What do you think?
Rate this book
Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai'i's Cherry Blossom Festical
After World War II, Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i sought to carve a positive niche of public citizenship in the community. In 1953 members of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and their wives created a beauty contest, the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) Queen Pageant, which quickly became an annual spectacle for the growing urban population of Honolulu. Crowning the Nice Girl analyzes the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research; interviews with CBF queens, contestants, and organizers; and participant observation in the Fiftieth Annual Festival as a volunteer, Christine Yano paints a complex portrait of not only a beauty pageant, but also a community.
The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest.Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990s, adding corresponding "herstories"―extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality.
The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest.Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990s, adding corresponding "herstories"―extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2006
11 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 16, 2013
This book covers the eras of the Cherry Blossom Festival in Hawaii, from the context of its beginning through to the 2000s, and the issues that arise of it being representative of a Japanese/ Japanese American from a multicultural Hawaii. It includes 3 chapters on interviews with past CBF Queens, of whom Yano took a good sample. Main issues that come up are: gender roles of the CBF, behind the scenes and in the forefront; blood-quantum requirements; and whose culture to represent and who gets to decide.
A wonderful read.
A wonderful read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review