As it approaches its centennial, the Miss America Pageant (1921- ) stands among the most enduring — and enduringly controversial — popular performance traditions of American life and culture. This course offers an intensive, method-based historical overview of how “Miss America” as both idea and event documents the shifting ways gender, sexuality, race and embodiment been comprehended in the United States, even as it also examines the disparate ways the “beauty pageant” as a performance genre has been adopted and adapted by/for communities excluded by the rules of Miss America.
