Making Miss India Miss World
Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation
in Postliberalization India

Cloth $26.95s    |    978-0-8156-3176-7    |    2008

Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey’s Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent political, economic, and cultural developments.

Description
For almost half a century, the Miss India competition has been a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. As India participates increasingly in a global economy, that standard is gradually being shaped by forces beyond the country’s borders. Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey’s Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent political, economic, and cultural developments.

Dewey offers readers an up-close view of the beauty pageant through her discussion of the contestants’ intense training program, a process that involves extensive physical, emotional, and cultural transformations. Covering everything from proper table etiquette to preferred skin tone, the author reveals the exacting standards set by pageant officials and reflected in Indian society. Yet she also recognizes the empowerment these women are afforded by their status as beauty symbols in a culture increasingly shaped by the visual influence of national and international media.

Making Miss India Miss World constitutes an important cultural critique and an enlightening take on how macroeconomic change affects cultural identity at the individual level.

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Author
Susan Dewey is a cultural anthropologist specializing in macroeconomic policy and Indian culture, particularly women’s culture. She is the author of Invisible Agents, Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India and of articles in the Journal of Ethnography and Education Quarterly and the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture.

6 x 9, 280 pages, 16 illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index