Performing Translatinidad: Miriam the Mexican Transsexual Reality Show Star and the Tropicalization of Difference in Anglo-Australian Media

Abstract

In 2004, a new celebrity hit the Australian television circuit. Billed as a mysterious, seductive Latina with a secret, she graced our shores in a TV reality show called 'There's Something About Miriam': a dating game with a twist. Set in Ibiza, Miriam vies for the attention of six eligible British bachelors without letting them in on her transsexual status. In her ambiguity, Miriam is the embodiment of all things seen as other and exotic; in the context of Anglo-Australian understandings, she is the marker of all things Hispanic. Wildly popular in Australia, Miriam stepped out of one reality show into another: the Australian version of Big Brother. The TV network promised to deliver more on this boy turned girl, whose body provided the right kind of slippage to become the site of inscription for a range of repeated tropical fictions. This article examines the use of gender and race as sites of contention in popular media visualizations of sex/gender non-normativity and cultural difference. It critically analyzes the case of the June 2004 appearance of the Latina transsexual, Miriam, on Australian reality television, drawing attention to practices of objectification and the spectacularization of sexuality and sexual identity, as well as cultural-symbolic processes of racialization and the production of 'otherness' in the Australian context. It considers in some depth the fraught problematics of contemporary modes of visibility for sexual and ethnic minorities in the Anglo-dominant and Article Sexualities

YouTube as Educator: A Content Analysis of Issues, Themes, and the Educational Value of Transgender-Created Online Videos

“…They are often projected as keepers of secrets and the salacious details of their lives are exploited for ratings and attention. For example, the Australian program There's Something About Miriam was a reality program revolving entirely around a pre-operative transgender woman and her potential suitors who were unaware of the fact that she was transgender (Lewis, 2009 Transgender youth may be particularly in need of media depictions and mediated role models, as they have been marked as an especially vulnerable population due to both peer violence and adult harassment (Sausa, 2005). The small amount of mediated depictions of transgender youth and adolescents has, therefore, been deemed particularly important.…”

La Comunicación y el Desarrollo Social desde la Comunicación

“…En contraste, Lewis (2009) halló que la falta de conceptos para abordar a una persona con condición trans provocó que la prensa australiana deshumanizara a una famosa transgénero de aquel país. De acuerdo con su investigación, Miriam no fue vista ni como hombre ni como mujer, sino como un "eso" que no encaja en la normatividad heterosexual.…”

“…Dicho resultado se acerca a la idea encontrada por Lewis (2009), Carratalá Simón (2011) y Miazhevich (2015) de que hay una inconsistencia entre los términos con los que se refieren a una persona trans en las notas informativas y que esto podría derivar en una fragmentación en la opinión pública. En ese sentido, el estudio demuestra que la diferencia terminológica tiene que ver con el lugar de edición y que se manifiesta en las características que la prensa resalta del personaje.…”

Film

“…Vek Lewis (2006) offers a critique of Kulick and Prieur, privileging the research of César O. González Pérez (Travestidos al desnudo: Homosexualidad, identidades y luchas territoriales en Colima) and Josefina Fernández (Cuerpos desobedientes: Travestismo e identidad de género). Also see Viviane Namaste 2011.…”