I am not much of a recapper (I don’t even like pageants!). But I’m in this thing and must fulfill my duties until the end! So here is what you officially need to know about the 2007 Miss Universe pageant:

Miss USA fell, and then got booed. (Trump blames Mexico’s anger over American immigration policy. I blame Elvis.) Whatever, she’s a trooper, smiling through the jeers: “Buenas Noches, Mexico.” Ouch! →

← Miss Japan won, and Miss Mexico didn’t make it into the finals.

¤

What I’m interested in, though, is Reuters‘ description of this year’s pageant as troubled. And they don’t mean “troubled” as in “we should be troubled it still exists,” a la Sweden, but troubled by its many controversies. Now, again, not big on the pageants. At worst they are just too tightly tethered to processes of female oppression through objectification; and at best they simply propogate the modern sense that all women must be “perfect,” e.g. smart, beautiful, and talented in completely mainstream, high capitalist ways.

But let us put that aside from now, for I am interested to see what counts as troubling in the Miss universe. According to Reuters:

A raven-haired Miss Japan, Riyo Mori, was crowned Miss Universe 2007 on Monday in a contest marked by protests, a banned dress and the withdrawal of one beauty queen on the ground the pageant degrades women.

I find these events far from troubling, and even think we should assume them to be par for the course– although I am also willing to admit that Reuters might simply be trying to wring some spicy story out of this monumental, hugely watched, non-event! But protests are good, especially when they are trying to bring attention to violence against women during an event that screens us from such violence (more on the protests later). And of course there was a banned dress. The Miss Universe costume is the pinnacle of nationalist couture; I’d be more worried if there were never controversy over what a contestant is wearing. Unless of course you’re Balkan or a European non-aligned state. And yay Sweden, “giving in” to the feminists. Or can we say, “responding to women’s concerns”?

But then the Reuters report takes a turn for the worse, letting too many things slip into, categorically, “troubled.” Let’s watch the progression of these three paragraphs. Beginning with the protests, the story moves from that which is a sign of trouble, to that which is “quirky,” to a reference to winner Zuleyka Rivera’s incipient eating disorder in last year’s conference:

This year, [the contest] attracted protesters wearing white dresses splashed with fake blood and sashes proclaiming “Miss Juarez,” ”Miss Atenco” and “Miss Michoacan” in reference to places in Mexico made infamous by killings or sexual abuse of women.In another quirk for 2007, the long, twisted dreadlocks of Miss Jamaica, the contest’s first ever Rastafarian participant, and the close-shaved head of Miss Tanzania stood out from the lacquered manes of the other contestants.Last year’s Miss Universe event in Los Angeles also made its mark when winner Rivera caused gasps by slumping to the ground in a faint during a post-pageant news conference.

In another post, I found myself unexpectedly reading Miss Tanzania and Miss Jamaica as beacons of light in an event that otherwise signals a kind of dreary global vision. According to Reuters, it turns out I am just totally into pathology– feminism, diversity, and political action…

And, oh, why do I care about a random Reuters story? It’s because no one seems to care so much about the Miss Universe pageant this year. That is quite fine with me, but it means that across the world (checked on the world this morning!), the Reuters story is the story– cited, misquoted, and plagiarized unto infinity in blogs, magazines, and newspapers. More stories will emerge, but the “trouble” might give this one just enough spice to keep it afloat in a sea of follow-ups.

And to quote my three year-old son: I don’t like this “trouble.” Or to paraphrase Objectify This, to the tune of Big Pun:

“I’m not a troublehater ’cause I dream a lot.”

I soon, however, regretted being so hard on Rachel Smith, for she fell during evening gown segment of the Miss Universe pageant. Ouch! It was pretty terrible, I must say.

Yet, somehow, she made it into the final five. (She must’ve had a whole lot points, huh?). But the audience wasn’t buying it, booing and jeering Miss America throughout the final question section.

And then her question, something to the order of “If you could go back and change any moment in time, what would it be?” She rattled out some prepared spiel about visiting Oprah Winfrey’s school in South Africa, but all I could hear was “more ouch”!

Nothing she could say would make up for Rosa Maria Ojeda Cuen, Miss Mexico, not making it into the top five in the Mexico City event. And oh yeah, the whole war thing. And the immigration thing. Who knows what’s converging in such a moment?

She should have tried to cruise on pure honesty, answering, “when I fucking fell ten minutes ago!”

Ouch!

Let’s have a look at Miss Mexico, v. 2!

As you can see, the new dress follows the original form, being cut from the same traditional manta and so on. Gone, however, is the band of bullets, replaced with a black lace shawl. Also gone are the scenes of civil war destruction, now replaced with “landscapes of corn and cactus fields and decorative elements from Indian cultures,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

I must admit that I am a little bit suspicious of this corn. I know: who could be suspicious of such a cute and important grain? (I strongly recommend the animated “what is corn and what’s its story” tour at The Great Corn Adventure!) But I guess that I am suspicious because I find it hard to avoid interpreting the dress change as meaningful– if only because the original was so oversteeped in its attempts at meaningfulness. It seems to me that whoever ultimately made this decision was looking for a way to keep the original message by offering up an “alternative” that is only different on its surface.

One connection between the original dress and this new one is in the way the new dress shifts its scene from a time of conflict to one of prelapsarian innocence. Rather than displaying a moment when the Catholics lost political power, it shows a scene from before when such power became necessary– before there was a nation-state. And by offering a vision of meso-america before political subjecthood, before the establishment of the Mexican state that the previous dress implicitly critiqued, the dress ultimately skirts (ha!) the issue of its divisive politcs.

The irony, of course, is that immense violence transformed meso-america into the very Mexico represented by the dress. In this sense, the dress indeed fulfills its mission to show the “nation’s culture and history,” but the details, this time, are only revealed in its seams and folds.

It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. [...] A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies.

Oh my! Let’s have a look at this dress…

According to msnbc, this well-accessoried ensemble features a “billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of Catholic rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapulars hung from the bullet-studded, bandolier belt; a large crucifix necklace, black halter top and wide-brimmed sombrero completed the outfit.”

(I really like it when ladies remember their hats. Bullets, however, are often that one thing too much that bogs down the look.)

The msnbc and BBC articles each do a good job pointing out some of what is at stake in this choice for representing Mexico to the world. There is also an article in La Jornada* that is particularly good at reading the dress as a signifier of contemporary Mexico’s political moment, which Melissa has also pointed out to us to in her response to JL’s post on the new abortion laws in Mexico City.

Further, as all of the articles point out, there is something troubling about this fetishization of the violent Cristero War, which hinged on Catholic rebellion against the secularization of the Mexican state. And for some, the images, which include Roman Catholic rebels hanging from posts and a man facing a firing squad (maybe Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ.?) also have an uncomfortable resonance with the pervasive public violence brought on by the escalating drug war in Mexico.

Hey Princess Propaganda and Princess Production, what do you think of this sticky uber-princess situation?

[*By the way, the Jornada article is in Spanish though, since it is a newspaper, you might only need to dredge up your sixth-grade Spanish! I suggest taking a look. If you get stuck, feed the article's URL into Babel Fish.]