Clover City pageant culture’s narrow beauty standards

Clover City pageant culture’s narrow beauty standards turn appearance into a local measure of belonging: the pageant presents a polished ideal as ordinary, while girls whose bodies or features depart from it are made to feel conspicuous before they ever compete. The standard is enforced not only through the contest itself but through class-coded rituals, schoolyard cruelty, and contestants’ expectations of ridicule. Against that pressure, the novel places a broader vision of beauty in the drag performers at The Hideaway and in the girls’ insistence that entering the pageant need not mean accepting its judgments.

The Pageant as a Social Order

At the registration gathering, the room is arranged by affiliation. Legacy contestants sit with mothers and sisters who have already been crowned; athletes appear to strengthen college résumés; cheerleaders and girls from theater and choir occupy their own tables. Most wear Easter-style dresses and matching cardigans. Willowdean Dickson, Amanda Lumbard, and Millie Michalchuk arrive in jeans and T-shirts, immediately conscious of the visible difference between their clothes and the established contestants’ presentation. The contrast makes pageant culture feel less like a neutral invitation than a system with recognizable insiders, inherited expectations, and a proper way to appear.

The pageant’s authority also rests on what it rewards. While preparing with Millie, Amanda, and Hannah Perez, Willowdean watches recordings of past contests and considers how swimsuit receives more points than talent. The footage makes the group’s absence from the pageant’s history feel palpable: they see few contestants like themselves and wonder whether anyone will remember their participation in the years ahead. The contest’s format thus does more than rank individual performances. Its repeated images of who has stood onstage establish a narrow template for who seems to belong there.

Bodies Under Public Judgment

That template is enforced in ordinary encounters as well as formal competition. At school, Willowdean hears people call Hannah Perez hideous and ask why she does not get braces. Hannah’s teeth become a public target, even though Willowdean recognizes that braces may be unaffordable or frightening and that Hannah should not have to alter her mouth to escape other people’s abuse. Hannah’s history gives her resistance a longer shape: as a child she insisted that Willowdean ask before taking her marker, and later corrected a teacher who repeatedly called her African American, explaining that she is Dominican. She is not merely a figure defined by other people’s descriptions; she has long asserted her right to name boundaries and herself.

The economic circumstances behind the demand for correction become explicit when Willowdean asks Hannah why she has not had her teeth fixed. Hannah answers that she should not have to, and that braces are expensive: her mother is a hairdresser, her father a mechanic, and the family does not have strong insurance. Her response exposes the material assumptions hidden inside advice to improve one’s appearance. What can be presented as a simple matter of effort depends on money and access, while the person being judged is left to bear the stigma either way. Hannah says she keeps her claws out because she has no friends to walk down the hallway with her; at first she entered the pageant hoping to sabotage it and escape being known as the girl with buck teeth. Her mother’s pride in her entry complicates that plan, turning an act of defiance into a participation that carries emotional stakes of its own.

Willowdean faces a related but distinct version of the same scrutiny. Before the pageant, Callie tells her that taking care of herself could make a difference, then insists that the contest is not a feel-good project in which effort earns approval. The encounter leaves Willowdean wondering whether losing a hundred pounds would make her life fall into place. The cruelty works precisely because it recasts exclusion as personal failure: instead of questioning the standard, it invites her to treat her body as the obstacle she must remove. Yet Willowdean’s stated aim in entering is not to win. She wants to show that being fat gives no one a reason she cannot take part, even as she admits that she fears becoming the girl who falls or fumbles through her magic act.

Alternative Stages and Wider Beauty

The Hideaway offers a striking counter-image to the pageant’s polished expectations. Willowdean brings Amanda, Millie, and Hannah to the bar, where she encounters openly gay men and realizes how small her understanding of Clover City has been. She remembers that Lucy had gay friends online and had described Dolly Parton as the patron saint of gay men, but the people at the door make that community present rather than distant or legendary. Amanda’s curiosity about their carefully shaped eyebrows and the burly, vest-wearing doorman also puncture any single expectation of how a person should look.

Onstage, drag performers of many shapes, sizes, and colors appear in elaborate costumes, towering heels, and elaborate wigs. Each has a distinct kind of beauty, made visible through performance rather than measured against one uniform body. Lee Wei, a short Asian drag queen in a sequined baby-blue minidress, commands the room when she performs “Jolene.” Willowdean connects the song’s plea to the fear that someone else will always be prettier, smarter, or thinner, and thinks of perfection as an unreachable shadow. Her tears at the performance mark the force of that recognition; the song gives emotional form to the comparison that pageant culture makes seem natural. The bar does not erase the contest’s power, but it lets the girls see beauty expressed beyond the pageant’s narrow frame.

Rehearsal, Memory, and Resistance

The girls later return to The Hideaway for help. Willowdean’s email to Dale, the owner and bouncer, explains that she found Lucy’s old registration form and has drawn Millie, Amanda, and Hannah into a competition none of them knows how to navigate. She asks for help because Clover City cannot provide the kind of preparation they need. Lee Wei lines them up in high heels and trains them to walk, pose, and present themselves. This instruction is practical, but it also gives the contestants tools to occupy the stage rather than waiting to become the kind of girls the town already recognizes.

Their anxiety remains real: Willowdean does not want to be reduced to the fat contestant who falls or cannot manage her magic tricks, and she knows she is unlikely to win. Her distinction between winning and proving that she can participate resists the pageant’s assumption that only its favored outcome makes an appearance worthwhile. The group’s late-night viewing of old pageants sharpens the stakes. Hannah calls the former contestants’ appearances the highlight of their lives, but Millie objects that staying in Clover City, becoming a stay-at-home mother, or working as a cashier does not make a woman’s life a waste. Her response challenges a second hierarchy embedded in the spectacle: the tendency to judge women’s whole lives by a crown, a contest, or what they do afterward.

Clover City’s beauty standard is therefore sustained by more than a preference for a particular look. It is reproduced through who is welcomed, what the contest rewards, which bodies are treated as problems to fix, and whose lives are considered worthy of respect. Hannah’s refusal to owe the town straighter teeth, Willowdean’s decision to enter without expecting victory, and Millie’s defense of former contestants each contest a different part of that logic. The alternative they make visible is not a promise that the pageant will become fair, but the possibility of taking the stage without allowing its narrow judgment to define the value of the person standing there.