Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela

Perverse Modernities

by Marcia Ochoa

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[6655321 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think i will just end up blathering on for too long about why i like this book so i am going to stick to a highlights list:
1) Ochoa is interested in the process of self-making and how it is related to the process of nation-making
2) Ochoa is interested in how internationally recognizable femininity and specifically beauty queen femininity is racialized yet how race is erased by focusing on *features* rather than skin color in the context of Venezuela, a country that prior to Chavez was famous for producing petro and beauty queens
3) There is something about ubiquitous beauty pageants and the self fashioning of transformistas
4) Transformista's self production is really complicated including space, technology and discourses
5) which is why the WPATH doesn't make sense to many of them
6) THIS IS ACTUALLY A BOOK THAT TALKS ABOUT TRANS SEX WORK WITHOUT BEING GROSS OR JUDGMENTAL OR DOING POVERTY PORN
7) the technologies of self fashioning are read differently between the miss (beauty queen) and transformistas even *by* plastic surgeons (and this is interesting)

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ochoa takes on a large task exploring beauty performance amongst miss and transformista beauty queens in Venezuela. Sometimes the boundaries between these two groups gets blurred, but the premise of the project is compelling.

[Michele · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has an interesting thesis, but it is unnecessarily theory heavy, repetitive, disorganized, and doesn't have enough ethnographic evidence.