| Adopting a feminist cultural studies approach, this dissertation discusses how a new global formation of ethnic Chinese "community" is coming into being---zhong hua---"global Chinese," a "national" form of community---and organized through the global phenomena of the ethnic Chinese beauty pageant. Specifically, I examine the Miss New York Chinese (MNYC) Beauty Pageant in NYC as a means of understanding community formation in an age of globalization and transnationalism. My research focuses on the role of women in dominant Chinese constructions of, as well as, as instruments of resistance to, newly forming global "national" collectivities.As China (PRC) rises economically and politically, China's (the state) and Chinese's (nation national subjectivity) position within the global family of nations---a position determined by past colonial encounters of the 19th century, will also undoubtedly change. MNYC serves as a "performative" site upon which zhong hua---an ethnic "global Chinese" community can be symbolically reconsolidated and re-imagined across the borders of nation-states and within glocal Chinese communities in the U.S. In the beauty pageant, the female Chinese body acts as the site of resistance to dominant Western powers, but paradoxically, also acts as a site of contestation in which notions of "global Chinese" are negotiated, redefined, and refigured. It is a performative space in which dominant conceptions are destabilized and "other" conceptions of "Chineseness" are performed by those in the ethnic, political, and geographic periphery, such as NYC, hence potentially decentering notions of Chineseness from the traditional center (PRC). |
