Fashion Shows, Strip Shows and Beauty Pageants: The Theatre of The Feminine Ideal
by
TARA MAGINNIS
(Under the direction of W. JOSEPH STELL)

Table of Contents:

Abstract
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Table of Illustrations
Chapter I: Introduction
part a
part b
part c
Chapter II: The Audience
part a
part b
part c
Chapter III: The Ideal and the Reality of the Performer
part a
part b
part c
Chapter IV: The Runway
part a
part b
part c
Chapter V: Conclusions
Notes to Chapter I
Notes to Chapter II
Notes to Chapter III
Notes to Chapter IV
Notes to Chapter V
Bibliography
Further Web Links, Books & Videos

ABSTRACT:
This study is an analysis of fashion shows, strip shows and beauty pageants, and the methods used in their presentation, focusing on the similarity of the three presentation styles and the differences between their final results. Detailed descriptions of the three audience groups, performer images, and uses of stage space, are used to explain how the single format used by all three is adapted to idealize the female figure preferred by each audience.

Fashion shows, strip shows and beauty pageants are shown to have a large number of structural similarities such as: predominantly female casts, use of a runway attached to the stage for promenading, a focus on the performer's costume as defining her image, silent performers promenading to music, and an emphasis on the performers as embodiments of ideal female sexuality. On the basis of these similarities the study postulates that these three genres of theatre are actually a single form ("the theatre of the feminine ideal") with three variations. The variations are then dissected in terms of audience expectations, the ideal embodied by the performer, and the use of stage space. Fashion show audiences, composed primarily of women, view models as substitute selves "with defects mercifully
and miraculously eliminated." Strip show audiences, composed of men, imagine strippers as super-sexualized aggressive females. Middle-class family audiences view beauty queens as ideal daughter figures, representing youthful virtue.

The performers' attempts to embody the preferred ideal of their audiences are shown to be the results of conscious effort by contrasting the projected images of performers with the reality of their lives.

Physical staging techniques used by the performers to put the ideal in the correct spatial arrangement with each audience are discussed in relationship with Hall's
theories of social, personal and intimate distance. The "theatre of the feminine ideal" is thus argued to be extremely flexible by this demonstration of the widely divergent ways these three genres of performance have adapted their common format to different uses.

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