Ochoa, Marcia

MARCIA OCHOA, then a student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, received funding in August 2002 to aid research on 'Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and Mass Media in Venezuela,' supervised by Dr. Renato I. Rosaldo. 'Queen for a Day' examined the ways women in Venezuela use transnational mass media to fashion womanhood. This study, developed as an ethnography of media, embedded hegemonic productions of beauty and femininity within discourses of the nation and everyday practice. Two groups of women were chosen for the study: participants in the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant, and transformistas, as some transgender women are called in Venezuela. Particular attention was paid to the 'accomplishment of femininity' of both groups by comparing and contrasting self-fashioning practices through interviews, participant observation, and video recording methods. The study also examined the emergence of the modern beauty pageant in 20th Century Venezuela, and its relationship to transnational circuits of economic and cultural power. Further, the study sought to account for the marginalization experienced by transformistas, and to document the strategies they employed for survival and selfmaking. This focus on social inequality also engaged ongoing transformation in Venezuela under President Chavez, political subjectivity, participation and citizenship in groups of people marginalized from the space of the political by their presumed frivolity. The study has resulted in a dissertation and article, several HIV prevention and human rights interventions, and a book under contract with Duke University Press.