Queen of the Maple Leaf

Download or read book Queen of the Maple Leaf written by Patrizia Gentile and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty emerged as a business. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers the codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that beauty pageants exemplified, whether they took place on local or national stages. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women, but immigrant women need not apply. Patrizia Gentile demonstrates how beauty contests connected female bodies to white, wholesome, respectable, middle-class femininity, locating their longevity squarely within their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies.