Domesticating South Asian Femininity. Bilal Ahmed, in Wednesday's Souciant.
I have to say this is the only article I've seen on this subject which encapsulates so well what girls and women in the Diaspora South Asian community face. What I find additionally troubling though is that so many South Asian girls and women are not even aware of how this mechanical process is problematic. It seems that too often, having such an ideal forced upon females through various social processes isn't seen to be less than ideal by the very women having to live up to such standards. From what I've encountered, this is further compounded by a discourse of religious legitimisation coming from both the first generation as well as the second and third generations themselves.
Yes, absolutely. I've found that particularly true in my own niche of Pakistani Muslims.
My guess is some of the tweets were plants by the pageant itself to drum up media buzz. When was the last time Miss America was in the news? A couple decades ago (probably because TV options were so limited), it used to draw large audiences. Part of me thinks this is a cynical ploy to get people taking. (I'm mostly joking, but I wouldn't be surprised if I turned out to be right either.)
Joke appreciated, though I do think that the pageant backed the cherrypicking of relevant tweets.
Perhaps, but I actually dug in to some of them and they were real people. One was a highschool kid that acted all tough and defiant at first but then started to half apologize, "it was just a joke" and eventually seemed genuinely afraid for himself. The mob had made him the most hated twitterer of the moment. I could see the pageant sending out emails to "go to her defense" to media outlets, asking them to pick up the story etc. Fanning the flames of outrage to their advantage.
Truth is, you could take her and reduce the pigment in her skin and she'd look like any other model. Busty, thin at the waste, tall and slender. Don't get me wrong, I like all of those qualities myself but it would be far more of a paradigm shift if a woman that was slightly overweight and short won.There have been several articles highlighting some of the racist responses to Davuluri’s win on social media, however, such an offensive array can conceivably be assembled for any event.
Thank you for pointing this out, I think it says more about the media-outlest that run this type of thing than it does American's in general. It's a small minority of people that 1. care about this competition and 2. care about her ethnicity.
Exactly, I hint on that here-- "Can we really talk about her representing diverse beauty standards, when the selection process of Miss America contains a bikini competition that privileges very specific aesthetic qualities, regardless of skin tone and heritage?"