“Lovelies on Wheels”: The Politics of Miss Wheelchair America, 1972–1977

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Miss Wheelchair America pageant in the 1970s as a cultural and political space that produced a specific message about the intersections of womanhood, disability, and citizenship. The pageant elevated contestants who performed normative femininity, beauty, heterosexuality, and whiteness, while narratively framing disability through the trope of individual accomplishment, thus eliding both individual embodied experience and structural inequality related to disability. Placing Miss Wheelchair America within broader currents of 1970s disability rights activism, I trace points of overlap and tension between grassroots political demands and pageant practices that downplayed disability for public consumption. Finally, by juxtaposing the pageant with the later mainstream inclusion of disabled women—exemplified by Heather Whitestone's Miss America moment—I show how dominant pageant culture reflected Miss Wheelchair America's vocabularies of the normate and the overcomer, rearticulating them with different cultural valences. The study reveals how mediated rites of feminine belonging both reflected and shaped mid‐ to late‐twentieth‐century American understandings of citizenship, embodiment, and social worth