The American Dream in Vietnamese

3. Pageantry and Nostalgia: Beauty Contests and the Gendered Homeland

59 Chapter 3 Pageantry and Nostalgia: Beauty Contests and the Gendered Homeland B E AU T Y C ON T E S T S may appear frivolous and trivial, but as a cultural practice they stage complex struggles over power and representation. Some feminists have argued that beauty contests are ideological regimes that reinforce dominant constructions of gender and idealized forms of femininity . Yet these organized events are much more complicated than just outright attempts to objectify, control, and commodify women’s bodies. Scholars of beauty pageants have begun to bring forth the contradictions inherent in the beauty contest by situating them in multiple systems of culture, struggles for power and control, and discursive fields of practice.1 While many have located beauty pageants in dominant discourses of nationalism all over the globe, few have addressed the significance of local “ethnic” beauty pageants. What happens when racially and ethnically marginal immigrant communities organize their own beauty pageants to commemorate their version of “the nation”? Which elements are different and which remain the same? How can we make sense of this need for beauty pageants in immigrant communities, and what do the contests come to represent? Despite the increasing accommodation toward multiculturalism and the crowning of nonwhite contestants in American national and statebeauty pageants , racist practices remain prevalent in perceptions of beauty in general and beauty pageants in the United States. As Sarah Banet-Weiser points out in her study of the Miss America pageant, “The presence of non-white contestants obscures and thus works to erase the racist histories and foundations upon which beauty pageants rest.”2 Moreover, because mainstream pageants tend to reaffirm whiteness and dominant understandings of American citizenship, they can sometimes conflict with cultural goals and beliefs of ethnic and immigrant communities. As such, beauty pageants in general serve different purposes for ethnic and racialized communities in the United States. And though 60 Pageantry and Nostalgia some aspects of “ethnic” beauty pageants replicate larger American national and state pageants, they also simultaneously articulate alternative cultural practices that counter the dominant discourse from which they are excluded.3 To resolve these exclusionary practices that disqualify Asian women from representingthe “nation”byvirtue of their race, Vietnamese Americans have organized their own beauty pageants to provide alternative spaces in which “ethnic Vietnamese” women have the opportunity to participate and to reign asbeauty queens for their ethnic community.4 This chapter examines the complex ways in which the Vietnamese diaspora construct cultural identities and imagine their lost nation through pageantry. I argue that young women play an essential role in the imagined community because they simultaneously represent tradition and modernity in beauty pageants.These pageants not only stage gender politics of the community but also dramatize the various ways in which Vietnamese American citizenship is realized through the performances of young female Vietnamese bodies. It is through the bodies of Vietnamese women that nostalgia is symbolically invoked and cultural nationalism forged. The Pageantry of the Ao Dai Beauty pageants of the Vietnamese diaspora are different from all other beauty pageants because of one significant cultural fashion component: the ao dai, or traditional Vietnamese dress.5 The basic ao dai for women is a long, flowing dress worn over long, full palazzo pants. Although it varies in style, the formal dress most often seen on display for competition is a form-fitting tunic that slits into front and back panels from slightly above the natural waistline down to below the knees. The ao dai has a long and complex history that mirrors Vietnam’s national and colonial history. Developed from Chinese court clothing, it originally was a dress worn by royalty. However, by the early twentieth century it had become a fashionable clothing item for the “modern” Vietnamese woman. Because the garment is difficult to perform work in, middle-class women and adolescent schoolgirls most commonly wore it. Others, including men, only wore ao dai on holidays and special occasions. Although the ao dai’s mandarin collar and panel designs reveal remarkable Chinese and French fashion influence, the Vietnamese insist that the garment is uniquely and authentically Vietnamese. Symbolically, the ao dai invokes nostalgia and timelessness associated with a gendered image of the homeland for which many Vietnamese people throughout diaspora yearn. Journalist Nam Hoang Nguyenhas observed that the emblematic meanings Pageantry and Nostalgia 61 associated with the ao dai have been “perpetuated by countless puppy...