The dressing room looked like a museum of beauty industry inventions: fake eyelashes, tape and gel padding for breast enhancement, Velcro rollers, curling and straightening irons, cellulite cream, and teeth-whitening strips.
A haze of hair spray filled the room. I walked with the other contestants onto the stage in Rehoboth Beach, the site of the first pageant in America.
As the lights came up, Debbye Turner, who in 1990 became the third African-American woman to be crowned Miss America, welcomed us to the stage and announced the top 10 finalists competing for the title of Miss Delaware. My heart pounded in my chest as she called out name after name.
After what seemed like an eternity, she announced, “Finalist number seven, Michelle Filling!” I smiled into the dark auditorium as my friends and family cheered, and then I looked at the judges and mouthed,“Thank you.”
But what, I wondered, was I thanking them for?
Yes, that’s right, Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown, feminist and founder of the National Undergraduate Conference on Body Image, competed in the Miss America Pageant system.
Surprising? Perhaps. A contradiction? Maybe. A learning experience? Definitely.
At the time, I entered because a friend enticed me with the opportunity to perform my talent, promote service learning, and, most importantly, earn scholarships. I was cognizant of the stigma surrounding pageantry, but I felt that it could be a positive experience for me.
Most people supported my decision, but I received some scathing remarks from colleagues who couldn’t fathom how a feminist could participate in a pageant. Trust me, I understood those remarks. I was competing in a pageant—a primary and highly provocative representation of America’s beauty culture.
As I look back on the experience, I realize that competing in a pageant served as an unofficial form of sociological fieldwork and a springboard for my future research about beauty culture.
Before the pageant began that night, Turner gave the contestants a pep talk. She told us that it took her seven years and 11 tries before she became Miss America.
Along the way, people told her that she was “too black” to be Miss America, noting that her skin tone was much darker than Vanessa Williams’s, the first black Miss America (not to be confused with the first Miss Black America, crowned in 1968 as a protest of the Miss America Pageant, which had historically excluded women of color).
After years of staying true to herself, Turner won Miss America, her crowning a demonstration that definitions of beauty are mutable. She did not attempt to change her image or values in order to please the judges. It was rather the case that she, a black woman, was finally accepted as Miss America.
In reality, none of us can escape beauty culture completely, and, while I personally cannot radically change pageantry, I can be critically engaged with it.
Denouncing and distancing myself from aspects of beauty culture, like pageantry, limit my ability to understand the issue from a comprehensive array of perspectives.
By participating, I learned more about the system and how women like Turner have used pageantry as a vehicle for change, especially as it relates to race and standards of beauty.
The vortex of beauty culture impacts us whether or not we want to participate. In the 1970s, The New York Times listed the weight of Miss America contestants, but the paper also listed the weight of renowned poet and Cabrini honorary degree recipient Nikki Giovanni in an article celebrating her poetry recital at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall.
Beauty culture is a space where we see changes in—and, often, acceptance of—different markers of race, class, and gender. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, as African-Americans called for equal rights, symbols of black radicalism became popularized in style and fashion.
Mainstream beauty culture slowly began to include images of blackness—and while mainstream beauty culture tended to sanitize the radical nature of these images, the cultural context of the era sustained their political symbolism, even as white culture appropriated the images for their use.
During this time, some aspects of beauty culture, like print media, television, and film, were more receptive to the inclusion of black images, while other aspects of beauty culture, like pageantry, were more resistant to such change.
While the first Miss Black America wore a small Afro, we have yet to see a Miss America with cornrows or dreadlocks.
The power shift that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s forced beauty culture to accept, absorb, and fuse with difference, but the road to inclusivity is clearly a long one.
As I reflect on competing in the Miss Delaware Pageant, I think about how our world has changed. When I competed more than a decade ago, I had a flip phone and Mark Zuckerberg had just launched “The Facebook.”
Now, we have to contend with perfectly selected and edited photos proliferating through social media and the impact of contemporary technology on our ideas about ourselves.
Looking at the words and slang that have infiltrated our vocabulary—selfie, bae, basic, duckface, insta, OOTD—it’s no wonder that young Americans feel pressure to conform to society’s standards of beauty. Dr. Michele Filling-Brown
From our obsession with weight to the consumerism of beauty products to ever-changing fashion trends, beauty culture surrounds us on television, on our phones, and in grocery store checkout lanes.
In the 21st century—when societal change is not as overt as when Freedom Riders, civil rights activists, and second-wave feminists fought battles daily—we must listen to beauty culture as it reveals what people in our society both value and reject.
By so doing, we can better understand beauty culture and use it as a space for social change. While it is not the floor of Congress or the front lines of a war zone, beauty culture is a place where important change can take place.
Impossible to escape, beauty culture must be criticized, engaged with, and learned from, for it is a powerful construction with real ramifications on our ideas about gender and race, as well as the development of healthy self-image.
Beyond social media as a means for promulgating images, beauty culture has not radically shifted in the 21st Century as it did during the 1970s when “blackness” became more accepted in the mainstream media.
Our country’s beauty culture and race relations have been stagnant for too long, and we must demand positive representations of women and people of color.
In the past year, we have seen the frustration in Ferguson, the rallying cry of the community in Baltimore, and the heartache in Charleston. We must demand acceptance of all people and search for the beauty that lies within each of us if we are to become a more accepting and inclusive society.
Michelle Filling-Brown, PhD, Chair and Associate Professor, English, played an instrumental role in the approval of Cabrini’s new Gender and Body Studies major and minor.
This article was featured in Cabrini Magazine.