Maxine Leeds Craig

Ain't I a Beauty Queen?

Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Ain't I A Beauty Queen? is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and pracices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for understanding social processes of racial change. It places changing black hair practices and standards of beauty in historical context and shows the powerful role social movements have had in reshaping the texture of everyday life. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements led a generation to question hair straightening and to establish a new standard of beauty that was summed up in the words "black is beautiful". Through oral history interviews with Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and ordinary women, the author documents the meaning of these changes in black women's lives.

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"Black is Beautiful!" The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated the intersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily life. With sources ranging from oral histories of Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and men and women who stood on the sidelines to black popular magazines and the black movement press, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 210
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Mai 2002
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 12mm
• Gewicht: 327g
• ISBN-13: 9780195152623
• ISBN-10: 019515262X
• Artikelnr.: 21793733

Autorenporträt

Maxine Leeds Craig is Assistant Professor of Sociology and director of the graduate program in Sociology at California State University, Hayward.

Inhaltsangabe

1: Ridicule and Celebration: Black Women as Symbols in
the Rearticulation of Race
2: Contexts for the Emergence of Black is Beautiful
3: Ain't I a Beauty Queen?: Representing the Ideal
Black Women
4: Standing (in Heels) For My People
5: How Black Became Popular: Social Movements and
Racial Rearticulation
6: Yvonne's Wig: Gender and the Racialized Body
7: Pride and Shame: Black Women as Symbols of the
"Middle Class"
8: The Appearance of Unity
9: An Ongoing Dialogue