Miss Congeniality

Miss Congeniality movie revolves around the FBI agent Gracie Harts who works undercover as Miss New Jersey with her team to protect the Miss United States Beauty Pageant from a possible terrorist attack.

Throughout the movie we can see a huge transformation in Gracie’s identity. At the very beginning Gracie seems to be very masculine in both her looks and her behavior. She doesn’t wear any make-up, doesn’t do her eyebrows, she doesn’t even brush her hair. Moreover, she is aggressive in everything she does, including eating, walking, and laughing. One of the ladies she meets at a bar asks her if the FBI forces all women over there to wear these “really masculine shoes”, and Gracie clarifies that its not the FBI, its her own personal choice. Moreover, her beauty pageant consultant for the mission, Victor Melling, compared her walk to the walk of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.



Gracie faces a hard time accepting her new assignment to work undercover as Miss New Jersey in the pageant. She gets a new look that shocks her colleagues, where she starts to look more feminine to others.




We can also see through the film how Gracie starts to socialize and learn the norms of this new culture she has to fit in. She takes the instructions from her adviser and watches video clips of beauty pageants and starts imitating the moves of the contestants.

At this stage Gracie’s front stage behavior is in the pageant trying to act more feminine, and her backstage behavior is with her team where she can act masculine, as she’s used to. However, as the time passes and through her interaction with the other girls in the pageant, Gracie seems to absorb more of these norms and attitudes and become more feminine overall, while maintaining some aspects of her original masculine identity, like power and independence.



Her transformation gets her the guy, her FBI colleague Eric Matthews, after she had really low chances in finding any guy who would be interested in her. This shows us how society as a social force puts a lot of pressure on individuals shaping their identities in order to have some of the things we desire, like a partner, which would be considered as positive sanctions for following the norms of the society for how we look and how we behave.

McDonaldization in Your Homes!

As soon as you walk into someone’s house you could automatically get a sense of the culture. Some houses even have a particular smell that could identify where the residents are from. Walking into my friend’s house I mindlessly recognized the scent I smell in all Sudanese houses I enter. This is actually the scent of some products they use in the house that are shipped in to Qatar from Sudan. The next thing I notice is the color and brightness of the house. It’s usually white and more blunt than my house for example, which gives their space a more temporary feel. A lot of the Sudanese houses I’ve been to use white lights, in contrast to mine, where we have warmer lighting.



You get a sense that the Sudanese residents don’t really consider this house in Qatar their home. Whereas for Palestinians, who constantly struggle to live in a subculture, try to make these houses their homes. When I say subculture, I mean a smaller culture within another culture that Palestinian usually live in. Palestinians use warmer colors, a lot of carpets and really design their houses in a way to make it feel like a home to them. In my home, and a lot of Palestinian homes I’ve visited, we try to add a lot of Palestinian elements to the house as a reminder of that place we “belong to,” even if we didn’t buy these objects from Palestine.




Sudanese usually have a lot of African and tribal objects around their “temporary” house that are bought back from home, to remind them of that place that they will eventually go back to, their real home.






However, the households did have some things in common. To begin with, there was a feel of alienation, which could be defined as a state-of-being where human life is dominated by the forces of its own inventions. The houses were machine-dominated. The families weren’t connecting in conversation, but most of the family members were watching TV. While the teenagers or working children were on their laptops, connected to the Internet. Some of the younger children were playing video games.




When the mother or housemaid cooked or even made tea, they would use a kettle, microwave, gas-run oven and so on. Everyone in the house was using a machine. Some of the siblings even communicated through the use of their cell phones, instead of verbal communication. So, even if the culture is different or the dialect they use is different, whether you’re Sudanese or Palestinian you are influenced by this idea of “McDonaldization.” In sociology, McDonaldization is a process where society is increasingly run like a fast-food restaurant. This means that we’re all being influenced by the idea of rationalization and even households could be modernized some way or another. This definitely can’t sound very literal, where a household could never really be a McDonald’s. However, all homes try to be as efficient, predictable and controlled as possible. They have a set of rules to be followed, try to be as efficient as possible with time, money etc. and predictable with honesty and the open relationship everyone has with one another. With time, the children in the house and the parents start demanding more. Here, control and calculation come in, where they need to monitor the amount of things they buy and consume.

Our Identity Though Our Costumes

It’s amazing how we can tell a person’s identity and his/her position in life by just looking at the way they dress or act. In almost everywhere you go to, there will always be people that have different jobs. In every home, people have positions and roles. For example, the parents are the ones in control. When entering any home for the first time, you can immediately tell who are the parents, the children, and the servants if there were any. These observations come naturally. Some of these observations are an ascribed status. Age and ethnicity is an ascribed status. By looking at the person, you can naturally tell their age group and their ethnicity by their appearance. However a mother on the other hand is an achieved status, she chose to build her family

The way people dress is based on who they are in the society. When you see the people in your everyday life, you assume what their job is from their costume. Uniforms of any kind of job act as a status symbol. For example, you can identify a police officer through his uniform. There are also other costumes that are common in our everyday life. Examples are: Workers, housemaids, school students, chefs and businessmen.

The costumes make it easier for people to identify who these people are. People have different jobs based on how they are dressed. For example, if you are in a restaurant you tell the waiter what you would like to order. You know who the waiter is and call him because of the uniform.

The army on the other hand is part of the mechanical solidarity. They all act and think in the same way with the same costume. An army cannot be an army without a large group of people in order to perform the job correctly. In most cases the groups such as a basketball team or an army are considered as ingroups. They have a connection between each other and they are closely tied to each other to form a team.