Embodiment and Empowerment in the Nigerian Beauty Pageant Industry

• In Event: Beauty Politics: Identity, Femininity, and Ideology

Abstract

Beauty pageants are big business in Nigeria. They promote complex ideals and ideas about gender and power. Nigerian pageants position beauty contestants - young, upwardly mobile, and ambitious women - as the aesthetic center of an ethnically diverse nation and the public face of a country on the economic rise. Insiders often tout beauty pageants as a tool of empowerment that helps contestants secure important social contacts, achieve national fame, and assist with economic capital. Beauty contestants negotiate constrained social structures that highlight the promises and pitfalls of this “empowerment” framing.

Presenter

• Oluwakemi Balogun, University of Oregon