Televised minority beauties

Abstract

Drawing on two beauty contests Ratu Suria (2012) and Miss Vasantham (2004–present) from the minority Malay and Tamil television stations in Singapore as case studies, this article seeks to map out the contours of ethnocultural scripting of gender and femininity. Rather than finding idealized beauties, these contests have brought to the surface anxieties of ethnocultural incompleteness. More importantly, they also reveal the extent of ethnocultural mobility in the contestants negotiating the ideological contours required by the state-supported minority television stations towards an idealized multicultural minority beauty.