Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India

Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power and the Nation in Postliberalization India. Susan Dewey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 224 pp. Susan Dewey's Making Miss India Miss World is an engaging ethnography of the Miss India pageant in the context of a changing, globalizing India. The book follows the 2003 pageant from beginning to end. It also considers the larger history of pageants and the effects of India's 1991 implementation of structural adjustment policies on the Miss India pageant and on surrounding issues of gender and national image. Dewey conducted four months of participant-observation in the pageant process, mostly in Mumbai, but also at the day-long auditions in Delhi and Bangalore. She interviewed pageant organizers, judges, and participants in the 2003 pageant and examined all submission materials. She also interviewed former participants and winners of Miss India, Miss Universe, and Miss World. The book is a unique contribution to the study of gender and globalization, examining both the "exploitative, classist, and sexist nature of pageants" (222) and the agency and social mobility possible for women involved in them. The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction and three sections, on "The Power of the Gaze," "Gender" and "Globalization," each considering different aspects of the making of Miss India and the larger goal of making this Miss India into a viable Miss Universe. This thematic rather than chronological organization makes for some repetition of material. The forty-eight page introductory chapter, in particular, introduces themes in great detail that are repeated in the later chapters. Nevertheless, an ethnographically rich description of the entire process of the 2003 pageant -- from initial submissions to the day-long final selection of three separate Miss Indias bound for Miss Universe, Miss World, and Miss Earth pageants - emerges in this highly readable book. In the chapters on "gaze," Dewey draws on Foucault's theory of the panopticon to discuss how pageant participants as well as the larger middle class society "are so closely monitored that they begin to monitor themselves" (99). Here, she introduces the twenty-six women out of 332 valid applicants who qualify for an intensive month-long training and preparation for the final pageant. Dewey is careful to note the narrow reaches of the Miss India contest's definition of "international standards" (99) of beauty that limit opportunities to participate to a small, privileged minority, who must alter their bodies and self-presentation to be competitive. Dewey argues successfully that the image of India presented to the larger world is stereotypically North Indian, even as the pageant organizers make efforts to remove names and other identifying features from applications during early selection. Yet in some places - most strikingly when she refers to the large metropolis of Chennai (formerly Madras) as a "small town