hard under pressure. An organizer runs through the night’s program, giving directions to her staff. A former contestant, now working for the pageant’s logistics team, motivates the participants. Beauticians paint nails, dress contestants, and style hair in high, straightened ponytails, well-equipped with Radiant Cosmetics hair products, one of the pageant’s sponsors. Hopeful participants, like Fortunate Natukunda, exchange tips anxiously. For three hours they will dance, perform talents, model gowns, answer tourism-based questions, and demonstrate fluency in several languages and regional cultures. Fortunate has her hand-tailored “national costume” ready. She works with her peers to ensure they are ready to grace the stage, to shine.

Winston Churchill is credited with naming Africa’s “Pearl” during his visit to Uganda in 1907. The name has stuck, like most enduring ad copy, because of its semiotic openness, its sexual ambiguity, and its familiarity. Indeed, there is a far longer colonial legacy depicting parts of the African continent as exotic, rare, beautiful, hidden, and thus worthy of exploration, including through tourism (Neumann, 2002; Wainaina, 2006). This legacy is deeply sexualized and gendered, relying on women’s bodies in varied, distinct, and significant ways (Jarosz, 1992; McEwan, 2000). Tonight, it’s the turn of Fortunate and her fellow competitors. She finishes as the first runner-up, but her talents catch the eyes of representatives from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Fortunate is named the “Face of Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation 2017.” One of just four habitats for wild mountain gorillas left in the world, she will work over the next year to promote tourism there.

Today’s efforts to promote “The Pearl” might seem frivolous, but the stakes are high. For Fortunate, and the hundreds of young, typically college-educated, women like her, pageants promise socioeconomic advancement in a country with few opportunities to shine. After three decades of extensive neoliberal structural adjustment, deep and sustained government cutbacks prompted rising school tuition, student debt, and reduced employment opportunities in government-paid positions and in industrial and agricultural sectors that were once supported by the state. With little protection, Uganda battles devastating international terms of trade (Wiegratz, 2010). While elite wealth has shot up, 41.7% of people still live in poverty (The World Bank Group, 2016), prompting increases in economic inequality (Christian and Namaganda, 2018). In this three-decade period of economic austerity, new ways to market and sell the country are a priority. In Uganda, like many other formerly colonized countries undergoing extensive neoliberal structural adjustment (for examples see Mollett, 2014; Mullings, 1999), tourism has become the panacea for growth and “modernization.” As such, these pageants are not simply a sideshow. They cultivate new kinds of development actors: beautiful ambassadors for the country’s tourism industry.

In this article, we demonstrate the centrality of beauty to Uganda’s neoliberal development strategy; beauty that is interwoven with gendered nationalist imperatives, and mirrored across the Global South. In particular, we show how neoliberal ideologies of self- and national improvement, used to attract tourists, promote investment, and cultivate consumer markets, center the visage of beauty: beautiful bodies, minds, and nations. We trace how this move, in line with wider neoliberal capital and development imperatives, relies on the labor of young, precariously positioned women. Centering Miss Tourism Uganda, we attend to the beauty labor undertaken to discipline one’s own body or the bodies of others in hegemonic norms of beauty and bodily comportment. This includes cosmetics application, hairstyling, clothing design and tailoring, rigorous exercise, modeling training, and the additional paid labor required to fund materials and make time for this work. We show how this labor is part of wider neoliberal development imperatives that rely heavily on women’s bodies and particular, emplaced, ideals of women’s beauty. Attending to this kind of corporeal beauty labor makes clear how, in neoliberal times, young women make-up to make-do.

Our data emerges from a larger research project on neoliberal globalization and the beauty trade (Faria and Falola, 2020; Whitesell and Faria, 2019), conducted between 2015 and 2018. This includes archival analysis of twenty five years of pageant coverage in two national newspapers, five focus groups, and nineteen interviews with pageant organizers and contestants. This was complemented by analysis of eight video recordings of regional and national pageants, additional interviews, and participant observation at the 2017 Miss Buganda and Miss Tourism Kigezi pageants by Elledge. We begin by detailing three distinct but connected bodies of feminist literature on gendered nationalism and development, neoliberalized labor, and geographic and sociological work on beauty. Ugandan neoliberal shifts and the Miss Tourism Uganda pageant, help us put these bodies of work into conversation. We use this framework to examine the gendering of labor, nationalism, and development in the pageant. We center four spaces where young women labor for the nation: behind the scenes; on the pageant stage; on the road following their award; and in Uganda’s growing fashion and beauty industries. In each we detail varied beauty labors, linking these intensive corporeal efforts to nationalist and neoliberal goals of tourism-based development. We conclude with a call for attention to the postcolonial and political-economic geographies of beauty more widely in our discipline.

Tourism labor and the “body work” of beauty: Feminist foundations

There is a longstanding, robust, and complex body of feminist work tracing the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s and the gendered formations manifest in the new international divisions of labor at that time. Neoliberalism is a now-globalized form of state and self-governance, a power-laden discursive and material ideology, and set of policies that valorize liberalized economic systems, market competition, privatization, and entrepreneurial individualism (Sparke, 2013). Ong’s (1991) review of literature, already burgeoning at that time, lays out what has since become heterodox economic commonsense: economic slowdown in the United States and increased competition from Europe and Japan in the late 1970s dovetailed with the dramatic rise of neoliberal hegemonies across the Global South (Eisenstein, 2005). This new economic norm was also relational, imbricated with ideational shifts in the United States and UK that were new, but also entrenched in colonial pasts (Massey, 2005). The crisis of capital in the Global North drove emergent neoliberal doctrine across the Global South (and increasingly now the Global North), which rose to hegemony via the mechanism of debt (Witter, 2004). Trade liberalization became a central structural economic demand on receipt of desperately needed loans provided by the IMF and World Bank. The new neoliberal “Washington Consensus” made possible a dramatic spatial fix for capital and its voracious appetite for cheap, un-unionized labor and deregulated manufacturing environments (Harvey, 2001; Sparke, 2013). Feminist economic scholars showed that the resultant and dramatic production relocation relied on the devalued labor of apparently “docile” women, positioned through colonial and sexist discourses, to be “naturally” attuned to such exploitation (Elson and Pearson, 1981). Widely demonstrated in the electronics and textiles sectors, and with distinct geographic particularities (Aguilar, 1987; Enloe, 2004; Ong, 1990; Wright, 2004), these political-economic shifts saw the rise of a “flexible,” feminized, racialized new international division of labor. Feminist scholars assert that this is inherent to, not a side-product of, capital crisis (Pratt, 1999; Roberts, 2013, 2015; Wright, 2004). As Eisenstein asserts, “That the incorporation of women in the market economy is a requirement for effective economic development has now become part of the conventional wisdom of globalization” (2005: 511). The contradiction here is that central to this form of economic development is both this recognition of the value of women, and a vicious form of their devaluation making possible the withdrawal of state social services and structures upon which women most depend.

The ideology and practice of development, what Lawson (2007) calls “(D)development,” is not isolated from these political-economic shifts. A large body of critical scholarship—feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and decolonial—has long interrogated their connected lives (Lawson, 2007; Parpart, 1995; Roberts, 2014), their colonial (Rodney, 1981) and heteropatriarchal grounds (Oswin, 2007), and how improvement, modernization, even “empowerment” efforts mirror and fuel capitalist endeavors (AWID, 2002; Eisenstein, 2005; Kabeer, 1994; Li, 2007; Talcott, 2003).Part of this body of work examines the gendered contours of nationalism and development (McIlwaine and Datta, 2004; Mollett, 2017), including through tourism strategies (Babb, 2012; Boonabaana, 2014; Torres and Momsen, 2005). Particularly relevant, Boonabaana’s work underscores the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) intense focus on, and optimism around, tourism-as-development strategies in the Global South. She argues that the WTO’s stance typifies neoliberal assertions that tourism serves as an “economic powerhouse,” increasing GDP and employment opportunities (Boonabaana, 2014: 27). This assertion seems enticing. Yet, as she and other feminist scholars show, the move relies heavily and often deleteriously on the labor of women, particularly women of color (Boonabaana, 2014; Jaiteh, 2018; Mollett, 2017; Mullings, 1999).

These tourism-as-development strategies are co-imbricated with the neoliberalization of labor (Ehreinreich and Hochschild, 2004; Enloe, 1990; McDowell, 2008; Oza, 2006; Pratt, 1997; White, 2004). Feminist scholars have interrogated the mechanisms—emotional, discursive, embodied, and spatial—through which labor is powerfully gendered, classed, sexualized, racialized, and grounded in colonial pasts (Chatterjee, 2012; Kang, 2003; Mollett, 2017; Mullings, 2009). These logics of power value or devalue different kinds of work, elevating some while eliding others (Domosh and Seager, 2001). As we note above, historically produced economic, sociocultural, and political inequalities are reflected in, reproduced, and entrenched through labor norms and practices, rendering and re-rendering them “natural” (Domosh and Seager, 2001; England and Stiell, 1997). Most notably, feminist scholars demonstrate how the naturalization of this work, typically undertaken by women, makes it easier to devalue, denigrate, violate, ignore, or expect it without remuneration (Enloe, 1990; Federici, 1975; Mollett, 2014; Wright, 2004). In response, feminist scholarship commonly seeks to make women’s work, and their spaces of work, visible in settings and structures where it is commonly trivialized, or otherwise elided (see Nagar et al., 2002 for examples) and to highlight its centrality, via this marginalization, to the colonial and postcolonial neoliberal capitalist process (Enloe, 2004; Mollett, 2017; Mullings, 1999).

Although expansive, feminist work on labor tends to center a narrower range of particularly “feminized” labor, most notably paid, un- and underpaid domestic work, care work (e.g. nursing and elder-care), sex work, and work by women in export-processing zones (Jaiteh, 2018; McDowell, 2008; Mullings, 1999). This valuably connects the intimacies of labor and macro geoeconomic and geopolitical drivers, providing innovative scalar analyses that push for an always-corporeal understanding of global and nation-state processes (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006).

Postcolonial intersectional scholarship, work that situates racial-gendered power, labor, and tourist-related neoliberal development in its colonial pasts, is particularly central for our project (Faria and Jones, 2019). This demonstrates how tourism-as-development neoliberal strategy draws on colonially entrenched racial logics of power that rely on and impact women of color. For example, Mullings’ work on sex tourism in Jamaica demonstrates in devastating ways how “the current international division of labor in the sex tourism sector primarily relies on the bodies and labor of women of color to create wealth” (1999: 57). Mollett builds on this work in her analysis of Black and Indigenous women’s work in Honduras’ tourism sector, arguing, “stereotypical meanings of blackness, sexuality and gender congeal into limited job opportunities” (2017: 12). As these scholars and others show, women’s bodies are a vital source of reproductive, caring, and productive labor in tourism-based development. In turn, their bodies are symbolically centered in the nation’s reimagining as a site for tourist-consumption and development. In these settings, women’s bodies are highly significant, highly scrutinized, and highly contested. They must be desirable, exoticized, erotic, but also docile, domestic, and caring (Babb, 2012; Nasser, 2012; Oza, 2006).

Much of this rests on racialized, sexualized, gendered, and neoliberal ideals and ideologies of beauty as self/national improvement. Feminist scholars have long examined the ties between beauty, geopolitics, nationalism, sociocultural conservatism and tumult (Enloe, 1990; Mani, 2006; Oza, 2006). Of particular value for us is work examining how dress, hair, and body beautification and styling performs idealized formations of nationalist and global femininity (Balogun, 2013; Faria, 2010; Fluri, 2009; Gökarıksel and Secor, 2010; Matebeni, 2016; Woo, 2004). This is so during neoliberal shifts. Edmonds (2007) and Picton (2013) take this up in their work on cosmetic surgery in Brazil and skin-lightening in India, respectively. They argue that in increasingly neoliberalized contexts where self-improvement is valorized, individuals modify, discipline, and whiten their bodies to become more economically and socially competitive.

Scholarship on “body work” helps us connect beauty and labor (Domosh, 2015). In geography, this includes research on home healthcare professionals and caring labor (England and Dyck, 2011; McDowell, 2015). While beauty is rarely taken up there, sociologists have attended to “body work” in beauty-related fields, including through manicures, tattooing, and hairdressing (Cohen and Wolkowitz, 2018; Kang, 2003; Rodríguez Rocha, 2018). Others have worked with beauty more explicitly, examining hetero and homo-nationalism, militarism, development, migration, and neoliberal globalization via beauty, beauty pageants, and varied beauty-trades (Faria and Falola, 2020; Farrales, 2019; Holliday et al., 2019). These geographic inroads are instructive in understanding the global-intimate spatialities of beauty and how gendered, racialized, sexualized, ability-based and classed articulations of power produce and maintain “normal,” idealized and/or improved subjects, places, and relationships across space. Despite its rich intellectual openings, work engaging explicitly and intellectually with beauty remains surprisingly rare in our field.

As geographers, we push for recognition of the spatiality of beauty and its power. We follow sociologists and others in recognizing beauty as a disciplinary process that requires work, occurs in work spaces, and connects laboring and consuming subjects where individuals condition their bodies both to meet specific beauty ideals and as a form of self-expression (Coffey, 2013; Crann et al., 2017). We spatialize this beauty work, a move that allows us to attend not only to the intimate and everyday spaces of beautification performed by pageant contestants, but to the global-intimate, socio-spatial moves of beauty labor that produce an idealized Ugandan nation for tourist consumption and development.

Showcasing “The Pearl”: Neoliberal development, tourism, and pageantry in Uganda

Early tourism in East Africa was centered on colonial environmental “preservation” efforts and elite hunting interests. Neumann (2002) details the tourism “boom” after World War II, a shift evident in Uganda. The initiation of the British modernization and development agenda, rise of expertise in resource management, expansion of commercial air travel, and the emergence of international conservation organizations dovetailed to promote and valorize colonial tourism. In Uganda, much of this investment centered the acclaimed preservation of local flora and fauna (often “protected” via indigenous displacement) to attract tourists to the British colony (Archabald and Naughton-Treves, 2001). After independence, President Milton Obote, “promised that the country’s economy would … be supported by the three Ts—tea, tobacco and tourism” (Ofcansky, 2018: 93). In the 1970s and 1980s, Idi Amin’s reign and poaching-related environmental concerns tarnished Uganda’s reputation as an ideal tourist destination (Tumwine, 1998).

But in the following decades, President Yoweri Museveni promoted tourism investment as part of neoliberal economic restructuring (Kuteesa, 2009; Wiegratz, 2010). More broadly, the tourism industry opened up to foreign investment, in accordance with goals set by the UN, World Bank, and WTO (The World Bank Group, 2013). Facilitated by these interventions, the country initiated the “Uganda Tourism Development Master Plan” in 2014. Aimed at addressing “key challenges constraining the growth of the sector” over the next ten years, the plan mirrored wider efforts by the WTO and the IMF to center tourism in neoliberal development strategies across the Global South (United Nations Development Plan, 2014). Tourism investment, it is argued, will bring infrastructural improvements, greater employment opportunities, and improve socioeconomic well-being for citizens (Uganda Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, 2017). Its success is questionable. But given its primacy, it is important to understand the machinations and effects of this now global development strategy, including on the lives of those it most relies on: young Ugandan women.

Neoliberal shifts in the last three to four decades wed pageantry and tourism promotion together. This move is reflected most fundamentally by promoting the nation’s apparent comparative advantage: its attractiveness for tourism through the use of beauty pageants. But while the privatization of national development is an end goal, neoliberal practices and messaging also saturate the pageant itself. It exemplifies and produces a space of modernization and both individual and national improvement. Young women, and their beauty labor, are central in this particular neoliberal project of development.

Pageants have served as spectacles of nationalist pride in Uganda since the 1950s (Kyebanja, 2005). The Miss Tourism Uganda pageant was founded in the 1980s with sporadic pageants held ever since (Uganda Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, 2017). Maria Mutagamba, the Minister of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, revived the pageant in 2011 and the tourism industry now relies heavily on it to market Uganda’s tourism potential. In addition, younger generations , including the pageant’s current Head of Operations, Allan Kanyike, view pageants as “viable business” opportunities (July 2017, personal communication). Miss Tourism Uganda holds twelve regional pageants and one national pageant in which women ages 18 to 25 compete. Prior to each event, contestants attend “boot camp”, a term itself recycled from another key Ugandan mode of development, its widely exported army. During the week-long regional and month-long national boot camps, contestants travel through their region and the country. They learn about the tourism industry, design national costumes, learn dances, practice speeches, conform their beauty skills (e.g. hairstyling, make-up application, and attire) to the pageant’s requirements, and train their bodies to compete on the pageant stage. Between thirty and forty women progress to the national pageant where judges select twenty four contestants to compete in the national finale. At the finale, three young women are crowned: Miss Tourism Uganda and two runners-up with superlatives awarded to other contestants. Each winner serves as a tourism ambassador for one year and the overall winner progresses to the international Miss Tourism pageant.

We deepen our analysis of this process below, attending to the varied forms of labor beauty queens perform in service to the state and global development goals. We center the boot camps where they prepare for the pageant; the stage where they perform and compete; and their work as ambassadors in the year that follows. While we detail how women are disciplined, managed, and exploited for these ends, we close by examining their renegotiation and disruption of pageant ideals and practices, and their use of the pageant to navigate the fashion, media, and beauty industries of Uganda. With this analysis, we assert that the Miss Tourism Uganda pageant is part of a historically rooted, and now reformulated, effort to promote tourism-oriented development in Uganda, producing ideal pathways to economic development through the bodies and labor of young Ugandan women.

Training beautiful bodies and minds: Preparing for the pageant

Pageant participants are trained explicitly and implicitly to conform to norms of the nation’s beauty: its women and its land. It is a process that involves considerable effort. Of course, this training begins long before participants enter the competition, as young girls are powerfully influenced by past pageant norms, advertisements, and social media. The community, organizers, and participants have specific notions of a queen’s physical appearance, informed by wider national and global norms and reinforced by pageant materials and narratives. The international Miss Tourism competition, which Miss Tourism Uganda feeds into, sharpens these national ideals.

Fans’ desire for a beautiful representative for Uganda was prevalent in discussions about pageants. And these “common sense” ideals of a pageant queen’s “beauty” circulate and discipline women long before the event itself. But for participants, this training becomes explicit and direct during the preparation process, most notably at its “boot camps.” As with their military counterpart, the goal of these camps is to produce ideal minds and bodies for nationalist ends, though here for pageant competition, rather than military conquest. Contestants build on work during the application process to train their minds, discipline their bodies, and to hone their makeup, hair, and public speaking skills. Former Miss Tourism Uganda contestant and current chaperone, Jaylor Birungi, describes the hectic nature of preparing for the national pageant:

In Miss Tourism, you go to the mountain one day and the next day you have game drives … You’re just learning about everything at the same time … Miss Tourism is more intense because you have to know your country. You have to know the tourism sector like the back of your hand … You have to know about which organization is marketing [the tourism industry], which organization is budgeting for it [and] which organization is working towards seeing it grow. It’s very intense. You need to know everything from how much the budget is allocated to what does the crocodile eat. (July 2017, personal communication)

The intensity of boot camps exemplifies the lengths pageant organizers go through to create and select a “proper” tourism ambassador. Birungi goes on to discuss the physical requirements of beautification and exercise expected of contestants at boot camp:

You wake up at 4:00 [AM], go to sleep around 2:00 [AM]. Then there’s a workout session … You have 30 minutes to be a girl and the bathroom is too small [but] you find your way. (July 2017, personal communication)

Particular ideals and practices of beauty are promoted while maintaining this demanding schedule. One former pageant queen and current pageant trainer asserted that losing weight at boot camp was integral to her journey of becoming a queen. With her “regular body,” she asserted, she would not have been successful (July 2017, personal communication). Another former participant, Proscovia Asingo, described how fellow contestants helped her learn “proper” makeup and hairstyling techniques:

I learned how to [apply makeup]. I didn’t know how to [do] make up. I was a person who just used to wake up and go to shower, put oil [on] then you just go but I learned how to draw the eyebrow somehow [and] how to put lipstick [on]. I learned a lot. (July 2017, personal communication)

The importance of beauty, via dress, cosmetic use, and cleanliness was fostered, arguing that this was central in being recognized as a national representative, of being visible:

It would be hard for someone to recognize you [on the pageant stage] if you don’t take care of your hair, if you don’t dress up very well. (Makerere University student, July 2017, personal communication)

Producing ideal Ugandan representatives relies on a considerable investment of time and money in other ways too. The contestants subsidize the pageant and the state through their unpaid labor, but they also use much of their own supplies. While some supplies are provided by sponsors, designers, and/or cosmetologists (also commonly women), contestants buy and make use of much of their own cosmetics and clothing. Most use their own time and money to design, pay for, or otherwise borrow the supplies needed, working after school, or instead of school, to raise the funds. Participants trade ideas, work together on costumes, and share these resources at boot camp. While seemingly trivial, and rarely acknowledged (Aren’t fancy dresses and cosmetics things women “naturally” have? Don’t they own these anyway for pleasure?), this is in fact a significant burden for participants. Stellah Nantumbwe, Miss Uganda 2013 and current pageant coach, noted that “Miss Tourism is just very expensive” (July 2017, personal communication), with Jaylor Birungi stating, “[the cost of pageants] discourages girls [from participating]. But being a beauty queen … is [a] sacrifice” (July 2017, personal communication). This economic burden dissuades young women from participating and requires contestants to invest their own money into a pageant that promotes the nation’s economic interests.

Participants work to buy and create pageant materials while laboring to maintain, improve, and perfect their physical appearance. Their efforts mirror neoliberal goals of self-improvement (physical and/as economic) for the benefit and promotion of the state (Edmonds, 2007; Picton, 2013). This is both directly implicated in the boot camp’s focus on entrepreneurialism and bodily disciplining and via the pageant’s wider efforts toward tourism-based development. This off-stage work is vital for producing the ideal Ugandan ambassador. Yet this work is erased in pageant narratives, promotional materials, and media coverage. This heightens as participants step into the limelight of the pageant stage, showcasing a seemingly effortless ideal of self and national beauty. We turn now to their work at these events.

On stage: Performing beauty for the nation

Central to the appeal of pageantry as a mode of development is, of course, the big night and its seductive pairing of aspiration, celebrity, and glamor. Catered meals, free drinks, and a sophisticated sound and light system provide VIP guests, who shell out an additional 10,000 to 15,000 Ugandan shillings (UGX) for regional contest tickets and 150,000 UGX for national contest tickets, with an extravagant show. The events are deliberately high profile and expensive to produce. But little revenue comes from ticket sales or state subsidies. Instead national and international corporate sponsorship funds the staging of the event. This comes from national sponsors like Radiant Cosmetics, a popular Ugandan beauty brand, The Bank of Uganda, and the newspaper New Vision, as well as international corporations like Emirates Airlines, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola. While their logos are featured on the pageant stage, promotional materials and media areas, they also adorn the bodies of participants (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Contestants of Miss Tourism Busoga 2016 perform opening dance routine wearing shirts with the Radiant Cosmetics logo.

The emphasis on corporate support dovetails with neoliberal strategies to promote national development. Women’s bodies, as pictured in Figure 1, serve as important vehicles here and otherwise. In turn, that which goes unfunded by corporate sponsors is made possible by the unremunerated labor of pageant organizers, staff and, most notably, participants. They work for free, motivated instead by the promise of experience, exposure, and self-improvement interwoven with the powerfully affective and gendered currency of national honor (to draw on Fluri and Lehr, 2017). Proscovia Asingo, a former contestant stated:

I’ve got to meet so many people [from competing in Miss Tourism Uganda]. There are some things that if you don’t do, you don’t get to learn … You don’t get to meet those big people in the country … You don’t get to see the different things in your country. [I] wouldn’t have known the … small tourist sites in the country. I got to see them [by competing], but before I had never travelled [back] to my village.

The opportunities for travel, as well as work, motivate young women to compete in pageants. As one woman in our focus group noted:

Most of those [women] become brand ambassadors … or [work] in multinational companies like MTN, Pepsi. You become a brand ambassador in Uganda … it takes the person to greater opportunities. (July 2017, personal communication)

It takes great effort to effectively sell, at once, cosmetics, airlines, the nation’s assets, and one’s entrepreneurial self. Through their bodies and comportment, pageant participants must encompass the overlapping, sometimes contradicting, ideals of each. Focus group participants discussed how a beautiful queen must have a “nice body” to properly represent Uganda domestically and internationally and described the embarrassment and shame should their national queens be fat or “oversized” (Makerere University student, July 2017, personal communication).

Most interviewees argued that having the “body of a queen” (Makerere University student, July 2017, personal communication) was vital, but the idealized femininity forwarded by Miss Tourism Uganda is not solely centered on physical beauty. Pageant organizers, contestants, and fans described how she must also be well versed in the country’s vast forestry and wildlife. The question and answer portion of the regional and national pageants figures heavily in the contestants’ scores. Judges ask highly specific questions on the country’s tourist highlights including data on mountain peaks, national parks, and flora and fauna. If they make mistakes, judges and audience members subject the contestants to harsh critiques, jeering, and mocking. But these questions are only partially designed to test participants’ knowledge. Few questions really get at complex cultural specificities that contestants learn through experience growing up in these regions, and in fact several argued they didn’t know their home regions well, having grown up far away in major cities like Kampala. Instead the quiz acts to imbricate women into orchestrated advertisements of the nation’s assets. Contestants understand this and know what to expect, they are trained and drilled in boot camp to respond, and spend hours preparing. On stage, they must work to exhibit ease in their responses. It is not enough that they can memorize the answers (as they have) but that the knowledge appears innate to the judges and audience. Miss Tourism Uganda and her runners-up simply know their nation. Members of the pageant community noted that the ideal queen “knows her country on the fingertips” (Proscovia Asingo, June 2017, personal communication) or, in her “soul” (Sudeep Mohanty, July 2017, personal communication).

Last here, contestants must balance contradictory demands around modesty and behavior. Contestants’ physical and intellectual attributes are complex and hotly contested, requiring incredible work and acumen. Yet, as we highlight above, their national and cultural knowledge must appear innate. Contestants must be desirable but cannot be caught desiring, on or off of the stage, an imaginary that connects ideals of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Married women cannot participate while unmarried women must display modesty to maintain the pageant’s image. Allan Kanyike said, “scandals [including prostitution, sending nude pictures and fighting over men] ruin the brand” (July 2017, personal communication). Woman must be intimately informed and committed to their nation and region, with both an entrepreneurial drive for economic success and a desire for family and yet contestants cannot have children. In addition, contestants must demonstrate “composure” and “wear a smile” throughout the competition (Sudeep Mohanty, July 2017, personal communication). During boot camp, contestants “are given notes on how to behave, how to walk … [and] how to handle [themselves] as a queen” (Proscovia Asingo, June 2017, personal communication). At the same time, they are expected to be competitive enough to outperform their fellow contestants. These tensions around learned and embodied knowledge, modesty and desirability, and composure and competitiveness highlight the fine line young women must walk to compete on the pageant stage.

Indeed, the labor performed by participants (and stylists, beauticians, and designers) enacted and made visible on the pageant stage, is strictly constrained and must do complex work for the nation. Oza (2006: 86) writes “gender and sexuality occupied a carefully balanced position in the language of the pageant; on the one hand there as the veiled eroticism of viewing India without visiting, while on the other, the participant’s sexual codes were held in check through traditional displays of femininity and compassion.” Oza helps us see how participants must package their efforts into a particular self-presentation, one that treads a fraught line between sexual desirability, modest femininity, individual self-promotion, and national love. They must appear to do so with ease, erasing the considerable work required with each camera pose, quiz response, and catwalk turn. Jaylor Birungi claimed that the, “pageants taught [her] how to be a girl” (July 2017, personal communication). That girl is adorned with the right application of makeup, styling of clothes, has the right balance of ambition and domesticity, and an innate appreciation for the nation’s assets. Not simply is “being a girl” about conforming to complex constraints of womanhood and feminine beauty then, but those ideals of femininity wed together gendered identity and national economic imperatives to sell Uganda (see Balogun, 2013 and Nasser, 2012 for parallels).

“Showing up” for your country: Promoting the pearl as pageant ambassadors

For pageant winners, the labor undertaken to promote Ugandan tourism does not end with the closing curtain. In fact, it has just begun. Winners work to promote and develop the tourism industry for local consumption and, in particular, for export. As a member of the Uganda pageant community, Sudeep Mohanty, notes:

[Beauty pageants] promote the girl as being an ambassador for the country in terms of new investments. (July 2017, personal communication)

This investment takes varied forms. Beauty queens spend a year as ambassadors for national parks, hosting events and fundraising for sites during their reign (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

(L to R): Mercy Norah Namukose (First Runner-Up Miss Tourism Busoga 2016), Hope Gloria Nyanzi (Miss Tourism Busoga 2016), and Lydia Kawala (Second Runner-Up Miss Tourism Busoga 2016) attend a promotional event.

They also promote and host national tourism events like “Wildlife Day” and “The Rolex Festival,” which celebrate Uganda’s environment, food, and history (Allan Kanyike, July 2017, personal communication). Winners of regional and national pageants, like those pictured in Figure 2, travel across their respective regions to meet with politicians, community leaders, and members of the tourism industry. During these travels, they encourage visitation and resources to expand tourism infrastructure.

These neoliberal development trajectories unfold through the body in numerous ways. They rely on beauty queens’ labor at minimal cost to the state. While provided with a small stipend, reigning queens must limit their schooling and other work, foregoing educational and economic opportunities in order to fulfill their duties. As part of these ambassadorial demands, winners must still engage in beauty work, including applying makeup, doing their hair, and exercising regularly. This work is rarely paid. Instead perks, the possibility of future opportunities, and a sense of national responsibility motivate the women. Former contestant Proscovia Asingo described how the challenges of unpaid work and demanding ambassadorial schedules were mitigated by a passion for promoting tourism in her eastern region. She notes:

In our region we have so many tourism sites but … they are not known by the tourist … We want to come out [and promote] the cultur[al] tourism. We want to maintain our country. (June 2017, personal communication)

Indeed, this desire represents an important manifestation of national pride and faith in neoliberal models of national development. Proscovia highlights the role tourism plays in local and national economies through infrastructural improvements and income increases. A Makerere University student noted the importance of representing Uganda and the entire continent of Africa when she said:

The beauty pageants are necessary because the country likes Miss Tourism … [They] come out with what you can do to the country [and how] to show up for your continent. (July 2017, personal communication)

The idea of “showing up” for one’s culture, country, and continent, despite the demands on their time, bodies, and resources was prevalent among participants. Not simply passive tools for the tourism sector, these young women conceptualize their labor as a service to their region and country. They demonstrated a vested interest in promoting tourism to foster social and economic growth. This is also an expected norm shared and promoted by organizers, judges, and fans. Contestants are asked about “how [tourism] can add up to the wellbeing of the people of [their] region and how it can raise the country at large” (Proscovia Asingo, July 2017, personal communication). As such, contestants are often committed to promoting tourism to benefit everyday people and the country’s growth. Indeed, through their knowledge of national languages, the histories of regional dress and dance, and their careful self-presentation, pageant contestants—both winners and other participants—emerge as a rich resource for organizers and the state. Pageants, and women participants, then, become a means to export Uganda. One woman in our focus group critiqued pageants by saying:

The Uganda Tourism Board uses pageants to sell the products. [The contestants] work as ambassadors for the tourism industry and Uganda has a lot of tourism destinations. (July 2017, personal communication)

Her observation reflects the growing popularity of the beauty pageant as a space to “sell the products” of the country’s tourism industry: activities, hotels, and experiences and, more broadly, the image of a beautiful and welcoming country open to both visitors and investment. The pageant then connects with wider neoliberal circuits and celebrations of tourism-based development via the international Miss Tourism competition. And, according to pageant organizers, it is effective. Allan Kanyike credits its work with the Uganda Wildlife Authority and Uganda Tourism Board for increased visitation and accessibility to national parks (July 2017, personal communication). Whether this is the case, the pageant has certainly been effective in positioning particular kinds of women, and their particular kinds of beauty labor, as the face of neoliberal tourism development in the country.

“An opportunity for me to try out myself”: Negotiating the neoliberal stage

Much of the labor young women perform on the pageant stage for Uganda’s tourism industry remains undervalued and underfunded, yet women still choose to use pageants as a platform for future socioeconomic success. Former beauty queens described how they used pageantry-pasts to advance their careers in the tourism industry. They leverage their crown to get jobs at airlines, with the Uganda Tourism Board, the Uganda Wildlife Authority, or by continuing to work as tourism ambassadors for different destinations.

These participants navigate the challenges deftly, using their popularity, skills, and business savvy to turn their experience on the stage into profitable careers in the fashion and beauty industries. Miss Tourism pageant participants, those who contested in parallel competitions (e.g. Miss Uganda), and fashion models, who are pictured in Figure 3, emphasized the importance of the pageant and fashion industries for young women living and working in Kampala.

Figure 3.

(L to R): Ruth Mashonda, Proscovia Asingo, Daphne Ngoma, Natalie Rukundo, Joan Karungi, Evelyn Atim, Anisha Hamis, and Barbra Tibaga. They wear gowns by designer Brenda Maraka.

Evelyn Atim (pictured third from the right in Figure 3) was the runner-up in Miss Tourism Northern Uganda 2015. She describes how pageantry taught her valuable skills that now help her as a model and storeowner:

[In] Miss Tourism we had a lot of classes … I [got] to know my abilities [and] what I can do. I got to know that I am good at administrating … I feel like Miss Tourism was an opportunity for me to try out myself … It was a really good training. So [by] the time I stepped out, I was able to do a number of things because I tested my confidence. (June 2017, personal communication)

Young women, like Evelyn, use their pageant “training” to gain the skills and connections to thrive in Uganda’s increasingly competitive fashion industry. Interviewees also noted that their pageant experience helped them gain the confidence and work-ethic required to network with up-and-coming fashion designers, design clothes, open shops, and work for popular fashion brands. For these young women, the pageants could help them ascend to middle class status in Uganda. Despite its demanding, fraught, and unpaid labor, the pageant can offer an opportunity for social and economic upward mobility. The participants' navigation of these opportunities, and their recognition of the limitations, counters the idea that beauty queens are merely passive tools for tourism development. Despite this, the “successes” of the pageant process remain those who adhere to neoliberal ideals of entrepreneurialism and self-improvement, ends achieved through networking, the use of social media, and corporate sponsorships. These ideals make possible the state's withdrawal and the precarity these women live in.

Nonetheless, the accounts of pageant workers demonstrate their agency navigating neoliberal pageant demands and the wider social, political, and economic constraints of life in Uganda. In this way, we follow recent and longstanding pageant scholarship (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Banet-Weiser, 1990; Farrales, 2019) to read the pageant stage cautiously, as one where women negotiate hegemonic power structures, their own class status, and conceptions of femininity. By using this stage as a space for empowering one’s self and their brand, beauty queens service their own goals too, not simply those of the nation’s tourism industry. While the ability to be too radical in this move is curtailed, it nonetheless counters ideas of African women's passivity in the face of nationalism and exploitative capitalism.

Conclusion

In this paper we center the intimate experiences of women living and laboring in Africa. In doing so, we first argue that their beauty labor is central to the connected drives of nationalism and neoliberalism. That is, we see in the Miss Tourism Uganda pageant how nationalist imperatives dovetail powerfully with globalizing ideologies of modernization, improvement, and both state and individual liberalism. As we assert, Miss Tourism Uganda shows us how nationalism and neoliberal development work together, not just, or only, in opposition.

To demonstrate this, we detail the work of pageant organizers, promoters, and participants to sell the nation, exploiting its natural beauty and the beauty of women in order to promote tourism and attract a wider and more varied form of foreign and local investment. This highlights the centrality of market competition, not simply laissez-faire policy, in neo-liberal economic expressions (Friedman, 1951 in Sparke, 2013). The pageant is a mechanism through which Uganda can, quite literally, compete with other countries for recognition, publicity, and consideration for capital investment. But it also complicates market-fundamentalism, both in its orthodox and critical formations. The market here is not only in a national economy, but also in a national imaginary, an illusion, for tourists looking for the exotic, the remote, the beautiful. And of course, it is a nation that cannot be thought outside of historically rooted and deeply gendered ideologies—most notably here around Ugandan women.

These ideals are not natural. They take work, and they are fostered over time, through place and power. To capture this, we turn to the labor of women. Behind the scenes, we trace how young women train their bodies and minds in intensive boot camps to prepare for the spotlight. Once on stage, we detail how contradictory demands of femininity and ambassadorship are placed on women, as they dance, perform talents, model, and answer questions. In the year that follows, we trace how they travel, host events, and advertise Uganda and their respective regions to promote the tourism industry nationally and internationally. In each of these moments, we unpack how the pageant relies on contestants’ labor to bolster a neoliberal mode of tourism-based development, placing most of the complex work of national growth, modernization, and improvement on the backs of young women. We thus read the pageant as one new way that the state burdens women with the maintenance and development of the nation. They are at the center of this process, put to work in varied, complex, and disciplined ways.

Second then, and in concert, our paper demonstrates how these interlocking processes of neoliberalism and development are powerfully gendered and racialized. Racist colonial pasts have structured Uganda’s economic and political relationship with the world, producing the legacies of debt and asymmetric terms of trade that make tourism, in line with neoliberal doctrine, the narrow path to progress. In turn, and as more than forty years of feminist scholarship makes clear, women’s labor, and their bodies are the backbone of neoliberal development. They subsidize production, here as the “Ugandan Pearl” in international eyes, and to do so they navigate their ambivalent positioning as sexy and virginal, well-studied and innately knowledgeable, with a cosmopolitan sensibility and deeply committed national love. Deemed a requirement for competitive success on the pageantry’s world stage, Fortunate, Jaylor, Proscovia, and other pageant participants must satisfy these demanding contradictory, historically produced, and enduring racialized and gendered expectations of their labor and ideals of their beauty.

While Ugandan women conform to these exploitative structures of nationalism and neoliberal capitalism, they are not without agency. In line with feminist work on neoliberal economic shifts more broadly, and neoliberal development in particular, we know that women resist, navigate, and make space for themselves in these neoliberal contexts in myriad, contextually specific ways (Balogun, 2013; Boonabaana, 2014; Faria, 2010; Matebeni, 2016). In recognition, we have detailed how participants enact their agency, albeit within strictly curtailed and neoliberal limits. Their successes in the tourism and fashion industries, including through modeling, clothes design, in hotels, and tour companies, show how young women use the pageant stage for their own economic and social benefit. These particular “geographies of beauty” challenge, complicate, and enrich our understandings of labor, nationalism, tourism, and development in the Global South. Through the postcolonial, intersectional feminist lens of beauty then, we make visible new, yet historically inflected and gendered, practices of neoliberal globalization and development.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all the research participants who shared their time with us. In particular, we would like to thank our research collaborators and co-thinkers at Makerere University: Kasfah Birungi, Jovah Katushabe, and Catherine Kyotowadde, and to Brenda Maraka and Allan Kanyike for their assistance connecting with pageant participants and understanding this pageant. Three anonymous reviewers, along with our editor Natalie Oswin, Michele Elledge, and members of the Feminist Geography Collective at UT-Austin provided deeply instructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interested with respect for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received funding from NSF GSS Grant #1461686, The UT at Austin College of Liberal Arts and the Office of Undergraduate Studies.

ORCID iD

Annie M Elledge

Annie Elledge received her BA in international relations and global studies and BA in government from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2018.

Caroline Faria is a feminist cultural and political geographer and faculty in the Department of Geography and the Environment and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas.

Note: Both the authors share interests in beauty and feminist critical race critiques of nationalism. They co-founded (with Dominica Whitesell) the Feminist Geography Collective at UT Austin.

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