Kiana Nicole Nadonza

KIANA NADONZA, then a graduate student at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Crowning Community: the cultural politics of beauty pageantry in the postcolonial Philippines,” supervised by Dr. Philip Scher. Pageants are held annually in each of the Philippines’ 42,029 barangays (districts) and are a means of cultivating national identity, as the Philippines achieved the most statistical success of any country between 2010 and 2019 in international pageants. This study examines the cultural practices, attitudes, and political economy of beauty pageantry in Manila’s National Capital Region by observing the trajectory of pageant season from the local to the national and international stage. This project advances anthropological scholarship through frameworks of gender, national identity, and visual representations of non-Western bodies in a space previously subject to colonization. Close collaboration with pageant delegates, organizers, coaches, and media provided firsthand accounts of Manila’s pageant industry with particular interest in the prevalence of LGBTQ+ men within its labor sector. A key observation was the dialectical relationship between mainstream traditional pageants and community-based LGBTQ+ pageants for queer individuals, both of which reflect the Philippines’ changing landscape regarding gender and sexuality within the Catholic-majority country.