Queen for a Day

Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela

Auteur: Ochoa, Marcia
Éditeur: Duke University Press
Collection: Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
ISBN: 9780822356110
eISBN Pdf: 9780822376996
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2014
Mois : Mai
Pages: 296
Langue: Anglais

Légende

Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela.

Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introducing . . . the Queen
Part I. On the (Trans)National
- 1. Belleza Venezolana: Media, Race, Modernity, and Nation in the Twentieth-Century Venezuelan Beauty Contest
- 2. La Moda Nace en Paris y Muere en Caracas: Fashion, Beauty, and Consumption on the (Trans)National
Part II. On the Runway, on the Street
- 3. La Reina de la Noche: Performance, Sexual Subjectivity, and the Form of the Beauty Pageant in Venezuela
- 4. Pasarelas y Perolones: Transformista Mediations on Avenida Libertador in Caracas
Part III. On the Body
- 5. Sacar el Cuerpo: Transformista and Miss Embodiment
- 6. Spectacular Femininities
Epilogue. Democracy and Melodrama: Frivolity, Fracaso, and Political Violence in Venezuela
Notes
References
Index