The First Beauty Contest Organized in Turkey as a Public Relations Study

This study aims to reveal how the first news texts regarding the first beauty contest organized embracing the beauty contests that were organized by the Cumhuriyet Newspaper with a socio-cultural approach between 1929-1933 as a public relations study were shaped by the nationalistic discourse and how the contest was functionalized as a public relations study. For that purpose, the first page news which was published in the Cumhuriyet Newspaper between 4 February 1929 when the first beauty contest organized in 1929 was declared and 4 September 1929 when the contest was concluded were compiled with document screening and among the data collected, news texts regarding the beauty contest were evaluated in terms of the basic arguments of the nationalistic discourse and it was tried to determine the effect of the nationalistic discourse on the meaning of the contest. At the end of the review, it was observed that categories like “Dilemma of Us/Them”, “Equality with Other Nations” and “Collective Participation” had come into prominence, the contest was considered a national issue and sending a Miss Turkey to an international beauty contest would equal to be among modern nations