Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780822356110)

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.

Author: Marcia Ochoa
ISBN-10: 0822356112
ISBN-13: 9780822356110
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/19/2014
Pages: 296
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 0.90d
Award: Lambda Literary Awards - Finalist