ABSTRACT
The corporate profitability and elasticity of beauty pageant competitions has resulted in a proliferation of beauty politics across a variety of new media genres including Reality TV, mobile apps, and robotic pageants. This flourishing global beauty economy continues to generate pressures for aesthetic and affective labors and self-capitalization. This chapter analyzes this contemporary global circuitry as well as the some of the recent border crossings of the beauty pageant competition prototype. This chapter also considers the ways traditional pageants have been rebranded, and traces the ways that class, cosmopolitanism, race, and gender are woven into emergent transnational beauty competitions. Finally, it also highlights the neoliberal technologies for optimizing gendered appearances, bodies, and subjectivities as well as the constructions of gendered normativity, belonging, and embodied distinction embedded in contemporary beauty competitions.
