SOUTHERN BEAUTY (VOTA) | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Nov 2, 2023 6:00 pm
Location
Takoma
235 Carroll St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20012
Nov 2, 2023 6:00 pm
Takoma
Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.
In a trio of popular gender rituals-sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage-young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?
Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties' racial work or their investment in it.
With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion-stylized and predictable but ephemeral-has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.
Voices of Takoma Authors is an ongoing series of programs sponsored by Historic Takoma featuring presentations by local authors about their works, their approach to writing, and their inspirations, drawing on authors in the Takoma Authors collection. Voices of Takoma Authors provides an opportunity for the community to learn about their author neighbors and engage in discussions with them. While many of these discussions occur at Historic Takoma, Busboys and Poets Books Takoma is hosting some as well. For more, see Historic Takoma’s page: https://historictakoma.org/voices-of-takoma-authors/.
Elizabeth Boyd and Lanita Whitehurst are joining us on the Busboys stage to discuss SOUTHERN BEAUTY and performative femininity in the south. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and the author will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of SOUTHERN BEAUTY will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON and will NOT be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Elizabeth Boyd is an interdisciplinary scholar whose experience growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath inspired her to study, teach, and write about the U.S. South. Her research explores the gendered performance of race and region. She holds a B.A. in Journalism, Broadcasting and Film from Trinity University; an M.A. in Southern Studies from The University of Mississippi; and, a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She has served on the faculties of Vanderbilt University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Center, Australian National University. She is past president of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association and the Chesapeake American Studies Association. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, and Southern Cultures. Her book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South was published by University of Georgia Press in 2022. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Lanita Whitehurst is a senior organizer at IMPACT Silver Spring, a nonprofit committed to promoting racial and economic equity in Montgomery County. She’s a member of Zora’s Roundtable, a book group for women of color that has been reading books and meeting regularly to discuss them since 2013. While she’s lived in Silver Spring for more than 20 years, she’s a Southerner at heart, having been raised in rural North Carolina.
Historic Takoma is a membership-based, all-volunteer, 501(c)3 non-profit organization, founded to preserve the heritage of Takoma Park, Maryland and the Takoma Park neighborhood of the District of Columbia through educational activities and the preservation of historic landmarks and artifacts, especially documentary archives.
