Uganda has announced the Miss Curvy Beauty Pageant 2022 edition.
This year’s pageant will happen on the 25th of November at Imperial Royale Hotel, Kampala hosted by the current Miss curvy Uganda.
According to organizers, the mission of this pageant is to empower women through Leadership and Community Service by facilitating a platform for them to present solutions and strategies as well as share their cultural values.
Misuse Of Female Bodies
When the Miss Curvy contest was launched in 2017, it attracted a lot of local and international media attention. It also received a lot of resistance from human rights activists and civil society organizations nationally and internationally.
Uganda’s Parliament was divided about using a beauty pageant as a marketing tool for tourism. The men legislators were more supportive of the idea than the women.
Those against the idea criticized it for objectifying women and the fact that the pageant was designed to use their bodies as tourist attractions. One analogy was that the initiative was like a zoo in which women were being placed to satisfy the tourist gaze.
The minister was accused by different sections of the society including legislators, women activists, academia and local Ugandans of positioning Uganda as an exotic tourist destination based on the attractiveness of its curvy women.
The minister was quoted as saying; ''We have naturally endowed, nice-looking women who are amazing to look at. Why don’t we use these people as a strategy to promote our tourism industry?
In our view, this is appalling exploitation and degradation of the dignity of women and girls.''
Even Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni rejected the pageant idea and denied that it had cabinet approval.
A number of civil society organizations described the pageant as sexist and a form of objectification, sexualization, prejudice, and exploitation of women for development purposes.
Some have argued that the pageant promotes the continued marginalization of women in an already strongly patriarchal society.