"Beauty queens": the list, and Imelda

OK, here is a compilation of the many beauty posts from the past week (has it only been a week?!), organized in chronological order. I wanted to do this because I think it's incredibly important to read the comments to these posts, and having links to the posts in one place makes that a lot easier. By the way, Bino Realuyo has joined the conversation! (See links to his and Ver's posts below.)

• On the Pinay Power event (Gladys)
• Dream panel on "beauty queens" (Gladys)
• Here she comes...Miss Whatever (Ver)
• Nostalgia and beauty queens (Gladys)
• beauty queens (Barbara Jane)
• And how 'bout that pink feather boa? (Gladys)
• beauty queens, debuts and empowerment (Michelle)
• Beauty and power (Gladys)
• power and standards of beauty (Barbara Jane)
• Welcome to Beautiful Women and Lanzones (Joanne)
• make-up: vanity or war paint? (Joanne)
• vestments (Barbara Jane)
  
• beautiful women and lanzones (Gladys)
• pan de sal [scroll down to penultimate section] (Bino)
• More on Beauty (Ver)

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What struck me about Imelda the movie, besides the fact that Imelda the woman is patently insane, was the sequence with the multitude of stunning, embroidered couture butterfly-sleeve dresses interposed with scenes of women hunched over while embroidering such dresses, and with scenes of poor women hanging their day-to-day laundry on lines. First, I was hit with longing upon seeing the butterfly dresses on their hangers. (And I know Joanne and Barbara Jane felt the same.) I wanted so badly just to try on one of them; actually, what I really wanted was to own one that was made just for me. But we're told in the film by the dress designer, Christian Espiritu, that several of his embroiderers/laborers (all women) literally went blind from doing such painstaking embroidery work.

Living in a deeply capitalist culture, we're trained to forget or, really, to disregard the nature of the labor that went into producing the commodity. I think the technical (Marxist) term for this is the "alienation of labor." Diaz, the director of the film, made sure that we didn't forget, even as we were hit with that consumerist longing. A brilliant move, in my opinion.

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Since I'm talking about consumption, I thought I'd just sneak in some of the things for which I (guiltily) dropped cash today:

• Constantine, dir. Francis Lawrence
• Batman Begins, dir. Christopher Nolan
• Firefly series, dir. Joss Whedon
• the new Franz Ferdinand album, you could have it so much better

I think that last title sums up quite a bit of consumerist rhetoric, don't you think?