marg conf proceedings paper

The Miss World Beauty Contest Debates: Configuring Femininity for a Cultural Politics i Nikhila H. Department of English Pondicherry University Pondicherry India The Miss Universe and Miss World Beauty Pageants are among the most popular of televised programs, drawing a worldwide audience running into millions for their broadcasts each year. In 1996, when Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (ABCL) announced the organizing of the Miss World Contest in Bangalore, India, the period between August 1996 (when the announcement was made) and November 23rd 1996 (the date of the Finals of the Contest) witnessed intense debates and mobilization of opinion about the Beauty Contest in different fora – Media, Courtrooms, Parliament, Public spaces - and through different means – protests, processions, signature campaigns, and even bomb blasts! If we look at the debates during the run-up to the Contest, the debates seem to be between two groups – one, that was seen as representing the West, the forces of Globalization, Secularism, Modernity, and the other, seemingly representing Culture. The Beauty Contest in Bangalore occasioned the debate on what constitutes womanhood and femininity in the Indian context today. Situating the study of the constituting of femininity in present times in the context of the Beauty Contest, this paper tries to understand why the woman question has become the central issue in these times of Media-powered cultural changes in the Indian context. It examines why women on various occasions in India today are being called upon to take the side of Culture against its variously perceived enemies – the West, Globalization, Modernity, etc. This paper is an attempt to understand why the woman question has (once again)ii become the central issue in today’s times in the mediatized Indian context. The paper argues that the discussion that is happening in India on woman is an attempt to define ‘womanhood’, femininity, in essence what it is to be a woman today. Throughout, the paper contends that it is not entirely incidental that the power and proliferation of the image in recent times is accompanied by the profusion of discussion on ‘woman’, that images and their contentious reception provide the setting in today’s times for the politicization of gender, or rather, more specifically of ‘woman’ identity. Because the Beauty Contest is media spectacle par excellence and because the context of 1996 Miss World Beauty Contest in Bangalore, India is a dramatic instance of ‘woman’ becoming the subject of much animated discussion and mobilization, this paper situates the study of the constituting of femininity in present times in that context. While tracking the competing notions of femininity that emerged in the course of the Miss World Contest debates, the paper’s larger concern is to look at the various interest groups involved in mobilizing women and the politics for which women are being mobilized in the Indian context. If one of the characteristics of mediatization is the ubiquitous-ness of the womanimage, the paper holds that the conditions of visiblization of woman today need to be examined. More often than not, women are being called upon to take sides with Culture against its variously perceived enemies – Globalization, Secularism, Modernity, etc. Why does Culture constitute a condition for visiblization of woman today? What do the competing definitions of femininity tell us about the contestations for power in society today? - While the paper poses these questions in the context of India, some of the discussion may be relevant to other postcolonial contexts as well. 2 Since the Miss World Contest in Bangalore in 1996, there have been a number of studies of that event. Studies by Huma Ahmed Ghosh (2003), Radhika Parameswaran (2004a) and Susan Runkle (2004) have focused on the ‘beauty queen’ to see what image of beauty and femininity she represents and how she comes to stand for the dominant cultural values of the nation. While images, i.e. iconic representation of values, are an important source of study of culture/society/nation, it is equally important to study the conditions of reception of these images. The present study following Brosius and Butcher (1999) who see images “in a journey, with their own ‘careers’ unfolding in the context of their movement through time (history), space (social, economic, political, symbolic spheres) and use (construction of meaning)” (11) argues that there are variations in accessibility and framing contexts of reception of images; this points to the unpredictability and fluidity of images, making them unstable signifiers of a finite range of cultural values. Thus, if the ‘beauty queen’ image, a marker of prestige and success in the present Indian context, was often derisively received during the run-up to the 1996 Beauty contest, it may be important to ask why it was so and what cultural battles were being waged around that image. Other studies of the Miss World Contest in 1996 have seen the contest as being about globalization (see for instance, Hoad (2004)) or have focused on the controversy it generated as staging the confrontation with global forces (See for instance, Oza (2001); Parameswaran (2004b); Luckose (2005)). While these 3 studies have contextualized the reception of ‘global’ images within broad national contexts, I focus on other geographic scales ‘within’ the nation which are not national. This ‘shift’ to other scales follows Merrett (2001) who discusses the centrality of ‘scale’ in the producing of identity in his essay “Understanding Local Responses to Globalization: The Production of Geographical Scale and Identity”. Following the move in social sciences in recent times to see the geographic concept of ‘scale’ as a political construct, Merrett sees identity as linked to not only a particular territory but also to a particular scale. Why he sees ‘scale’ as central is that “the boundaries and frontiers that define the limits of a neighborhood, locality, region, nation-state, or sphere of influence are not pre-given. Rather these limits represent the outcome of politically charged and evolving processes rooted at particular scales (72). It follows that identities are mobilized at different scales by competing forces for defining their boundaries of influence (and not necessarily at one scale alone, that of the nation-state). In this paper, I argue that debates around femininity and attempts to produce the identity of woman at different socio-geographical scales (such as home, neighborhood, locality, region, nation-state, etc.) are also attempts to define territoriality or spheres of influence of particular political actors and of the extent or reach of their constituency. 4 To other theorists, the Beauty Contest context is an instance of the impasse for women, with the ‘choice’ for women being - should they consort with the forces of globalization or with the forces of cultural nationalism? This impasse is captured vividly by Nivedita Menon (2006) who characterizes the ‘choice’ the Beauty Contest and other such moments in recent times have placed before women as being “[b]etween the Burqa and the Beauty Parlour” (206). The Beauty Contest context has been seen as an instance by theorists to explore their “theoretical-political confusions” (Niranjana, 1999: 6). The confusions were attributed in general to the inability of the women’s movement to distinguish its vocabulary of protest from that of the Hindu Right wing groups (See Niranjana: 1999; John: 1998; Oza: 2000). Niranjana, for instance, had called for greater precision in the use of political vocabulary among feminists and greater consensus within the women’s movement “regarding the forms and vocabulary of critique” (5). Mary John had argued that “levelling our (feminist?) protests against tawdry and predictable extravaganzas such as the Miss World pageant” was not significant or useful, though it was an occasion to begin to examine how “localized and sedimented the beauty business is” and suggested that that it might be important to take more seriously “the aspirations and anxieties symptomatic of the desire for beauty” instead of negating it, as had happened with the protests (374). In this paper, I share with them their concern with feminist politics, as also the sense that the Beauty Contest is not an issue in itself and only find the debates it generated useful to explore larger questions with regard to women, 5 constructions of femininity and the cultural politics in and for which women are being deployed. However, this paper departs from these studies in some respects: 1) it does not see an impasse or theoretical-political confusion as only related to the strategy or language of protest to be devised by feminist politics, instead sees it as an issue related to the larger conditions of visiblization of women today; 2) instead of looking at the event as constituted by two opposing groups – the proponents of the Beauty Contest and its opponents –, the paper looks at various interest groups and their interests in issuizing the Contest and the discourse constituted by their interventions and 3) though women were centrally involved both as actors and subjects of discourse, it does not see the Beauty Contest context as giving rise to a ‘Women’s Movement’, given that though women (and men) were mobilized, they were mobilized by and for different interests. In the first section of this paper, I examine how a discourse on women was constituted around the image of the ‘beauty queen’. In this section, I look at how different interest groups came to the fore and developed stakes in the debate on the Beauty Contest. This will provide us with a glimpse of the variety of interest groups and the range of interests for which woman is being mobilized in the Indian context today. In the second section of this paper, I examine what the subject position/s offered was/were to woman in the discourse. This will also help us to see how womanhood or femininity is being defined in the present-day context in India. As source material for these two sections, I rely largely on the 6 electronic Media Archives of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore (CSCS) (http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/site.nsf) which has exhaustively documented the event in the form of newspaper reports, pamphlets, advertisements, etc. While these two sections analyze the cultural politics in/for configuring femininity in India today, the last section of this paper draws together the discussion on images, the discursive context of the reception of these images and identity to conclude that the diverse images in the course of their reception, pass through various filters in the process of producing a more or less stable and homogenous identity. I In mid-August 1996 when Amitabh Bachchan announced that Bangalore would host not only the forthcoming Miss World Contest in November, but also two more in consecutive years, the only question that he seemed to expect was ‘Why Bangalore?’, which he defended saying that “Bangalore was the most ideal and correct place” and had the necessary infrastructure facilities in the floodlit Karnataka State Cricket Association stadium, the proposed venue for the Beauty Contest.iii In an interview given to the then Sunday magazine editor Vir Sanghvi, Bachchan claimed that Miss World, a British Company had almost out of the blue made the offer of hosting to ABCL (Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited) in August 1996 when the Company wanted to move out the hosting of the Miss World Contest from Sun City, South Africa 7 (http://www.rediff.com/news/1996/2011virs.htm). ABCL had been launched in 1995 with the objective of “corporatising every aspect of the Indian entertainment industry” and within a year the Company had made forays into almost every segment of the industry like film distribution, film production, event management, celebrity management, film music, etc. (http://www.rediff.com/business/1999/apr/26abcl.htm). Also the previous years had seen the number of beauty contests multiply in India, and Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai’s winning their Contests had been nationally hailed. ABCL’s stakes in the Beauty Contest to begin with are clear. Given ABCL’s ambitions and the booming beauty business, it made perfect business sense for ABCL to take up to manage the spectacle on Indian territory for a well-known foreign company and in turn gain international visibility and control over the expanding overseas market for the products of the Indian entertainment industry. When the then Government of Karnataka headed by Chief Minister J.H. Patel hosted a joint press conference with Bachchan from the Vidhan Soudha, the seat of the Government, to announce the event, it still seemed to be in the spirit that Bachchan had indeed conferred an honor to Bangalore and Karnataka by choosing Bangalore as venue. By offering legitimacy and infrastructural support, it is not clear if there was anything more for the Government to gain from hosting the Contest beyond proving itself worthy of the ‘honor’ so bestowed. 8 The first dissonant note on this corporate-Government collaboration was struck by Pramila Nesargi, a Bharatiya Janata Partyiv legislator in the Karnataka Assembly, when she criticized the J.H. Patel Government for allowing the press conference to happen on the precincts of the Vidhan Soudha and for offering infrastructural support without consulting the people of Karnataka. But without stopping with that, she went on to say that Karnataka was the land of Kittur Chennammav and Onake Obavvavi and termed the Beauty Contest “an ugly show”. By early September, women’s organizations had come into play and soon from being an ‘honor’, the Beauty Contest came to be seen as a ‘dubious honor’ (Deccan Herald editorial title: 3/9/96). While Mahila Jagaran and Janawadi Mahila Sanghatane opposed the Beauty Contest for different reasons and by different means, Mahila Dakshata Samiti organized a peace procession in support of the event and to condemn acts of violence resorted to by members of other women’s organizations. Jagaran members had famously threatened to form suicide squads to disrupt the event, as Janawadi Mahila Sanghatane, with Students Federation of India and Democratic Youth Federation of India had threatened agitation against the foisting of Western culture on women. Mahila Jagruti members stormed into a Godrej showroom (Godrej was the official sponsor of the event) and smeared cow-dung on the products on display to express their protest against the event. When we see that the All India Democratic Women’s Association in a press conference to express its opposition to the Beauty Contest 9 took pains to clarify that they were opposing the Contest but not in the name of ‘Indian culture’ and ‘Indian womanhood’, it becomes clear that the Beauty Contest had become an occasion for various women’s organizations to define themselves and defend their positions vis-à-vis each other. The fallout of the participation of women’s groups and their sustained mobilization served to turn the Beauty Contest into a woman’s issue. With the Contest now becoming a woman’s issue, it seemed to acquire more respectability, greater weight and scope as farmers’ organizations (Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha), political parties (BJP), pro-Kannada groups (Kannada Chaluvali Vatal Paksha), and civil and democratic liberties groups (People’s Democratic Forum), all began to mobilize in the name of women. vii It also seemed to become a righteous cause for well-known litterateurs, academicians, thinkers, former Chief Justices, advocates, political activists, sportspersons, dancers, entrepreneurs, doctors, theatre-people (U.R. Ananthamurthy, K.V. Subbanna, Sarah Aboobacker, A.N. Murthy Rao, Pu.Thi.Na., Channaveera Kanavi, Nittor Srinivasa Rao, M.N. Venkatachalaiah, Sandeep Shastri, Bhanu Mushtaq, Hemalatha Mahishi, Varavara Rao, N. Babaiah, Ashwini Nachappa, Vani Ganapathy, Kiran Majumdar, Arundhati Nag, etc. – a veritable who’s who of Karnataka at that time) who began to express their opinion on whether the Beauty Contest was degrading or not for women. During the months of October and November, newspapers ran editorials, letters to the editor, features and write-ups, besides news reports on the issue. A 10 number of individuals, organizations and institutions seemed to acquire stakes in the Beauty Contest once it turned into a woman issue. The Beauty Contest matter was taken up to the Karnataka High Court by Mahila Jagaran which sought a ban on holding the Contest in India. The Court ruled that the Beauty Contest could go on provided there was no show of obscenity. The Beauty Contest matter was raised in Parliament; seminars were conducted; pamphlets were circulated. All this outpouring of expression constituted a discourse on women. If we consider ‘discourse’ as general domain of statements and as regulated practice that account for the statements, in the Beauty Contest context there was not only a proliferation of statements on women, but there were also large-scale norms, values and ideologies inscribed into them. In addition, there were processions, signature campaigns, opinion polls, sit-in protests, storming into offices and showrooms of the sponsors, bomb blasts which ensured that for nearly two-and-a-half months between September and November 23rd (the day of the finals of the Contest) the Beauty Contest as an issue remained in public eye. Further, these protests were not limited to Bangalore alone and were reported from other districts of Karnataka such as Shimoga, Bidar, etc. If a Movement involves issuizing, constituting a discourse and mobilizing of social groups, the 1996 Miss World Beauty Contest could be seen as the occasion for a ‘Movement’. It involved galvanization of people on a large scale and that 11 too across social groups, as we saw above. Through mobilization of opinion and personnel, different interest groups came to the forefront. Sustained campaign for three months ensured that people were in a state of readiness to act. Here were all the ingredients combining to cook up a ‘Movement’. But for whom did it constitute a movement? It seemed to constitute a movement for all the stakeholders in the Beauty Contest some of whom we saw above – ABCL, J.H. Patel Government, women’s groups, the assortment of other groups, individuals, etc., for all of whom the Beauty Contest seemed to provide an occasion for talking about ‘woman’, defining ‘woman’, what her role is or should be. Also from the foregoing, it seems that women are embedded in different interests, and different interest groups constitute and maintain themselves to a great extent by defining ‘their’ women. So although woman was the prime mover here, it can hardly be termed Women’s Movement because they were often pitted against each other and formed part of different and often competing interest groups. Ironically, while intense debates were going on about women, the 1996 Miss World Beauty Contest itself is widely reported to have gone off without a hitch. II If we examine the discourse constituted in the context of the Miss World Beauty Contest, there is a great deal of discussion on Indian culture, Kannada cultureviii, our culture, etc. Equally, there is a lot of discussion on multinational 12 corporations, globalization, capitalism, etc. While some expressed their anxieties about the former vis-à-vis the latter (e.g. see K.V. Subbanna (1996)), others simply focused on the latter or the dangers it posed (e.g. see the write-up by Vimochana, a woman’s organization in Karnataka, dt. 1-10-1996). It is possible to conceptualize ‘culture’ and ‘capitalism’ as the axis from which various statements that constituted the discourse on women branched off. Discourse on women Culture Capitalism Fig. 1 The culture-capitalism axis Women, it seems, were divided along this axis. Thus, it appears that there were women who were on the side of culture – the Resistors to the temptations and seductions of capitalism; and there were women who were on the side of capitalism – the Consumers, who were forever running to remain in the same place. So on the face of it, it looks like there were two positions being offered to women on either side of the Culture-Capitalism axis – A) as Resistors and B) as Consumers. 13 Culture A B Capitalism Fig. 2 Two positions on opposing sides of the Culture-Capitalism Axis Now, if we take up the question of a subject’s investment in a discourse, it raises such questions as why she would position herself in a discourse; what taking a subject position would offer her; what for instance, taking the position of Resistor, would give the woman subject. Let us look at K.V. Subbanna’s ix article as an instance of the discourse constituted during the Beauty Contest to see what it offers to the Resistor. In his article, Subbanna begins by talking about the grave danger posed by this global-commercial enterprise at present and calls for selfwilled protest against and overcoming the low desire deep within us. If we resist the temptations of global capital and conquer our desires, what is on offer? It seems that ‘culture’ is on offer. Culture, it seems gives us identity, values of independence, equality, self-respect, truth, purity, beauty, harmony, etc. This implies that going into the realm of capitalism would make the subject lose her identity and values. Further Subbanna says that ‘beauty’ does not consist in weighing and measuring a young girl. The problem he has with such contests is 14 that they assume that woman’s utterance, her laughter and her delicacies can be measured according to world standards; but these, he says, belong to the realm of abstract and imperceptible values that are specific to a culture and hence do not lend themselves to standardized measurements. What would the taking up of position B offer? If we again look at the discourse constituted, it seems to offer ‘products’ – products which as one contestant puts it “makes one feel good about being a woman”, but which the Vimochana write-up denounced as “leading to more ugliness and violence … whose scars can never be covered by the world’s best cosmetics”. Choosing between ‘values’ and ‘products’ – is this the stake then that is involved for women in taking up one or the other position? Although this dichotomy between ‘values’ and ‘products’ is philosophically unsound – aren’t values also produced? Don’t products also have value? – I am not going to pursue that line of argument. Instead in the next few lines I will investigate why this dichotomy is created and why the CultureCapitalism axis is kept alive in defining women. Things start becoming a little clear when we see that actually it is not two positions, but one subject position that is being offered to women. 15 Culture Subject position offered to women Capitalism Fig. 3 Subject position offered to women in the discourse As woman is made to pivot on the Culture-Capitalism axis, her identity and her values are constantly called into question, i.e. Culture constantly keeps raising in her anxieties about her femininity. Capitalism assuages these anxieties around her femininity with products that will make her “feel good to be a woman”. We can see here that Culture and Capitalism are not mutually opposed, but feed off each other: one raises anxieties in woman, the other purports to assuage them. One keeps raising questions about her femininity by constantly harping on her losing her identity and values; the other reassures her of her femininity with the promise of turning her into a ‘new woman’. Woman here we can see is turned into the site for strengthening the Culture-Capitalism nexus. We can also see that those who seem to be for Culture need not in effect be operating against Capitalism, that even when they are rallying against Globalization or Modernity, they may not be working against the Culture-Capitalism combine. 16 III In the first section of this paper, we saw that ‘woman’ has become the prime mover for mobilizing for different interests. In the second section of this paper, I examined how Culture creates the condition for visiblizing women: women need to be visiblized for Culture’s various battles so that in defending their femininity, women will defend Culture/Capitalism. In this brief section let us pull together the arguments in the first two sections and make the connections between images of women, discourse on woman and identity of woman. If mediatization or enhanced production of images is one of the features of High Capitalism, we saw in Section I of this paper that the proliferation of images of women has also given rise to women getting mobilized by/for different interest groups. The images then are received in the context of discussion between and within interest groups. At this level, a certain filtering of images happens as interest groups determine what images and how images are received. In Section II of this paper, we saw that these various interest groups, though separate, discursively converge when it comes to defining femininity and strengthening the Culture-Capitalism nexus. At this level, images pass through the discursive filter so that when the ‘woman’ identity is finally forged, it is a fairly stable and homogenous identity, reflecting little of the diversity or instability of images and their signification. 17 i An earlier draft of this paper was presented in the ICPR sponsored National Seminar on “Philosophical Foundations of Contemporary Social Movements in India” organized by the Department of Philosophy, Pondicherry University in October 2005. I thank the participants of the Seminar for their feedback on the paper. ii Scholars of the colonial period, most famously Partha Chatterjee (1989) has pointed out that the woman’s question after being the central issue for most part of the 19th century had been ‘resolved’ in a fashion by the nationalist discourse in the late 19th century. What factors held the ‘resolution’ in place, if at all it did hold and what factors account for the women question coming back yet again are the larger questions that I am interested in. This paper is a beginning towards addressing those larger questions. iii A few words about Bangalore is warranted here. Bangalore was a minor colonial town with a cantonment of the British Army stationed here. It was part of the princely state of Mysore. After Independence, it became the capital of the newly formed province of Mysore (later Karnataka), but it was still only a second-order city after the four major cities of India, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras. In the last fifteen years, however, Bangalore has acquired a prominent place not only in India, but on the world map as the Silicon Valley of India, with major and minor IT companies seeking out and basing their operations in Bangalore. It is often seen as the new face of liberalizing India, which is what made it an apt location to announce India’s graduation on to the global cultural stage through the Miss World contest. iv The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a national-level party that emerged as a major player in the political scene in the 1990s. After a hiccup in the mid-90s, it steadily rose to head the national government singly or in coalition for the latter part of the 1990s till the previous General Elections in 2004. It is known as a party professing Hindutva ideology or at least having strong connection with groups professing Hindutva ideology. At the time of the Miss World contest, the BJP was in Opposition in Karnataka with the Janata Dal being the ruling party in Karnataka and the Prime Minister at the national level also belonging to the Janata Dal at that time. v Rani Chennamma (1778-1829) was the Rani of Kittur a princely state in Belgaum. In order to secure for her adopted son the throne of Kittur, she defied the British Doctrine of Lapse which gave them right of annexation of such kingdoms without natural heirs. She is said to have had training as a young girl in horse riding, sword fighting and archery. She is said to have battled against the British, been taken into captivity and died in captivity. She is iconized among the pantheon of Karnataka women who put an end to British rule in India. vi Obavva is said to have been the wife of a watch-guard of Chitradurga fort in the 18th century. When Hyder Ali and his army attacked the fort and tried to sneak in through an opening in the fort, Obavva is said to have taken the onake (pounding stone) and killed each soldier as he came in through the opening in the fort-wall. She is iconized for taking upon herself the defence of her land and loyally serving her husband and king by bravely thwarting the enemy. vii There are also newspaper reports of handicapped children being taken out in procession, with the children carrying posters “We don’t want immoral money” after Bachchan announced that some amount of the proceeds from the Contest would be donated to Spastics Society of India! viii Kannada is the language of the state of Karnataka and like other vernacular languages in India, it is seen as the embodiment of a unique culture. ix I am taking K.V. Subbanna (1932-2005), a noted cultural critic of Karnataka and Magsaysay Award winner here, because his article in Kannada “Soundarya Spardeyannu Prathibhatisuvudethakke?” (“Why Protest against the Beauty Contest?”) articulates most clearly and coherently in what manner the Beauty Contest is a threat to culture and why it is so important to fight the ‘cultural destruction’ posed by the global-commercial enterprise. 18 Works Cited: Ahmed Ghosh, Huma. 2003. “Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen’s Body: Implications for a “Hindu” Nation.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism - Volume 4, Number 1. pp. 205-227 Brosius, Christiane and Melissa Butcher. 1999. “Introduction: Image Journeys.” Image Journeys: Audio-visual Media and Cultural Change in India. Ed. Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher. New Delhi: Sage Publications. pp. 11-39 Chatterjee, Partha.. 1989. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial Historiography. Ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women. pp. 233-253 Hoad, Neville. 2004. “World Piece: What the Miss World Pageant Can Teach About Globalization.” Cultural Critique 58. pp. 56-81 John, Mary. 1998. “Globalization, Sexuality and the Visual Field: Issues and nonissues for cultural critique. A Question of Silence? Sexual Economies in India. Ed. Mary John and Janaki Nair. New Delhi: Kali for Women. pp. 368-396 Luckose, Ritty. 2005 (Summer). “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History. pp. 915-935 Menon, Nivedita. (2006). “Between the Burqa and the Beauty Parlor? Globalization, Cultural Nationalism, and Feminist Politics.” Postcolonial Studies and beyond. Ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, et.al. Delhi: Permanent Black. pp. 206-229 Merrett, Christopher. D. (2001). “Understanding Local Responses to Globalization: The Production of Geographical Scale and Political Identity.” National Identities. Vol. 3, No. 1. pp. 69-87 19 Oza, Rupal. 2001 (Summer). “Gender, Geography and Globalization.” Signs. Vol. 26, No. 4 Globalization and Gender. pp. 1067-1095 Parameswaran, Radhika. 2004. “Spectacles of Gender and Globalization: Mapping Miss World’s Media Event Space in the News”. The Communication Review, 7:371–406. Parameswaran, Radhika, 2004a (December). “Global Queens, National Celebrities: Tales of Feminine Triumph in Post-Liberalization India.” Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 21, No. 4, December. pp. 346–370 Runkle, Susan. 2004 (October). “Making ‘Miss India’: Constructing Gender, Power and the Nation.” South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 145–159 Websites: CSCS Media Archive on the Miss World Contest: http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/search.nsf?SearchSite&Q uery=Miss+World+Beauty+Contest&searchmax=0&count=10 Rediff on the Net: “Baron Bachchan braves a bad patch as ABCL falls sick” http://www.rediff.com/business/1999/apr/26abcl.htm as retrieved on 4 Aug 2005 16:34:07 GMT. Rediff on the Net: “Interview/Amitabh Bachchan” http://www.rediff.com/news/1996/2011virs.htm as retrieved on 23 Aug 2005 08:49:29 GMT Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1999. “Introduction” Journal of Arts & Ideas, no. 32-33 (April 1999) http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/artsandideas/pager.html?issue=3233&objectid=HN681.S597_32-33_005.gif 20 Subbanna. K.V. 1996. “Soundarya Spardeyannu Prathibhatisuvudethakke?” (Why do we need to protest against the Beauty Contest?) http://www.kannadasaahithya.com/brharc/index.php?layout=main&cslot_1=219 Biographical Details: I teach courses related to Media, Communication and Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India. My Ph.D. research was on issues in women’s writing, particularly the issue of communalism. Since then, I have been researching on the constitution of femininity in post-Independence times in India. Contact Details: Email: nikhila05@gmail.com Telephone: 91-0413-2655512 (res.) 91-0413-2655991 ext.482 (off.) Contact Address: Department of English Pondicherry University R.V. Nagar, Kalapet Pondicherry – 605014 India 21