Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (review)

If race is biologically false, then so is mixed-race. If people believe that race is biologically real, then they will view mixed-race individuals as either members of some new race, or a literal mixture of the races of their forebears. The "literal mixture" view tends to prevail, with the result that many believe that mixed-race individuals need to be assessed and evaluated as to what race they "really" are. In Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain takes an ethnographic approach to these issues, in the context of Japanese beauty pageants in the United States. Mixed-race has intruded on Japanese traditions of racial purity, due to aging demographics and a high rate of out-marriage in the Japanese American community. One result is a relaxation of racial purity rules for beauty contestants, which has led to intense contestation about who looks Japanese, or appears to represent the community. Despite these divisive identity politics, the pageants endure. They are occasions for celebration and reconnection with Japanese identity. At the same time, they represent the Japanese American community to the other ethnic groups in the United States. Contestants are enthusiastic about their participation, as a form of community involvement, as well as opportunity to develop personal interests and careers through the attention they get and contact with influential people afforded.

A Japanese and white, second-generation "beauty queen," herself, King uses a "triangulated" methodology of documentary and archival research, interviews, and participant observation. She claims that the ways in which "race" is contested, structured, and restructured, over the bodies of young women in beauty contests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu, is a form of work, a "doing of race." Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of the performance of gender, O'Riain believes that beauty pageant participants keep traditional Japanese culture, as a social fabrication, alive, while at the same time changing it enough to include themselves, if they are not racially "pure":

Racialized gestures and acts, such as "walking Japanese" in kimono, reveal the process of expressing these fabrications—and are intentional. These actions take effort and work to perfect and perform. In addition, all of the pageants are exhibitions and therefore are performed on stage, with an audience, and with judging taking place at the time of performance. This sense of the public display and the controlled exhibition makes the pageant a very visible and therefore unique social act.

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King-O'Riain's book is a detailed portrait on a relatively small canvas. It would have been a stronger work if she had focused more on the distinction between what people believe and what people are justified in believing. Lacking, as well, is engagement with feminist issues regarding the objectification of women's bodies inherent in all beauty pageants and their attending cultures (although she does note the feminist objections). King-O'Riain seems unaware of how racism against Japanese-Americans, including internalized forms of it, might compound the objectification of women in the pageants. Nevertheless, Pure Beauty is an interesting and informative contribution to American racial studies in general and Asian-American studies in particular.