This is work in the best tradition of cultural analysis, refashioning a seemingly banal cultural object into a newly complicated and eye-opening thing.
"At the end of the nineteenth century, three revolutionary women fight for freedom in ... Chanel Cleeton's ... novel inspired by real-life events and the true story of a legendary Cuban woman--Evangelina Cisneros--who changed the course of history"--
A six-year-old peasant girl is lost and searches for her mother. The story proves an old Russian proverb: We do not love people because they are beautiful, but they seem beautiful to us because we love them.
Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study. Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.
I have been enjoying teaching for the past three decades. Prior to joining the Baker College family, I served as a faculty member at Ohio State University, Franklin University, Central Connecticut State, University of Massachusetts. Over the same period, my research papers have appeared in more than sixty periodic journals and scholarly collections, in over thirty-five countries situated on all inhabited continents. I also published (as author or editor) fifteen books. I earned my D. Phil. at Oxford university (England) (with a Grant from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom), M.A. at the University of Texas at Dallas (with a National Science Foundation Project Grant Assistantship) and B.S. at Trinity University (with Bostwick Scholarship).
The first biography on the wonderful and weird fashion icon Cara Delevingne is living the dream. She is the girl who landed on her feet in the fickle world of fashion and she s here to stay. As the face of DKNY, Burberry, and Chanel, Cara's startling blue eyes, framed by trademark bushy eyebrows, gaze down from billboards across the world. But she s not just a pretty face; cutting an edgy swathe through the celeb party scene, Cara s quirky character and frequent controversial antics are pure box-office. She has even been given a DJ slot on her own radio station in Rockstar s record-breaking videogame, "Grand Theft Auto V."This is the first biography on the British beauty, and Abi Smith reveals Cara s life behind the lens."
"The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" is a coming-of-age story about Christopher Showers. Christopher leaves his backwoods Georgia home and moves to San Francisco. That's where his adventure begins. His journey is enlightening, romantic, comical and sexy. He meets a cast of characters and new friends who open his eyes to the new world of being a man - on his own and far from home. Most importantly, he meets Serena Davenport. The two 24-year olds fall in love, and Chris tells anyone who'll listen that Serena is the most beautiful girl in the world. But he soon realizes true love is hard to find, hard to hold, and that things are not always as they seem.