Mesmerizing Missis, Nationalist Musings: Beauty Pageants and the Public Controversy over 'Malian' Womanhood

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Periodical article

Title:	Mesmerizing Missis, Nationalist Musings: Beauty Pageants and the Public Controversy over 'Malian' Womanhood
Author:	Schulz, Dorothea E.
Year:	2000
Periodical:	Paideuma
Volume:	46
Pages:	111-135
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Mali
Subjects:	women radio aesthetics mass media Cultural Roles Women's Issues Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Economics and Trade Law, Human Rights and Violence
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/40341785
Abstract:	Mali's annual national 'Miss ORTM' (Office de la Radio et Télévision du Mali) beauty pageant, at which Mali's 'missi' (as the public generally refers to the beauty queen) is selected, has become an event that draws national attention. National television broadcasts the pageant to a nationwide audience and mediates a field in which global forces and images of consumer culture interact with both State-orchestrated processes of nationbuilding and regional and local assertions of a particular and distinctive cultural tradition in a multicultural nation-State. The author explores the dynamics that broadcasting creates, whether and how new standards of beauty are created in the pageants, whether spectators subscribe to these standards or assert that they have their own local ideal of beauty, and how these different standards of beauty feed on one another. The article is based on some two years' research in urban and rural southern Mali between 1994 and 1999. Bibliogr., notes, ref.