‘Beyond Their Culture’: Language Choice and Hybrid Identity in the Miss Tibet Pageant
(University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Contestants in the Miss Tibet Pageant, held in McLeod Ganj, India, mobilize linguistic codes to negotiate and present a hybrid identity by drawing upon local language ideologies associated with Tibetan and English. Among multilingual Tibetan exile youth, choices to speak in Tibetan, English or to codeswitch across the two linguistic codes are important means for identity negotiation in everyday interactions. As a contestant in the Miss Tibet Pageant, whose main aim is to present Tibetan women as “part of their traditional culture but also beyond their culture, as contemporary, modern young women” (misstibet.com), language choices are integral to their negotiations of this traditional yet modern identity. In this paper, I present video excerpts from several Miss Tibet Pageants, conversations among pageant organizers and contestants, as well as texts from the pageant’s website. I suggest that contestants’ language choices are important performances of a shifting hybridity that enact and recreate a Tibetan identity that is simultaneously traditional and modern.