As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty emerged as a business. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers the codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that beauty pageants exemplified, whether they took place on local or national stages. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women, but immigrant women need not apply. Patrizia Gentile demonstrates how beauty contests connected female bodies to white, wholesome, respectable, middle-class femininity, locating their longevity squarely within their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies.

Patrizia Gentile is an associate professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University.

Patrizia Gentile's profile page

[Queen of the Maple Leaf ] will be of interest to all who study nation making in Canada as a process involving intersecting categories of subject positions.

University of Toronto Quarterly

[Queen of the Maple Leaf] is a seminal contribution to better understanding how histories of women’s bodies make for legitimate historiography of settler colonialism, truth regimes and power dynamics within Canada.

Canadian Journal of History

Gentile’s compelling argument and sharp analysis of a diverse set of sources provide a rich examination of oft-trivialized beauty pageants. While Gentile hardly celebrates these events, she does allow room to consider women’s (uneven) agency.

Journal of the History of Sexuality