ABSTRACT
The cover of Libba Bray's Beauty Queens shows a headless, blonde, bikini-clad beauty wearing a pageant sash and a lipstick-loaded bandolier. It may not initially strike one as "feminist". When read through the framework of material feminism, the young adult dystopian Beauty Queens offers an honest discourse about multiple removals from power and satirizes dominant culture's norms to show the power of becoming, of indeterminacy, and of hybridity. Beauty Queens is a dystopian vision that shows our own culture's trajectory by highlighting gender-normalizing pressures in our current world, using satire to exaggerate the absurdity of such pressures. Beauty Queens, like other feminist utopias and dystopias, recognizably embraces process over product with its characters struggling with who they are and want to become rather than either accepting a fixed identity or striving for quick answers. In the case of Beauty Queens, the satire critiques the dystopian exaggeration of normative sexualization.
