Socialization on pageant circuit?
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ISSUE: 11/08/07 > NEWS > Socialization on pageant circuit?
By attending multiple child beauty pageants across Tennessee, Dr. Shelby Pannell-Longard examined how and why mothers specifically teach femininity to their daughters. The findings of her research, which was conducted during a three-year period, will be presented at a convocation event Friday, Nov. 16, at 10 a.m. in Beaman Meeting Room A.
Pannell-Longard is an assistant professor of sociology who chose to research child beauty pageants because she believed the pageants are open sites where women instruct young girls on how to be women.
“I wanted to look at a setting in which gender was treated and performed explicitly,” Pannell-Longard said. “Pageants are a good environment to examine how parents socialize their daughters into very specific and idealized forms of feminism.”
In addition, she believes pageants symbolize how today’s society views women.
“Even today we judge girls and women by their looks, whether they are on a stage or not,” Pannell-Longard said. “I think pageants are useful to study because they are a representation on what’s going on everyday.”
At pageants she had an opportunity to meet families and find out why mothers choose to put their daughters –sometimes younger than the age of 2 – into pageants.
“Pageant parents don’t want anything different than other parents,” Pannell-Longard said. “They want their kids to be successful, gaining self-esteem, confidence, stage-presence and interview skills.”
She also said most parents expressed that their daughters were the ones who wanted to compete, that some young girls seek out pageantry on their own.
In addition, Pannell-Longard found that parents see pageantry as a form of sport for their daughters.
“It’s not uncommon they compare it to their son’s baseball,” she said. “It’s telling how we think about gender, that we construct beauty as a sport.”
Andi Stepnick, associate professor and chair of sociology, said her colleague’s research shows complex reasons behind why parents want their daughters to participate in pageants.
“Those reasons are well intentioned,” Stepnick said. “We don’t want our assumptions to lead us to judge people before we know their reasoning.”
The intention Stepnick referred to was parents wanting daughters to gain social skills and social capital needed to move up the ladder. However, she stressed that she finds it interesting that in the face of modern – and kinder alternatives – some people would prefer pageants over other options.
“Girls are allowed to play sports now or do a whole host of other things,” Stepnick said.
Pannell-Longard’s research also showed that as many pageant parents attributed their daughters’ higher self-esteem to pageantry, the high self-esteem was mostly true for girls who won the pageants.
“Girls who lost more than they won had lower levels of self-esteem,” Pannell-Longard said. “Those happen to be the girls who had it harder to fit in the social notions of beauty.”
In addition, those were the families who ended up dropping out of pageants and transitioned to other forms of competition, such as sports or music.
Stepnick explained the findings further.
“What Dr. Pannel-Longard finds is that as long as girls meet the ‘standards’ and win competitions, they feel good about themselves,” she said. “But for each pageant there can only be one winner and many losers – so for most girls, pageant participation will probably hurt over time.”
Even though Stepnick said she realizes it is important for young girls to learn how to lose and not be devastated, she explained there are other ways to hone skills, such as confidence, that pageants teach contestants.
“There are other ways to learn those things while developing a rich sense of who they are and why they are just as fine as they are,” Stepnick said.
If Stepnick had the opportunity to vote for or against child beauty pageants, she would vote against them. She believes it is a tragedy when young women think of themselves as worthless because they are not a size two.
“Pageants judge girls and women very narrowly,” Stepnick said. “Those ideas are insidious and they do real damage to real girls and women.”
Pannell-Longard shares a similar opinion and said she would not want her children to participate in child beauty pageants.
“I would want my daughter to involve herself in sport and other forms of competition,” she said.
During her convo, Pannell-Longard will put faces, identities and reality to the social perceptions of what pageantry is. She promises fun quotes and interesting stories, but most importantly, she hopes students will learn from her research and findings.
“I hope students will learn that gender really is a performance both on stage and off, and that women still battle against traditional ideas of beauty,” she said.
