Protesting Miss America

On 7 September 1968, around one hundred feminists assembled on the Atlantic City Boardwalk to protest the Miss America pageant, an annual beauty contest with a television audience of circa 27 million and live audience of approximately 25,000 (Reference KreydatusKreydatus 2018: 22). Organized by New York Radical Women, the protest took issue with the demeaning image of women portrayed by Miss America. The assembled women picketed the pageant, leafleted, lobbied participants to join the protest, sang songs, and announced a boycott of the products of the competition's commercial sponsors. They carried signs reading: “I am a Woman, not a Toy, Pet or Mascot” (Reference DuffettDuffett 1968), “Let's Judge Ourselves as People,” and “Can Make-Up Cover the Wounds of Our Oppression” (Reference LittleLittle 2021). They enacted guerrilla theater. A woman dressed as a Wall Street broker oversaw the pretend auction of a life-size Miss America paper doll to which other protestors were chained (Reference DuffettDuffett 1968). Two African American feminists (Flo Kennedy and Bonnie Allen) were bound to a maypole during the staging of a cattle auction (Reference KreydatusKreydatus 2018: 25). A live sheep was crowned Miss America and paraded on the boardwalk to “parody the way the contestants . . . are appraised and judged like animals at a country fair” (Reference DuffettDuffett 1968; Reference EcholsEchols 1989: 93).

The “highlight” of the afternoon, for one participant (Reference DuffettDuffett 1968), was not bra-burning, as has been falsely claimed, but the tossing of “instruments of female torture” (Hanisch [1968] 2003), including girdles, bras, wigs, high heels, makeup, and copies of magazines (like Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies Home Journal) into a “huge Freedom Trash Can” (Reference DowDow 2003; Redstockings 1968). In the evening, a group of 15 or 16 women, trying “to disguise themselves with ‘straight’ clothes and lots of makeup” (Reference SuthelmSuthelm 1968), entered the hall where the televised pageant was being staged. As the outgoing Miss America was reading her farewell speech, the protestors hung a large banner proclaiming “Women's Liberation” over the balcony and shouted: “No More Miss America” and “Freedom for Women” (Reference EcholsEchols 1989: 94).

The Miss America protest has been described as the moment when “feminism suddenly burst into the headlines” (Davis cited in Reference DowDow 2003: 130) and “put women's lib on the map” (Reference DowDow 2003: 135), marking “the end of the movement's obscurity” (Reference EcholsEchols 1989: 93). How, though, might we understand it in terms of corporeality, visibility, and appearance?

Making the Invisible Visible

“Political activity,” Rancière notes, “is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it” and “makes visible what had no business being seen” (1999: 30). Political subjects are thus subjects-in-process that emerge through politics—through the transformation of policed identities “into instances of experiences of a dispute” (36). This includes feminist subjects of the kind explored in this article. Although Rancière says little about how race, gender, or heteronormativity govern possibilities for disidentification (Reference SparksSparks 2016: 421), he does furnish an example germane to the current analysis when he notes that, within police logic, woman is an identity that “hold[s] no mystery,” but in politics “‘woman’ is the subject of experience—the denatured, defeminized subject—that measures the gap between an acknowledged part (that of sexual complementarity) and a having no part.” It is this gap that creates the conditions for disidentification from the police order's sense of woman as the sexual other of man, and the performative appearance or making visible of the “militant” (Reference RancièreRancière 1999: 36) feminist subject(-in-process).

The ten points identified in the press release accompanying the Miss America protest encapsulate the protestors’ disidentification from the demeaning policed image of woman reiterated by the pageant—an image, in their estimation, that is racist,^{Footnote 2} embraces the cult of youth, propagates divisive beauty standards, perpetuates the idea of women as merely competitors for male attention, requires them to be both “sexy and wholesome” (“Madonna” and “whore”), judges them only by their appearance, and bolsters militarism through the expectation that Miss America be deployed overseas as a “military death mascot” to entertain the troops—woman, that is, as “Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol” (Redstockings 1968). We might understand these objections as initiating “a quarrel over the perceptible givens of common life” (Reference RancièreRancière 2004b: 7, emphasis added). In this case, over the gendered expectations about women's ways of acting, being, and doing demanded by white heteronormative beauty standards—standards that turned “[e]very day in a woman's life” into “a walking Miss America contest” (Baxandall cited in Hanisch [1968] 2003).

An important feature of Rancière's account is that in democratic politics, “subjects act to create a stage on which problems can be made visible—a scene with subjects and objects, in full view of a ‘partner’ who does not ‘see’ them” (2004b: 7). For the Miss America protestors this was achieved by appropriating a stretch of seafront promenade, where, aided by the media, they used their “presence as a group . . . to make women's oppression into a conscious social issue” (Hanisch [1968] 2003). A stage where they could expose the inegalitarian logic of the prevailing police order that not only hierarchizes bodies according to gender, race, and sexuality but also configures the public sphere as masculine, white, and heteronormative,^{Footnote 3} where women could not be “seen” as the non-objectified equals of men. In Rancièrean terms, the Miss America protest, on my reading, made visible certain “wrongs” the women were facing and, as dissensual action, entailed an assumption (or “verification”) of equality by the protestors.

The idea that politics is concerned with appearance and visibility is not exclusive to Rancière. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt sets out her well-known idea of the “space of appearance” as “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me” (1958: 198). This space—a stage, perhaps—does not preexist politics but is performatively constituted “wherever,” and whenever people “are together in the manner of speech and action” (Reference ArendtArendt 1958: 199), albeit on a temporary and evanescent basis. The space of appearance is neither a physical space nor a particular location, though, as Reference ButlerButler (2015) shows, specific material conditions are necessary for its actualization. It is a space produced between people “acting and speaking together” (Reference ArendtArendt 1958: 198). While Arendt might not recognize it as such, because of its focus on (in her terms) social rather than political issues and on women's interests rather than a “concern with the world” (Reference MarkusMarkus 1987: 85), the Miss America protest arguably constructed just such a fleeting space of appearance.

In their accounts of politics, however, both Arendt and Rancière privilege speech, with the former writing: “Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor,” for “speech is what makes man a political being” (1958: 178, 3). Likewise, as illustrated, for Rancière, by the plebians on Aventine Hill, politics “exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account” (1999: 27, emphasis added). As indicated earlier, Rancière's idea of disidentification centers on the dual rejection of the specific names—and thus identities—the police order assigns, “names that pin people down to their place and work” (1992: 62) and the deployment of “litigious” (2004a), “wrong,” or “political” names (1992, 1999), such as Auguste Blanqui's use of “proletarian” to designate the “part of those who have no part” (Reference RancièreRancière, 1999: 39). These “improper” names, as others (Reference AsenbaumAsenbaum 2023; Reference DeseriisDeseriis 2012) have called them, are thus vital discursive elements in political subjectivation.

Exclusion and marginalization do not occur only through the denial of political voice. They also operate through the differential distribution of visibility, through what can be seen rather than said or heard. Visibility calls attention to bodies. Yet, neither Arendt nor Rancière sufficiently consider the role of the body or, indeed, of insurgent corporeal practices in democratic claims to appearance. Indeed, Arendt does not regard corporeal matters to be the proper subject of politics at all (for further discussion see Reference ButlerButler 2015; Reference Deranty, Emmanuel and AndrewDeranty and Renault 2009; Reference HonigHonig 1995b; Reference NortonNorton 1995; Reference ZerilliZerilli 1995).^{Footnote 4} Butler's work on public assembly is instructive here. Butler builds on Arendt's ideas about the space of appearance—she is silent about Rancière—but insists the bodies involved are “exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field” and “pose[s] its challenge in corporeal terms” (2015: 11, 83). Understanding appearance, for Butler, requires us to acknowledge the necessarily “bodily dimension of action” (2015: 73; see also Reference CavareroCavarero 2021).

Informed by Butler's reading of Arendt, I want to turn in the final section of this article to the role of the body in democratic disidentification. Specifically, how embodied political actions might enact democratic claims to visibility that, in Rancière's terms, challenge the dominant distribution of the sensible dividing bodies into “two categories: those that one sees and those that one does not see” (1999: 22).

Disidentification as Corporeal Practice

The body is central to the Miss America protest in three main ways. First, the issues the women were protesting focused on the female/feminine body: on its objectification, as exemplified in the pageant's swimsuit contest, its disciplining to attain heteronormative beauty standards, the gendered and racialized norms determining how it is expected to look, and the norms of “respectable” femininity conditioning how the contestants, and by implication all women, ought to behave. The Miss America demonstration was thus one of the inaugural moments in the development of feminist “body politics”: the idea that the material body could be the locus of political contestation (Reference BordoBordo 1993). Indeed, such was the novelty of this emphasis on corporeal matters that onlookers allegedly “didn't know how to categorize what they saw. It couldn't be a political demonstration,” they thought, because “the slogans weren't ‘political’ and anyhow, it was just women” (Reference SuthelmSuthelm 1968). The protestors, however, made fleshy issues political when they challenged the hierarchical distribution of bodies associated with the prevailing patriarchal and heteronormative police order, making visible what it occluded—namely, that it was precisely as bodies, specifically as sexed and gendered bodies, that women were objectified, marginalized, and oppressed.

Second, the Miss America protest confirms the importance of embodiment to radical democratic politics more broadly—not just because all such action is carried out by enfleshed beings and engenders (involuntary) sensate affects and reactions that elicit corporeal responses (Reference CooleCoole 2007; Reference KrauseKrause 2011; Reference MachinMachin 2022), though this is correct, but because creating a space of appearance or staging a disagreement requires the embodied presence—the physical coming together—of democratic subjects (Reference ButlerButler 2015; Reference CavareroCavarero 2021). It is through what Melissa Tyler describes as a “collective, corporeal claim to public space” (2020: 190) that, I am suggesting, alternative modes of disidentificatory subjectivation can emerge. Physically congregating on the Atlantic City Boardwalk—being there as bodies—to perform guerrilla theater or to trash feminine accoutrements was how those involved subverted policed expectations about embodied femininity and performatively enacted an alternative mode of gendered embodiment.

This takes me to my third point. If, as Rancière observes, the “political realm” is the “realm of appearance” (2003: 202), then, as just noted, tying political action to speech clearly limits our understanding of how democratic claims to visibility are performed. What, then, are we to make of the fact that when Rancière defines politics he describes it as “whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it,” and when he characterizes subjectivation he notes that it involves “a series of actions of a body” (1999: 30, 35, emphasis added)? It implies that politics has a corporeal dimension, though not one Rancière actively explores (but see Reference QuintanaQuintana 2019).

We know, however, from discussions of the subject-in-process that (policed) identities are embodied effects, incorporated through everyday compulsory repetition of corporeal norms and practices. A need for repetition that renders fleshy identities both contingent and potentially open to democratic contestation, subversion, and transformation. Embodied subjects can resist or subvert entrenched enfleshed norms (Reference ButlerButler 1990, Reference Butler1993; Reference Schippers, Adrian and MoyaSchippers 2009). They can seek alternative ways of living their bodies in the world (Reference MachinMachin 2022). The corporeality of democratic disidentification is not, of course, limited to specific practices or activities. Bodies can “appear” publicly in several different ways. Nevertheless, in this final segment of this article, I want to reflect on how the somatic practices underpinning certain forms of protest, not all of which relate to the Miss America protest, can serve as the modality through which presuppositions of equality are enacted, bodies and identities are reconfigured, and new modes of embodied subjectivation emerge.

Employed mainly by refugees or asylum seekers, lip sewing, where participants literally suture their lips together, performatively materializes the silence imposed on those who enact it just as it resists that imposition (Reference BarguBargu 2022; Reference Edkins and VéroniqueEdkins and Pin-Fat 2005). Incarcerated hunger strikers refuse food to reclaim control over a body that is no longer theirs to control, a confined, surveilled, administered, and micromanaged body (Reference BarguBargu 2014; Reference MachinMachin 2022; Reference ShahShah 2022). Refusing food is an enfleshed refusal to live that way. Of course, the Miss America protests took place in full public view, while lip sewing and hunger strikes frequently occur in detention. Yet sometimes even from captivity, such modes of fleshy disidentification secure visibility for previously unseen prisoners and detainees (Reference ShahShah 2022).

Not all embodied performative practices directly harm the corpus of the protestor. Some are nonviolent. Sit-ins, used by civil rights protestors in, for example, Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 (see e.g., Reference KowalKowal 2004; Reference MorrisMorris 1981; Reference SchmidtSchmidt 2018), served to stage a political disagreement over the system of segregation that refused to see African Americans as equal to their white peers—that treated them as “invisible” (Ellison [1952] 2011). Others are more theatrical, such as die-ins, used by a broad range of movements, including climate activists, antinuclear campaigners, critics of the Vietnam War, and Black Lives Matter. During the late 1980s, to make visible the high mortality toll from AIDS, large groups of people laid down silently in busy public venues and simulated being dead (Reference BrownM. Brown 1997; Reference GouldGould 2009). Their “corpses” serving as physical reminders of how many, particularly within gay communities, had perished from AIDS. The goal being to expose and contest the public invisibility of AIDS at a time when governments were largely ignoring it.

As a bodily action, the physical chaining of women to a giant Miss America puppet worked similarly. It demonstrated—evidenced and protested—“women's enslavement to ‘beauty standards’” (Reference EcholsEchols 1989: 93; see also Reference DuffettDuffett 1968). As another nonviolent action, binding women to a puppet, was (part of) an attempt to assert a hitherto denied political presence by making the unseen visible. Taken as a whole, however, the Miss America protest, I submit, parallels, what Athena Athanasiou terms, “a performativity of embodied agency” (Reference Butler and AthenaButler and Athanasiou 2013: 178), where through their various actions in concert and appearance in public, the women not only asserted control over the very bodies they did not control but constituted those bodies differently.

It is my contention that the particular examples just cited should all be understood as different modes of disidentifying from particular, restrictive organizations of “being” and “living,” be that as refugees, prisoners or detainees, as African Americans within a segregationist structure unable to perceive them as fully human in a normative social or political sense, as gay men within a heteronormative regime construing homosexuality as “unnatural,” or, in the case of the Miss America protest, as “oppressed” women in need of “liberation” (see Hanisch [1968] 2003). Each entailed an insurgent democratic demand for visibility but one that was not articulated primarily or exclusively through speech, as Rancière or Arendt indicate, but through the enactment of a fleshy claim to appear as a political subject. In each case the practices engaged in served as the performative means through which the police norms defining how a particular group ought to behave (what it could say, do, or be) were refused and embodied subjectivity configured differently.

This is not to say, of course, that corporeal disidentification is either easy or risk-free. Because of the operation of hierarchizing norms of sex, gender, sexuality, and race in structuring the public sphere, not all bodies are immediately able to enter it in the same way. Some are invisible within it, while other types of body are privileged. This means that the possibilities for and perils attaching to corporeal disidentification may vary depending on positionality. Refugees in detention have much more limited opportunities for disidentification, for instance, than other groups, though they still have them (Reference LloydLloyd 2023). It should also not be assumed that the specific bodily practices I have mentioned (hunger striking, die-ins, and so on) will necessarily or always enable disidentification. Their productivity, in this sense, will depend on context.