Why Nigeria Loves Beauty Pageants 👑
Why Nigeria Loves Beauty Pageants 👑
Miss Universe, Miss World and "beauty diplomacy"
Here she is, Miss…Geopolitics?
The Miss Universe pageant declared bankruptcy mere days before its 72nd competition happening Saturday (as in, tomorrow) in El Salvador. But even if profits and viewership are down, don’t count out Big Beauty Pageant™️ just yet. These Western exports are actually becoming more popular across the Global South.
This week on the podcast, we’re exploring why that is by traveling to Nigeria, home to more than a thousand different beauty pageants. That’s where our guest, feminist sociologist Dr. Oluwakemi Balogun, embedded behind the scenes for research, which became her first book, Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying a Nation.
Kemi takes us beyond Western feminism’s tête-à-tête with pageant culture and to see what big international beauty pageants can tell us about gender, globalization, and the precarious power of being a beauty queen.
ICYMI:
🩺“Eldest daughter syndrome.” (The Atlantic) As the youngest of five, I benefit from baby-of-the-family privilege—at least, that’s what my older siblings tell me. But while “eldest daughter syndrome” isn’t an official diagnosis, it makes total sense that the combination of birth order and gendered expectations of women as caregivers can weigh extra heavily on the oldest (or only?) girls in the family.
🥊Don’t mess with Texas women denied abortions. (Texas Tribune) Eleanor Klibanoff reports that 22 women have now joined the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit suing the state of Texas for its batshit—and medically dangerous—abortion ban.
⌛ Get to Golden Girls prepping. (TIME) And maaaaybe I shouldn’t be jokey about US women outliving men even longer these days since the widening lifespan gap is largely due to men’s higher rates of COVID-related death and drug overdoses.
🔬 Have y’all heard of Isala? (Isala) I just stumbled across the “largest study on the vaginal microbiome in the world” and do not have the STEM degree to know exactly what all those swabs could tell us. But I do have the (unaccredited) Unladylike degree to know it’s probably some long ignored science, so hip hip hooray!
🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ Palestinian x queer liberation (Autostraddle) Highly recommended intersectional reading by Kayla Kumari Updahyaya that’s also packed with links to even more highly recommended reading.
Unladies’ Room: 2 Women, 80 Days, 1 Race Around the World
Grab your passports and popcorn! Tomorrow on Patreon, podcaster, storyteller and solo traveler Adrien Behn tells us the incredible story of Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Bisland and their 1889 race around the world, which made them the first two people to attempt sci fi author Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days fictional gambit.
Before talking to Adrien, I only knew of Nellie as the famed investigative journalist who went undercover for Ten Days in a Mad House and had never heard of the Cosmopolitan magazine editor, Elizabeth.
On her gorgeously produced new podcast, A Race Around the World, Adrien retraces their respective itineraries, the media sensation it became and most importantly, who these two very different women were and what they took away from their journeys.
unladies are saying:
This is my infinity war crossover event! As a law librarian, I could listen to this forever.
Unladies’ Room patron Emma, re: Supreme Court Is BACK with Strict Scrutiny
til next week . . . speaking of beauty pageants, can we get a wellness check on our dethroned Bratwurst Queen?
