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Venezuelan Beauties

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-3334595

2328-9260

José Quiroga,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Queen for a Day dazzlingly sashays from the tulle and satin dresses of the Miss Venezuela beauty contest to the very specific sites in Caracas where sex and desire transform, reimagine, and reorder the city. The spectacular story of modern Venezuela may not be familiar to many in the United States, more attuned to issues of revolution (Cuba), dictatorship (Argentina, Chile, and others), and US proxy wars in Central America and other parts of the region. But this fast-paced story, which begins in the 1950s, takes us to a time when a country looking at its present and past could see only a future of brilliant transformation in a city intended to be one of the modern centers of the continent. In Venezuela, the wealth produced by petroleum financed progress as an attainable dream: extraordinary abstract art and dazzling architectural feats; publishing houses that nurtured a continental, and not simply a national, readership; a communications powerhouse ruled by televisual spectacle and advertising; and a metropolis connected by highways that intended to glue economic disparities. That this latter aim was never achieved is the main reason why the Bolivarian revolution erupted in the latter years of the twentieth century and the initial decade of this century led by the charismatic figure of Hugo Chávez, who put an end to what used to be called the most stable democracy in South America.As all stories crafted for an age in which mass media and visuality rule, there are grand events and minor acts of resistance and survival. Marcia Ochoa takes note of them all: the most humble stage connects to a future and possible glory, just as a drag queen today may be walking the Avenida Libertador and find herself roaming Italian medieval plazas, only to be deported back to a territory forcibly gendered by the state. All the different strands that Ochoa offers for a study of femininity and gender in Venezuela that is not simply a study of “gendered behavior” can be seen as unrelated to each other, but one of the most important underpinnings of Ochoa's book is that it is rightly founded upon a faith in connection, in communication, across social classes spread throughout the country of Venezuela. All the pieces are found together, despite the fact that they form a shape we may not immediately recognize, but, then again, this speaks more to our difficulty with understanding or accepting contradiction than to the impossibility of a national cohesion.As the book unfolds, it becomes clear (at least to this reader) that in order to “explain” Venezuela, one needs to choose between metaphor or metonymy. In other words, one can deconstruct the contradictions of modern Venezuela by focusing on a major event, such as one of the state funerals for Hugo Chávez, and use it as a metaphor whose ultimate referent may always be elusive. But conversely, one may actually go further by working with discrete units—the route of metonymy. The latter is the kernel for Ochoa's unfolding analysis, and it seems to me important to repeat it here. It is a minor detail—an inconsequential incident—that put a spell on Ochoa, and it works its magic on us when we read about it in the opening pages of the book.Ochoa boards a plane at the San Antonio de Táchira provincial airport, and just before the plane departs, a flight attendant—“tall, gaunt, and arduously stylized”—proceeds to (explain? illustrate? act out?) the airline safety procedures in a way that turns the (honest, responsible, inquisitive, curious) cultural critic into a poststructuralist mess—but one with her feet on the ground. Ochoa does not mourn the lack of “authenticity” evident in the performance of a flight attendant repeating for the umpteenth time the same safety rules—a performance that no disgruntled traveler really pays attention to. On the contrary, she is going to be fascinated and enthralled, and she is going to fall for those lips “dripping with a mocha-tinged red” and the skin coated with a foundation “the color of café con leche” (1).Without that recognition, without that image of the critic seduced, floored even (one could say “transported,” but let's recall that Ochoa is not flying Air France, and she is not even in “economy comfort class”), by the unfolding spectacle, Queen for a Day would have been a solid contribution; but we have here an extraordinary book that tackles the complexity of the present Venezuelan moment with an academic rigor that does not discount the intuitive or the improvisational “hunch” pursued to its ultimate consequences. It is true that, in part, Ochoa's reaction is the product of a different historical moment, for at another point in time, the flight attendant's lack of authenticity would have been read differently—for example, as an anguished performance of the explicit demands of femininity as a system of oppression, one that maintains her in a state of false consciousness and keeps her indebted to a reactionary notion of an always similar gendered subject in the social sphere. Ochoa does not necessarily disavow this reading, nor should she—just as she does not merely celebrate the flight attendant's gestural complexity as a triumph of glamour over the actually existing conditions of labor and of life that produce that momentary escape from reality, a flight that can also represent an act of defiance. Ochoa is haunted by that image, and that image haunts us in turn. The flight attendant reappears at other points in the book, most notably when Ochoa discusses a fundamental contradiction that is not necessarily resolved in the book. (There is no need to resolve it, to tame its extraordinary pull.) It is stated succinctly in the following manner: “The perversions of modernity that seek to normalize, or perhaps extinguish, our messy bodies are also those in which we produce our own perverse, colored, and queer existences” (75). And here again, the flight attendant reappears: “She, with her jangling baubles, what is she doing?” (75). She is casting an aura of glamour over her captive audience, and she is engaging in imaginary travel, transporting herself to another runway, somewhere else.Escaping may be thought of as a tool for negotiating a landscape of contradiction. “In Venezuela cannibalist cosmopolitanism takes the form of glamour—both in the ways the nation of Venezuela and queer and trans Venezuelans make space for themselves in the world” (75). There is much to unpack in this sentence. What fascinates Ochoa is the possibility (or the reality) of self-fashioning, but I think we can push this idea further (and I think Ochoa would agree with me, or perhaps not) and stress the political importance of flight, of escape—of flight as political praxis—without in any way implying that self-delusion is a necessary component of that flight. During that brief moment in time, arrested and suspended within the laborious displacements around her where everything moves, everything travels, everything is translated, the flight attendant has control, and she knows it. That such authority can be produced by an act in which the performer in essence “escapes” or “flees,” projecting herself into a different context, renders the act a political one—even if the flight attendant herself may have the “reactionary” politics that is explored elsewhere in the book.Ochoa's notion of spectacle derives from, but also distinguishes itself from, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle while keeping it as a point of reference. As Ochoa states, although Debord talks about the “harsh logic of spectacle” (204), Ochoa brings its very material facticity to the forefront. For Ochoa (and I think this is an illuminating critique), Debord ignores or pays little attention to labor (204). In contrast, Ochoa focuses on how desire here entails energy, preparation, and coordination. For in order to produce an illusion that is, or may be, the performance of femininity in Venezuela, one has to keep in mind the space that supports it and that does not merely serve as background but as a factor that determines much of what can be found as conventional or unconventional (or radical) within it. Labor, in other words, is an integral part of the spectacle, and it contributes its own kind of weight to the final overall product. The self-possession and sense of ambition and drive that make young women work sometimes beyond what is humanly possible in order to be “Misses” (or “queens”) underscore an ethics that Ochoa can at no point dismiss or minimize. For all the kitschy glamour entailed in the soft-focus lens that registers the victorious queen, Ochoa is above all the one who seeks to understand both the mechanics and rationale that drive these spectacles. There is nothing pathological here, but it is evident that only hard work may, in the end, pay off.If Queen for a Day stages the relationship between femininity in Venezuela and the national passion for beauty contests, the second part stages how subjects survive on the street—specifically, a street that functions as a runway (pasarela) along the Avenida Libertador in Caracas. Here, Ochoa enters the dangerous urban, nocturnal territory of the transformistas (allow us for a moment to leave the word untranslated). These “night workers” claim different corners, streets, and zones of the city, but in particular the pasarelas—perhaps imagined as red carpets—along Avenida Libertador where transformistas offer something more than just physical beauty. Like the Misses, they display a certain “feminine” essence, a manufactured product that is spectacular and illusory at the same time. As such, it is not unrelated to the logic that prevailed in the construction of the Avenida Libertador in itself, which is not solely an avenue but the very model of what the Venezuelan state thought modernity should be. Apprehended at this point as an object that lives in its own time, in its own “future past,” Avenida Libertador is where Venezuelan modernity put on its high heels. As if responding precisely to this fact, “at this site on the juncture of power and modernity in late twentieth century Caracas, transformistas have carved out a persistent place to project themselves onto the national imaginary” (152). One may not know when it happened or who was wearing the first high pumps while strutting down the street, but there the transformistas defend and define their own parcel and resistance, as well as their labor, which Ochoa recognizes as complicated and multifaceted: they are constantly looking for tricks, fleeing from the police, and fighting, if not for the territory, then at least for their recognition as citizens.That one small part of the urban rendition of the Venezuelan modernist dream is now an open-air nightly habitus for transformistas forces Ochoa to excavate that dream to its very foundations, in addition to her very dangerous fieldwork in the transformista scenario at night. As Ochoa notes, on Avenida Libertador, both client and worker engage in coded transactions in which illusion defines the very human need for physical contact and release. If the street in no way resembles the artificial, air-conditioned, and superbly coiffed microclimate of femininity that can be seen in the beauty contests, then what links them both is a notion of a subject whose praxis is constantly enacted, as if the subject were always managing to look like she was in front of a television camera. It is not that Ochoa finds similar behavior in two different places, but that a common logic sustains what certain aspects of the person's inflection, the “gestuality,” and the bodily movement want to enforce: an attention to the self that goes beyond physical beauty and that includes open and implicit understandings of social structure and behavior, of presentation vis-à-vis an Other, in order to craft a self that allows social upward mobility and success.Queen for a Day also stages, in its final part, Venezuela's complex politics after the death of Hugo Chávez. It is important to note that, although she takes note of political processes that occur beyond the realm of the visual—with its constant visual reminders of scarcities of all kinds, and citizens taking to the street to protest the way in which the government has seemingly occupied all oppositional spaces—Ochoa is at her best when she captures what is happening “on the street.” With concrete and asphalt as foundational leveling factors for new iterations of Venezuelan culture, the book accomplishes its riskier moves, putting the Misses and the travestis back together. It is a dazzling combination pursued in the final parts of the book, which includes a coda, or epilogue. The book as a whole does come together at this point, and despite the persistence of social clashes in the thoroughly modern and urban context of Caracas, I think Ochoa sees great opportunities in the almost complete upheaval that the country is experiencing at this moment. As Ochoa herself states, she did not seek to write a book on the Bolivarian revolution, but the revolution did happen, and it changed some things in unexpected ways, and it left others seemingly intact. In terms of those elements that changed, she mentions the process of citizenship, one that has been gained by all Venezuelans, who see themselves, for good or bad, as belonging to a broader collective, one in which the state—any state, as a matter of fact, whether inefficient, corrupt, imperfect—emerges as the guarantor or advocate of the rights of all citizens.As one reads Ochoa's Queen for a Day, one becomes aware of how Venezuela still is, amazingly, one of the most understudied Latin American political and social scenarios for US Latin American studies. Within transgender, gender, and sexuality studies, no other author comes close to approximating the sheer feat of creating a book about a “national” deployment of gender that at the same time manages not to repeat national platitudes in the midst of what has been surely the most contested period in recent Venezuelan history, in which competing visions of gendered nationalism skew the conversation toward zones of dispute. Ochoa has thankfully avoided the temptation to write a book in which representations of feminism (or feminism itself) become the traveling companion to ideology. That this is an unimaginative mode of addressing an issue can immediately be ascertained by following Ochoa, who keeps the focus on performativity and mass media. This reader welcomed this approach, for it joined fields that have also produced, in Venezuela and elsewhere, marvelous interlocutors.For the reader who knows little of Venezuela, it may seem unreal that such serious politics originate, or are inscribed within, the banalities that can be seen on television. But bear in mind that, whereas the structures that defined Venezuelan nationality may have tottered and collapsed during the Bolivarian revolution, the beauty pageant lives on. The fact that so many millions adore, worship, and revere the replicant product crowned at the end of the show may surely seem like an academic exaggeration. Be very afraid: it is not. Ochoa guides us at various points of the book through the history of this monstrous spectacle (monstrous in the sense of producing wonder), from the fascinating account of the first Miss Venezuela, an almost savage beauty who refused to be tamed by the corporatist system, to the multifaceted, varied industry of the Misses that permeates the high and low, the poor, rich, and middle-class residents of Venezuela and members of the Venezuelan diaspora.That the performances of femininity these events produce are eminently “readable” proves how the citational aspect of gender is the most normativized way of constructing the intimate technologies of glamour. It also served to clarify that the hard work of the contestants, as well as that of the transformistas that adopt that same citational construct, may employ a register of self-possession evident in each and every detail of its composition—its modes of speech, the composed way in which it gives itself over to the public and the audience—all of these served to project authority on the one hand, while on the other it rendered evident the fact that the authority itself was elsewhere, that the gendered, articulate subject was responding to a call, to a form of interpellation that came from someplace else. It is in the process of responding to it that the subject constructs herself as an “emblem” of Venezuelan femininity.