Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain has written a fascinating book, Pure Beauty, about Japanese American community beauty pageants, exploring how race, ethnicity, culture, and gender are linked in social practice. As revealed in her research, these beauty pageants reflect important conflicts within the Japanese American community over national citizenship, gender, and race and raise questions about the struggle to maintain racial and ethnic lines within the community.
Dr. King-O’Riain has always felt a strong bond to her Japanese ancestry. Because her grandfather, grandmother, and mot…