Since its inception in 1921, the annual Miss America Organization has transformed from a beauty pageant to an organisation focused on awarding winners scholarships that allow them to advocate for integral social causes. On December 15, Grace Stanke, Miss Wisconsin won the coveted Miss America 2023 title, earning a $100,000 (INR 8,281,405) scholarship and a year-long national tour to raise awareness about nuclear power and other zero-carbon energy sources.
The competition featured 51 contestants from all 50 U.S. States and the District of Columbia, with the participating women pursuing impressive degrees in chemistry and law, aspiring to be filmmakers or Broadway performers, or engaging in entrepreneurship. They showcased their various talents and skills onstage, wowing all of America.
Notably, this year’s competition also represented diversity in another way: through its judges and hosts. Featuring one male African American NBA player and four female judges, the competition was also a moment for South Asian representation, as indicated by co-host and singer-songwriter Arianna Afsar and judge Aparna Shewakramani, star of Netflix’s hit show Indian Matchmaking.
This is not the first time that someone of South Asian descent has graced the Miss America stage. In 2014, Nina Davuluri, 24 at the time, made history by becoming the first Indian-American to win the title. She stunned America with her flawless performance in the talent section, fusing her classical dance training with mainstream Bollywood moves.
However, beauty standards in 2014 looked very different. Those were the days when the swimsuit competition, a category where women stood in bikinis or one-piece swimsuits and were measured up against each other on the basis of their outward appearance, was perhaps the most popular segment of the pageant. In 2018, the organisation waved a long overdue goodbye to this contest and revamped its program to instead include a scholarship opportunity for winners to advocate for their chosen social causes.
“Being eight years removed from the pageant world, I often reflect on how I allowed myself to stand on a stage in a swimsuit or an evening gown and give others the right to score me and my body on a scale of 1 to 10,” Davuluri tells Vogue India. “It’s not just the pageant world, but society overall that judges women on their appearance. It’s time we dismantle and push back on these beauty standards and start to share our truth and create new standards.” Davuluri continues to use her voice and the reach she has achieved since her crowning to reclaim her own power and encourage others to break archaic beauty stereotypes. She even gave a TED Talk to this effect earlier this year.
Along the vein of creating new standards, during this year’s competition, judge Shewakramani demonstrated the importance of showcasing her own Indian culture on a global stage. Sporting intricate pre-pleated sarees from Indian designers and female-owned rental companies paired with jhumka earrings, she proved that there is a space for South Asian representation on the national stage, after all.
“As a judge on this pivotal stage, it was important to me to bring my background and understanding of the world through my immigrant, female and South Asian lens. I chose to wear this outfit on the red carpet and at the events as a nod to my culture and also because that’s what I feel most beautiful and confident in. It was a moment for others to see who the real me is,” she told Vogue India.
Diversity was also showcased through the contestants themselves who came from different socioeconomic statuses, body types, backgrounds, nationalities and career aspirations. This was a stark deviation from previous outings, where critics disapproved of the Miss America competition imposing unrealistic beauty standards on young women and prioritising their physical stature over their inward beauty and capability. In recent years, the program has been revamped to be inclusive of more than one version of beauty.
“This is no longer called a beauty pageant, but a scholarship for social causes such as autism, childhood cancer advocacy or sex trafficking,” Shewakramani added. “What was most important to me in choosing Miss America 2023 was her intelligence and drive. Each contestant had to present a business plan about how they would use their platform to make a social impact and their respective plans through their tenure,” Shewakramani added.
Since her onscreen outing in Indian Matchmaking and the success of her internationally bestselling novel She’s Unlikeable: And Other Lies That Bring Women Down, Shewakramani has become an overnight ambassador for women to be heard in all aspects of their lives. This year, she showed up proud to be South Asian and hopefully inspired young brown girls watching the television set that they, too, could be on that panel one day.
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