Willowdean Takes Part in the Swimsuit Round
Dumplin'Willowdean’s participation in the swimsuit round turns the pageant’s demand for public display into a direct test of her relationship with her body. She arrives at the stage still carrying familiar anxieties, but completes the walk without retreating from the audience or accepting the idea that she must earn the right to wear a swimsuit.
Preparation and Exposure
The swimsuit round follows the evening’s rapid succession of performances. Changing clothes offers no privacy: Willowdean tries to dress strategically, then realizes that the other contestants are attending to themselves rather than scrutinizing her. Once she has pulled on her red swimsuit, she tucks into her hair the red, heart-shaped sunglasses Bo gave her months earlier, an object she had rediscovered while clearing out her closet the week before.
Waiting in the wings, Willowdean notices Ellen stepping onto the stage in a green two-piece and espadrilles, projecting confidence despite Willowdean’s sense that Ellen is anxious inside. The contrast sharpens Willowdean’s attention to her own appearance: her black sandals and the red suit stretched across her round belly. Yet the feature that troubles her most is her thighs. She describes them through a string of harsh comparisons and focuses on their size, cellulite, and the chafing caused when they rub together. Her discomfort is specific rather than a simple rejection of her entire body; she can be forgiving of her softness, but finds it difficult to face her bare legs in a mirror.
When her turn comes, Willowdean takes a deep breath and smiles, recalling her mother’s encouragement. She does not claim to feel entirely comfortable. Instead, she refuses to let discomfort become shame and walks out rather than scurrying away as she once did at a pool. The audience does not boo, and the feared catastrophe does not arrive. In that small but consequential change, the round becomes less a verdict on her body than an occasion to test the authority of the judgment she anticipates.
A Broader Contest over Visibility
After making it through her own walk, Willowdean frames the right to wear a swimsuit as something that does not need to be earned: “Do you have a body? Put a swimsuit on it.” The sentence turns the round’s usual logic inside out. Rather than treating the contestants’ bodies as evidence to be judged against a narrow ideal, it makes having a body the only qualification. That conviction does not erase her earlier discomfort, but it gives the discomfort no authority to disqualify her.
The support around her matters, too. Amanda waits at the far end of the runway and tells Willowdean she looked fine; Willowdean squeezes Amanda’s arm in thanks, then asks about Amanda’s soccer showcase. The exchange moves encouragement in both directions: surviving the pageant walk becomes a point of connection, not a private test Willowdean must pass alone.
From the wings, the girls watch Millie take her turn in a skirted gingham swimsuit, matching wedges, oversized white sunglasses, and bright red lipstick, with a beach ball tucked under her arm. Ellen calls her a beauty queen, but attaches that praise to the diminutive description of a “cute, little fat girl.” Willowdean’s response shifts the emphasis: Millie is not a beauty queen despite being fat, or merely a future beauty queen; she already is one. The moment extends the swimsuit round’s challenge beyond Willowdean’s own body, making recognition itself part of the contest.
That insistence resonates with Hannah’s account of why she entered. She had initially hoped to sabotage the pageant from within, imagining that ruining it would replace the identity imposed on her because of her teeth. Her mother’s pride after discovering the welcome packet changed what participation meant to her. Hannah also explains that orthodontic care is expensive for a family with limited insurance, and that she has no friend to walk the school hallway with her. Her experience makes clear that scrutiny of appearance is not one uniform pressure: the teeth that draw ridicule are also tied to access to care and to isolation. Beside Willowdean’s refusal to be ashamed of her thighs, Hannah’s account reveals how the pageant’s promise of visibility can carry very different costs for its contestants.
The History Behind Hannah’s Defiance
Hannah’s guardedness has a history that makes her later account more than a response to the pageant. Willowdean remembers her as quiet and stubborn, but her earliest memories show that quiet did not mean passive: in third grade, Hannah slapped away a marker Willowdean had taken from the table and demanded that she ask permission. In fifth grade, she snapped at a teacher who repeatedly called her African American, correcting the misidentification by saying she was Dominican. Both moments show Hannah insisting on being treated accurately and on having her boundaries respected.
That insistence is tested by the comments Willowdean hears at school, where students call Hannah hideous and ask why she does not get braces. The remarks follow Willowdean through the day, especially the assumption that Hannah should alter her teeth to make other people stop tormenting her. Willowdean considers that orthodontic care may be unaffordable or frightening for Hannah, and rejects the premise that she must submit to it. This history complicates the swimsuit round’s public display: the contestants do not arrive with identical vulnerabilities, and appearance-based judgment can involve ethnicity, access to care, and isolation as well as body size. Hannah’s defiance, like Willowdean’s walk, refuses to make conformity the price of being seen.
The Pageant’s Managed Body
Before the contestants go onstage, Mrs. Clawson runs along the line spraying them with Aqua Net to keep their swimsuits from riding up. The practical backstage instruction reveals how carefully the pageant regulates the body it displays, even as Willowdean’s walk resists the idea that a body must meet a standard before it can be seen. Her refusal to feel ashamed does not dissolve the competition’s rules of presentation; it marks a different measure of participation, one that allows her to appear without first making herself conform.
