Description
Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture,
and the Filipino Adoration of Queens
BY GENE S. NAVERA
In Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture, and the Filipino Adoration for Queens, Gene S. Navera delves into the deep-rooted Filipino fascination with beauty queens and with pageantry itself.
Made by a pageant fan for pageant fans and those curious about the scene, this book explores the duality of its spectacle—both as a wellspring of empowerment and a space for exploitation—with a critical, scholarly eye. In three parts, the author unpacks the concept of beauty and its role as both an object and a facilitator of power, the vibrant history of Philippine pageants in light of the grandeur of the Miss Universe stage, and the various circles of pageant fandom and their impact on the industry as a whole.
Looking beyond the glamor of the crown to uncover the deeper cultural forces at play, Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture, and the Filipino Adoration for Queens is an insightful reflection on the contradictions and enduring allure of pageantry.
REVIEWS:
“Blending scholarship with personal reflection, Gene Segarra Navera examines beauty’s power—both oppressive and empowering—while recounting a lifelong passion for pageants. Engaging, cutting, and deeply reflective, this book is one-of-a-kind as it unpacks the social, colonial, and digital forces shaping beauty and its evolving role in identity-making.”
— Ruanni Tupas, PhD, Author of (Re)making Society: The Politics of Language, Discourse, and Identity in
the Philippines and associate professor in sociolinguistics of education, University College London
“Rare and ground-breaking, this book offers a comprehensive and penetrating scrutiny, as well as an unabashed celebration of beauty and pageantry in the Philippines. Written by a fan-scholar whose deep passion for beauty pageants can only be matched by a critically reflective approach to it, this book gives pageantry the serious scholarly attention it has long deserved.”
— Rommel Curaming, PhD, Author of Power and Knowledge in Southeast Asia: State and Scholars in Indonesia and the Philippines and senior assistant professor, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
“As someone who has competed on the national stage, I felt both seen and inspired while reading this book… It strikes the perfect balance between a well-researched cultural study and deeply personal reflections from someone who has lived and breathed the world of pageants.”
— Bella Ysmael, Model, ballerina, and Miss Universe Philippines 2020 first runner-up
“Navera emerges as a fine stylist of prose crafted from an exuberant present, offering an amorous discourse not only for the queens he has adored but also the fellow queers he has stood up for and with, all these years. What more can one ask after immersing oneself in the spectacle of this solidarity?”
— Jaya Jacobo, PhD, Poet, critic, and scholar, University of the Philippines–Diliman
Size: 7" x 10"
Number of pages: 264
Available: Softbound, Hardbound
Publisher: Vibal Foundation Inc.
Imprint: Academica Filipina+
Copyright: 2025
About the Author:
Gene Segarra Navera is a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore Centre for English Language Communication (NUS CELC), and also serves as one of its deputy directors. He is a fellow at Tembusu College, one of the residential colleges at NUS University Town. He earned his doctorate in English language studies from NUS and holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in speech communication and communication arts from UP–Diliman and UP–Los Baños, respectively.
Before pursuing his doctorate in Singapore, he taught writing and speech communication courses for eight and a half years at UP–Los Baños, where he received the Outstanding Teacher Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2004. He teaches interdisciplinary seminars and content-based academic writing courses at the residential colleges of NUS.
His research interests include rhetoric and public address, critical discourse studies, and pedagogies in writing and speech communication. He is the author of The Rhetoric of PNoy: Image, Myth, and Rhetorical Citizenship in Philippine Presidential Speeches (2018).
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