Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela by Marcia Ochoa (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2015 Some aspects may surprise. When recalling Martı́’s March 25, 1895 letter to his mother, which carried a sense of foreboding, Dr. Ikeda makes a comparison to the letters that Japanese kamikaze pilots wrote to their mothers. Other comments and lines of discussion will provoke a response based on the reader’s own interpretation of Martı́. But overall there is much to be gleaned. The conversations provide a plethora of curious associations, and abundant evidence that Martı́’s importance in Latin America and the world remains vibrant. In addition to displaying knowledge about José Martı́’s life, Dr. Ikeda comments on some of the Cuban’s better known works by name: La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age, a magazine for children), the 1880 address in Steck Hall, “Nuestra América,” “The Montecristi Manifesto,” Versos Sencillos (Simple/Sincere Verses), “Mi raza” (My Race), and El presidio polı́tico en Cuba (The Political Prison in Cuba). Cintio Vitier expands the list of referenced works to include Versos libres (Free Verses), Ismaelillo (Little Ishmael), Diario de Cabo Haitiano a Dos Rı́os (Martı́’s campaign diary of the weeks before his death), and more. Throughout the volume, Cintio Vitier elaborates, fills in details about specific Martı́ works and their context and provides relevant background information. The discussants agree broadly on most topics including these: José Martı́ was a poet even in this prose writing, he was a visionary writer who discerned the looming problems of modernity, and he was a man of great compassion with faith in humanity. At the beginning of the final chapter, Dr. Ikeda mentions a three-volume translation into Japanese of Martı́ works and states that the first volume contains poetry from Ismaelillo and Versos Sencillos. He also quotes from the Japanese translator of Martı́’s work, Nobuaki Ushijima (132). Now, several translation journeys after Dr. Ikeda’s initial interest in the Cuban national hero, we have a book that will be of value to both Martı́ specialists and broader audiences. Anne Fountain Department of World Languages and Literatures San José State University QUEEN FOR A DAY: TRANSFORMISTAS, BEAUTY QUEENS, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF FEMININITY IN VENEZUELA. By Marcia Ochoa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 296, $24.95. Marcia Ochoa’s innovative monograph critically analyzes how transformista and cisgender (biological) women accomplish their femininity within the discursive context of national identity in Venezuela. Ochoa argues that people and countries living in marginality make a place for themselves through participation in transnationally mass-mediated spectacle and imaginary projection. She demonstrates that the production of Miss Venezuela is a primary site for the discursive construction of 92 Book Reviews national femininity and evaluates performances of gender and sexuality with respect to the nation, its political position in the global economy, and the historical processes of modernity and marginality. Her arguments are well grounded in relevant theoretical scholarship and a rich source base, including observations of Miss Venezuela castings and conversations with beauty pageant contestants, plastic surgeons, transformista pageant contestants, and transformista sex workers. The book is organized into three sections following a politics of scale: The (Trans) National; The Runway and the Street; and The Body. The transnational section traces the role of beauty contests, consumption practices, and beauty pageants in producing national identity. Arguing that Miss Venezuela is a national product that allows the country to successfully participate on the global stage, Ochoa develops the term miss-ing race to describe how the miss becomes a mediation of Venezuelan racial ideology, simultaneously exoticizing diversity and reinforcing Eurocentric aesthetics. An examination of queer parties and protests against repression demonstrates how transformistas, who in Venezuela are those “assigned male sex at birth, but who from an early age begins to transform her body and make herself a woman” (3), reinscribe themselves in the nation through the consumption and production of beauty and femininity. The second section focuses on the staging of women in the production of the Miss Venezuela casting, in a beauty pageant for transformistas, and on the street where transformista sex workers “market” themselves to a larger public. Ochoa describes the beauty pageant as a site that produces sexual subjectivity and projects local...