Queen for a day: Transformistas, misses and mass media in Venezuela.

摘要

This dissertation represents a study of the accomplishment of femininity among two kinds of Venezuelan women: transformistas, a kind of Venezuelan transgender women, and misses, the popular name for participants in the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant (MVP). The MVP is the beauty pageant system in Venezuela that produces Miss Venezuela for the broadcaster, Venevision, and sends the national delegates to international beauty competitions, including the Miss Universe and Miss World competitions. By comparing and contrasting self-fashioning practices in these two groups, this study reveals what is at stake in individual productions of femininity. I hypothesized (following Hall 1992) that similar processes act in the ways that transformistas and misses fashion femininity with relation to mass-mediated representations of feminine personae. I also hypothesized that this process might be similar in the positioning of the nation of Venezuela in what has been called "the global stage.";This study brings together the fields of media studies and gender performance to understand both the implications of marginalized subjects to the study of reception and the undertheorized importance of media discourses to our embodiments of gender. It also engages questions of gender, power, marginality, modernity, race, center/periphery relations and mass mediation in Venezuela, taking as its central theme the mass-mediated national discourse of beauty and femininity. From the runway walk (pasarela) of the beauty queens to the pedestrian bridges of Avenida Libertador, where transformistas do sex work, I examine the strategies and imaginaries these women employ to negotiate their lives and social locations.