"Most Unusual" Beauty Contests

Nordic Photographic Competitions and the Construction of a Public for German Race Science, 1926-1935

Bibliographic Data

ID3248580
AuthorsAndrew D Evans (SUNY New Paltz, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume111
Issue2
Pages284-309
Publication date2020-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/709160
OpenAlexW3033721445
LanguageEN
References cited12

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, professional anthropologists and prominent race scientists in Germany served as judges in a series of mail-in photographic competitions designed to identify the most representative examples of the so-called Nordic race. This essay examines the interactions between judges and audience in three of these contests. Race scientists and entrants collaborated to construct a vision of the Nordic race as primarily male and middle and upper class. More important, the contests served to configure the very categories of “science” and “lay public” for the new discipline of race science (Rassenkunde), setting them in an unequal relationship to each other. Race scientists portrayed their audience as the entire German people, or Volk, which they represented as desperately in need of racial knowledge that only experts in Rassenkunde could provide. Rather than breaking down divisions between race scientists and the public, the collaborative process of the contests served to construct those very categories

Beauty · Class (philosophy · Construct (python library · Epistemology · German · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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