{"id":2807,"date":"2009-11-05T02:08:42","date_gmt":"2009-11-05T02:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=2807"},"modified":"2017-03-26T21:24:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-26T21:24:31","slug":"pure-beauty-judging-race-in-japanese-american-beauty-pageants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=2807","title":{"rendered":"Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Minnesota Press<\/a>
\n2006
\n280 pages, 6 halftones, 10 tables
\n5 7\u20448 x 9
\nPaper ISBN: 0-8166-4790-9
\nPaper ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4790-3
\nCloth ISBN: 0-8166-4789-5
\nCloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4789-7<\/p>\n

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O\u2019Riain<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer in Sociology
\nNational University of Ireland, Maynooth<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Examines the question, Who is Japanese American?<\/strong><\/p>\n

With a low rate of immigration and a high rate of interracial marriage, Japanese Americans today compose the Asian ethnic group with the largest proportion of mixed-race members. Within Japanese American communities, increased participation by mixed-race members, along with concerns about overassimilation, has led to a search for cultural authenticity, giving new answers to the question, Who is Japanese American?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Pure Beauty<\/em>, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O\u2019Riain tackles this question by studying a cultural institution: Japanese American community beauty pageants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. King-O\u2019Riain employs rich ethnographic fieldwork to discover how these pageants seek to maintain racial and ethnic purity amid shifting notions of cultural identity. She uses revealing in-depth interviews with candidates, queens, and community members, her experiences as a pageant committee member, and archival research\u2014including Japanese and English newspapers, museum collections, private photo albums, and mementos\u2014to establish both the importance and impossibility of racial purity. King-O\u2019Riain examines racial eligibility rules and tests, which encompass not only ancestry but also residency, community service, and culture, and traces the history of pageants throughout the United States. Pure Beauty<\/em> shows how racial and gendered meanings are enacted through the pageants, and reveals their impact on Japanese American men, women, and children.<\/p>\n

King-O\u2019Riain concludes that the mixed-race challenge to racial understandings of Japanese Americanness does not necessarily mean an end to race as we know it and asserts that race is work\u2014created and re-created in a social context. Ultimately, she determines that the concept of race, fragile though it may be, is still one of the categories by which Japanese Americans are judged.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n