Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture, and the Filipino Adoration for Queens

On 10 November 2025, Dr. Gene Segarra Navera (NUS Centre for English Language Communication) presented a talk based on his new book, Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture, and the Filipino Adoration for Queens (2025).

Event Details

Date and Time: 10 Nov 2025, Monday, 10.00am to 12.00pm
Venue: NUS FASS Research Division Seminar Room, AS7 06-42

About the Talk

My talk draws heavily from the book’s Chapter 6 titled “Contesting and Reimagining Pageants” that brings the readers’ attention to how pageants’ dark history becomes a source of critique and investigation. The chapter specifically problematizes pageants’ tendency to objectify, hypersexualize, and trivialize their contestants. Beyond this critique, I bring to the fore the potential of pageants to serve as sites for empowerment and transformation. I argue that Philippine pageant spaces, despite their strong association with commercialism, enable empowerment and emancipatory goals by encouraging the narratives of women to flourish. This inclination links to the possibility of critical fandom, an idea that acknowledges pageant fans as culture producing or reaffirming, culture subverting, and culture transforming. Ultimately, I offer readers possibilities of reimagining pageants in the future—as relevant spaces that can affirm the dignity of pageant actors by enacting ways for the pageant system to be just, empowering, and humane.

About the Speaker

Gene Segarra NAVERA is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for English Language Communication and a Fellow at the Tembusu College in the University Town. With over twenty years of experience in university teaching, research, and service, Gene teaches interdisciplinary seminars and academic literacy courses at NUS while pursuing research in rhetoric, critical discourse studies, and writing and communication pedagogies. He has authored two books: The Rhetoric of PNoy: Image, Myth, and Rhetorical Citizenship in Philippine Presidential Speeches (2018) and Beauty Spectacle: Pageants, Fan Culture, and the Filipino Adoration for Queens (2025).