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

Gender and Globalization

by Susan Dewey

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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

245 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2008

Reviews

[so-original · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is interesting for me because the bulk of feminist literature I have read is usually about women in either the UK or the US. There should be books about this subject in more countries.

[Anyusha Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

For an anthropological study of Indian beauty pageants, the depth of Dewey's analysis is surprisingly limited. She shows that the cultural, political and so on representations of femininity/class/beauty are part of broader global processes - but to draw such an obvious conclusion after extensive interviews with Miss India candidates, and participating in the month-long judging process, is disappointing. In some parts the book reads too self-consciously as the author makes frequent reference to her own 'unusual beauty' and 'great intellect'. Whilst I would not wish to completely destroy these opinions without having known or read anything else by the author, I suggest that this book may not be the ideal space in which to share them.

The real triumph of this book is not as an academic text but as a piece of intriguing journalism. Once I started to overlook the half-hearted references to panopticon, "Making Miss India Miss World" became extremely interesting. It is the personalities and competition between contestants, the idea of Indianness and the presence of class and domestic geography that make this readable, not the theories Dewey uses to explain them.