Are We Grading on the Curves?: Beauty, Students Bodies, and Campus Life

Please join DePauw's Women's Studies Program for a lecture by 

Karen W. Tice
Associate Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Kentucky-Lexington

 Wednesday, November 14, 2012
4:15-5:30 p.m.
Watson Forum

Dr. Tice's first book, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Illinois 1998) explores the construction of professional authority in social work and how the writing of case narratives created clients, authorities, problems, and solutions. Other published work includes articles on gender and professionalization, social reform and settlement work in Kentucky, the politics of social justice/women’s organizations, service learning and feminist pedagogy, Reality TV makeover shows, and religion and beauty pageantry. Her forthcoming book, Queens of Academe: Beauty, Bodies and Campus Life, 1920-Present (Oxford University Press, 2012) examines how the politics of gender and race are braided in campus rituals and student life on predominantly white and black campuses. Growing out of this book project is new research on the fusion of popular culture, higher education, and college men. 

Here's how she describes her November lecture: "Universities are unlikely venues for grading, performing, and marketing gendered and racialized beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century.  Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, I examine the desires, personal ambitions, and sometimes, racial/political agendas that propel students to perform on collegiate catwalks and how they resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and, even, bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. I argue the pageants help to illuminate the shifting iterations of class, race, religion, culture, sexuality, and gender braided in contemporary campus rituals and student life."

Hope to see you!