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Introduction
In this article I analyse how young Maya women in Guatemala navigate the social categories that are constituted at the intersections of gender, indigeneity and class. My main argument is that intersectionality is not only negotiated along different axes of domination (gender, class, ethnicity) and embedded in history, but also produces and becomes manifest in dynamic, hybrid forms of agency. My analysis follows a case-study: the election of the ‘Umial Tinimit Re Xelajuj Noj’ (‘Daughter of the People of Quetzaltenango’, hereafter ‘Umial Tinimit’), the indigenous beauty pageant of Guatemala's second city. Beauty pageants reflect how women are expected by cultural norms to be ‘bearers of culture’ and to physically and culturally reproduce ethnic groups and nations.1 As such, they represent and (re)produce not only gender values and norms, but also ethnic and class ideologies. This domain therefore helps illuminate how intersections of such ordering mechanisms work out in practice.
The argument that I present in this article consists of four interrelated claims. First, beauty pageants constitute a site where gender relations are (re)produced. At the same time, they provide new professional and political opportunities for young women, making it possible for them to transform gender relations on a personal level. Second, indigenous beauty pageants function as a site for cultural appropriation and political agency of indigenous peoples, but at the same time delimit the ways of being an indigenous woman. That is, the young women's political agency as indigenous might be enhanced, rather than their personal agency as indigenous women. Third, beauty pageants reproduce socio-economic relations because of the way they are organised. Indigenous beauty queens, however, often gain social awareness about class relations and poverty. Fourth, indigenous beauty pageants are not only sites where meanings of gender, indigeneity and class are constructed, they are also social events that provide a setting for changes in (gender) relations within and between families.
These four claims come together to demonstrate how intersectionality is negotiated along the lines of gender, class and indigeneity and how contestations of such steering mechanisms produce and become manifest in the construction of agency. My analysis of becoming and being a beauty queen is rooted in the assumption that the meanings of ‘being a woman’ and...