Margaret Chung and "Contested Beauty"

First, I am in agreement with Faye’s take on Margaret Chung’s “breaking” of gender roles. Such things cannot truly be broken without some catastrophic change that makes them moot. Chung did not fit in well with society’s views of gender roles, but her adoption of male dress allowed her to some extent to slide between the boundaries. Whether she intended for it to do so regardless, her choice of dress made her more acceptable to her medical colleagues and made some of her patients feel more comfortable. More easily parsed is her adoption of Chinese décor for her office, which attracted clients who wanted a less Western approach to their treatment and were engaging in an early form of medical tourism.

On another subject, I was somewhat bothered by Lim’s article “Contested Beauty” as Lim did not relate Asian American women’s experiences in the pageants to today’s notion of pageants at all. Today’s view of pageants is focused on their objectification of women, which is something that Lim does not mention in her article. Lim writes as if she finds the pageants empowering for the women who took part. While some women no doubt chose to participate on their own terms, for which they are to be commended, others likely were pressured into doing so by family and community members who wanted the money and status associated with winning a pageant. I do not believe that for the majority of women they served as a positive influence in the long run.

On the other hand, I do accept that the pageants were good for the Asian American communities, who by using them to emphasize their American-ness managed to become more accepted into American society. By conforming to American ideals of beauty and ladylike conduct, Asian American women could prove their community to be more American than Asian, and allied ideologically with America. Such was important for the Japanese during World War II to distance themselves from their homeland, and for the Chinese during the Cold War due to Americans’ desperate fear of communism. For the Chinese particularly, conforming to American ideals of beauty allowed their purchased goods to show their endorsement of the capitalist system. Using beauty pageants to ally themselves to America and prove their American-ness was surprisingly effective, and improved cultural relations to some extent.