Philippine E-Journals

Media of the Diaspora: The Lao-American Miss Songkhan Pageant

Daryl M. Gordon

 

Abstract:

This article examines ethnic beauty pageants as diasporic media, through which immigrant and refugee communities explore new ways of belonging and negotiate spatial and temporal limitations. The Miss Songkhan beauty pageant, an integral part of the Lao New Year Celebration, influences how Laotian refugee communities re-imagine and re-define their communities. Based on ethnographic data collection in a Lao-American Buddhist temple in the late 1990s, this article how the pageant preserves and re-imagines pre-revolutionary Lao cultural traditions and symbols of the deposed Lao monarchy. Through the usage of specific Lao language terms, gender performance, and clothing, the pageant provides a platform through which the refugee community negotiates dramatic cultural changes and gender ideologies. The Miss Songkhan pageant evokes nostalgia for the imagined community of a lost homeland and for a feminine gender identity no longer performed by young Lao-American women.