“It’s not like I was born a feminist and always knew that there was some problem with beauty pageants,” says Lisa Wainwright, an art historian at the School of the Art Institute. “I bought so many Barbies–I performed my femininity through my Barbie dolls.” And she watched beauty pageants on TV. “I liked the spectacle of it, the man in the tuxedo, this sweeping stage, and 50 girls–all my Barbie dolls come alive.” By the time she got to college she thought the contests were ridiculous, but she still had a Princess Diana fascination and had noticed that she was being judged by the criteria used for pageant contestants: “her beauty, her evening wear, her talents, her social platform.”
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When the Miss USA pageant announced it would be coming to Gary, Indiana, this year–pageant co-owner Donald Trump also owns a Gary casino–members of the fine arts and women’s studies faculties at Indiana University’s Gary campus were concerned, and one of them asked Wainwright, who had curated shows on gender issues, to put together an exhibition. “I thought it pretty strange that Miss USA will rise out of the ashes of Gary,” she says. “In my mind, Gary is about men and steel, so I thought I should switch the gender. Perhaps that would get people thinking about some of the issues that pertain to a female beauty pageant, but from another angle.”
Beauty pageants, Wainwright points out, were once openly racist; as late as the 1930s contestants had to supply genealogical information. Even today African-Americans in pageants are usually lighter skinned. As an acknowledgment of this problem, most of the men in this show are white, though Barbara DeGenevieve interviewed nine African-American men in Gary for her video MR. USA. “I decided I wanted to have the people of Gary comment about the pageant,” she says. “It’s a town that is extremely economically depressed. I started the interview process by going to bars with a female assistant.” She was warned this could be dangerous, but it wasn’t. “People were so nice,” she says, “really accommodating.” She asked what they thought of the pageant–most were glad it was coming–and posed other questions based on those commonly asked of pageant contestants, such as “Do you believe in premarital sex?”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
