Crowning the nice girl : gender, ethnicity, and culture in Hawaii's Cherry Blossom Festival / Christine R. Yano.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yano, Christine Reiko.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Beauty contests--Hawaii--Honolulu.

Beauty contests.

Japanese American women--Hawaii--Honolulu--Ethnic identity.

Japanese American women.

Japanese American women--Hawaii--Honolulu--Psychology.

Japanese American women--Hawaii--Honolulu--Social conditions.

Honolulu (Hawaii)--Race relations.

Honolulu (Hawaii).

Honolulu (Hawaii)--Social life and customs.

Cherry Blossom Festival (Honolulu, Hawaii)--History.

Cherry Blossom Festival (Honolulu, Hawaii).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

After World War II, Japanese Americans in Hawai'i sought to carve a positive niche of public citizenship in the community. In 1953 members of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and their wives created a beauty contest, the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) Queen Pageant, which quickly became an annual spectacle for the growing urban population of Honolulu. Crowning the Nice Girl analyzes the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research; interviews with CBF queens, contestants, and organizers; and participant observation in the Fiftieth Annual Festival as a volunteer, Christine Yano paints a complex portrait of not only a beauty pageant, but also a community. The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest. Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990's, adding corresponding "herstories"-extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter One. Beauty Pageants as Spectacles of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Community

Chapter Two. Historicizing the Cherry Blossom Festival

Chapter Three. The Cherry Blossom Festival as Center Stage in Hawai'i

Chapter Four. Herstories I

Chapter Five. Struggles toward Reform

Chapter Six. Herstories II

Chapter Seven. Controversy and Reform

Chapter Eight. Herstories III

Chapter Nine. Crowning the "Nice Girl"

Notes

Appendix

References

Index

About the Author

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-286) and index.

ISBN:

9780824862060

0824862066

OCLC:

256819224