Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd - Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South

2022 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Set in 11/13.5 Corundum Text Book by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boyd, Elizabeth Bronwyn, 1960 author.

Title: Southern beauty : race, ritual, and memory in the modern South / Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061980 | ISBN 9780820362311 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820362328 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820362304 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenSouthern States. | FemininitySouthern States. | Sex roleSouthern States. | RacismSouthern States. | Beauty contestsSouthern States. | Debutante ballsSouthern States. | College sorority membersSouthern States.

Classification: LCC HQ 1438. A 13 B 69 2022 | DDC 305.40975dc23/eng/20220404

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061980

FOR

Bronwyn Clare Redvers-Lee

AND

Peter Redvers-Lee

CONTENTS

I THINK IT WAS THE SCREAMING. IT WAS THE LATE 1980S, AND I HAD moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to pursue a masters degree in southern studies at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, as it is known colloquially. Partial funding for this endeavor came in the form of a graduate assistantship that charged a small cadre of students with proofreading the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture(UNC Press, 1989). Reading aloud to one another in pairs as we marked up the manuscript, we would lounge about the common rooms of Barnard Observatory, home to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and characterized in those days by peeling paint, creaky floorboards, and faded cabbage-rose wallpaper. Nice weather found us out on the porch, where we couldnt help but observe the comings and goings of Sorority Row. It was there that I first witnessed the resounding, ecstatic cries and hyperfeminine motions of sorority rush.

The scene came as a bit of a shock. Though, having grown up in the state capital of Jackson, the move to Mississippi was a return for me, I had forgotten the extent to which a regionally specific and competitive femininity charged nearly every milieu. Or perhaps I had blotted it out or assumed that things had changed. But here it was: highly structured and highly visible, high volume and high stakes. The scene playing out before me was perhaps a heightened expression of the sort, but it was also part and parcel of a ubiquitous regional institution: southern beauty culture. This regional realm of feminine competency emphasized looks, lineage, grooming, and manners, all measured by performance. Nearly a decade earlier, hoping to escape the rah-rah nature of campus life at a big state university, I had purposely chosen a smallish liberal arts college in south-central Texas, where the only sport of note was tennis. Yet here I was, drawn back to ground zero of southern beauty culture in my quest to understand and interpret the South. The irony of our poring over the Encyclopedias serious scholarship on History and Manners, Womens Life, and Mythic South with sorority-rush door songs as a soundtrack was not lost on me. Yet what I first experienced as amusing happenstance was, in retrospect, serendipity.