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

Author:   Marcia Ochoa
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9780822356264


Pages:   296
Publication Date:   19 May 2014
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Marcia Ochoa
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.431kg
ISBN:  

9780822356264


ISBN 10:   0822356260
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   19 May 2014
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Index 279 Acknowledgments vii Introducing ... the Queen 1 Part I. On the (Trans)National 19 1. Belleza Venezolana: Media, Race, Modernity, and Nation in the Twentieth-Century Venezuelan Beauty Contest 21 2. La Moda Nace en Paris y Muere en Caracas: Fashion, Beauty, and Consumption on the (Trans)National 59 Part II. On the Runway, on the Street 95 3. La Reina de la Noche: Performance, Sexual Subjectivity, and the Form of the Beauty Pageant in Venezuela 97 4. Pasarelas y Perolones: Transformista Mediations on Avenida Libertador in Caracas 127 Part III. On the Body 153 5. Sacar el Cuerpo: Transformista and Miss Embodiment 155 6. Spectacular Femininities 201 Epilogue. Democracy and Melodrama: Frivolity, Fracaso, and Political Violence in Venezuela 233 Notes 247 References 269

Reviews

A gifted ethnographer with an eye for detail, Marcia Ochoa weaves rich narratives of contemporary Venezuela and its complex cultural geography of gendered, sexualized, racialized, and classed bodies and selves caught in the pursuit of alluring beauty and accomplished femininity. Queen for a Day is a queer diasporic ethnography that complicates practices of cultural consumption and production within the shifting terrains of normality and 'abnormality,' the nation and the global, and home and away. - Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora


Author Information

Marcia Ochoa is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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