Calendar Girls

Power of the Sash: How a beauty pageant became a platform for change in South Africa

Beauty pageants have long played an important role in South African society. Many pageants were organised not only as expressions or celebrations of beauty, but also as acts of protest or resistance.

The Miss Calendar Girl beauty pageant was founded by Chedino Martin, a South African transgender activist and beauty pageant contestant. Chedino has participated in more than 80 pageant events throughout her career. Initially, she felt accepted and included. However, when she started taking hormones as part of her preparations for gender-affirming surgeries, attitudes towards her suddenly hardened. Chedino responded to this discrimination by starting Miss Calendar Girl — a pageant meant to celebrate everyone including transgender women, gay men and drag queens competing against each other, regardless of whether they had fully transitioned.

In 2019, Chedino asked me to help her set up a new competition category — Miss Photogenic — as well as document the pageants as part of my longterm project about her remarkable journey to become the first Miss Trans Africa 2022.

For the 2019 pageant edition, in an homage to the 1994 road comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Chedino and I spent a day photographing the contestants on a salt pan outside of Cape Town. In 2022, inspired by the iconic seaside embrace between Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in the 1953 classic From Here to Eternity, we took the group to Windmill Beach, in Simon's Town.