author of The Celestial Jukebox - Cynthia Shearer
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd documents how performative southern rituals fulfill imaginative needs of the present by distorting the past. This book is not salvage ethnography but something much smarter, as she captures the necessary and sometimes painful dialogues about our shared racial past and the possibilities for reconciliation.
author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South - Blain Roberts
Boyd’s arguments about the significance of gender performances to regional identity and memory are persuasive. As she writes, these performances do important memory work, through processes of both remembering and forgetting.
The Journal of American Culture - Andrew Kettler
With all this stark argument and evidence, Southern Beauty is consequently a solid introduction to these highly complex topics, will probably not be enjoyed by pageant moms, and would work well in an undergraduate classroom, especially for a sampling from Chapter One, or in a graduate classroom on courses related to modern Southern identity.
The Public Historian - Elizabeth Gonzalez
The book is full of rigorous research and insightful analysis communicated in clear prose.... Boyd does an exceptional job of storytelling, immersing the reader in the intricate worlds of the sorority house, the beauty pageant stage, and the Natchez Garden Club performance.
author of Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body - Riché Richardson
Boyd’s important study examines how scripts linking 'southern beauty' and White womanhood have helped to conflate Southernness with Whiteness ideologically, while maintaining racial distinctions and stratifications in contemporary social life. This deeply engaging book is a valuable resource. It also adds important layers to the contemporary public dialogues on monuments and symbols, which, as it illustrates, have typically ignored the seemingly innocuous raced and gendered symbolism linked to White femininity in the U.S. South. As this study shows, while White feminine performances premised on southern nostalgia have not gotten a lot of attention, they continue to speak volumes in this day and time.
Georgia Library Quarterly - Jillian Speck
Anyone interested in understanding Southern culture and how it intertwines with racism, sexism, and classism will find Boyd’s research engaging and illuminating.
author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory - W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Southern Beauty is written with verve and takes a subject that is easily dismissed and transforms it into a revealing spotlight on the performance of gender in the contemporary South.
