Queen for a Day

<div><i>Queen for a Day</i> 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 (<i>transformistas</i>) project themselves into the urban imaginary and on the bodies of both <i>transformistas</i> and beauty pageant contestants (<i>misses</i>). Placing <i>transformistas</i> and <i>misses</i> 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.<p>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 <i>transformistas</i> and <i>misses</i> work to achieve the bodies clothing and makeup styles and postures and gestures of this national femininity they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.</p></div>