This week’s No Comment entry focuses on the following course offered through the Department of History at Oberlin College in Ohio:
How to Win a Beauty Pageant: Race Gender, Culture and U.S. National Identity
This course examines US beauty pageants from the 1920s to the present. Our aim will be to analyze pageantry as a unique site for the interplay of race, gender class, sexuality and nation. We will learn about cultural studies methodology, including close reading, cultural history, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography, and use those methods to understand the changing identity of the US over time. This course includes a field visit to a pageant in Ohio.
For further information, visit the web page of Oberlin’s History Department.
