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

Event date: 
Wednesday, March 29, 2023 - 7:30pm to 8:30pm

This event takes place in person at Charis and on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Click here to register to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event.

Charis and Agnes Scott College welcome Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd in conversation with Mary Cain for a discussion of Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern SouthSouthern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism. This event is in partnership with the Agnes Scott College Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies. 

In a trio of popular gender rituals--sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage--young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why? 

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties' racial work or their investment in it. 

With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion--stylized and predictable but ephemeral--has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd is an independent scholar who lives and writes in Takoma Park, Maryland.
 
Mary Cain is Associate Professor of History at Agnes Scott College. She is the author of several articles and reviews that consider issues of race, gender, privilege, power and domesticity in the antebellum United States. Her teaching interests include African-American history, the history of slavery, Native American history and US women’s history. In recent years she has received both the Faith Yao Yu Chao Faculty Excellence Award and the Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award. In January she was appointed editor of the teaching network within H-Net, the online platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and looks forward to serving the academic community in that role!
 

In-person event guidelines: 

  • All attendees must wear a face mask at all times inside the building 

  • We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

  • This event will be live-streamed via crowdcast. Click here to register to attend virtually.

  • As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

  • If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304

If you would like to watch the virtual event with computer-generated captions, please watch in Google Chrome and enable captions. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we continue to connect across distances.

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Event address: 
A Charis Hybrid (in-person + virtual) Event
184 S. Candler Street
Decatur, GA 30030
Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South By Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd Cover Image
$32.95
ISBN: 9780820362328
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: University of Georgia Press - August 15th, 2022

Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.


Event Summary: 
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.