Greg Marchildon interviews Patrizia Gentile on her book Queen of the Maple Leaf: Beauty Contests and Settler Femininity published by UBC Press in 2020. An associate professor of human rights, social justice and gender studies at Carleton University, Gentile has written a cultural history of beauty contests in Canada that pays attention to the evolving perceptions of femininity among contest organizers, participants and audiences. In particular, she examines the patient paradox when there is an explicit display of the feminine figure on the one hand and an insistency by pageant officials on the other to vehemently deny that their particular pageant was a “beauty contest.” She also described the racial dimensions of these beauty contests and the “while settler codes of feminine respectability.”
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