Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy beauty pageant in Tonga
Dados Bibliográficos
AUTOR(ES) | |
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ANO | 2002 |
TIPO | Artigo |
PERIÓDICO | American Ethnologist |
ISSN | 0094-0496 |
E-ISSN | 1548-1425 |
EDITORA | Wiley-Blackwell |
DOI | 10.1525/ae.2002.29.3.534 |
CITAÇÕES | 12 |
ADICIONADO EM | 2025-08-18 |
MD5 |
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Resumo
The Miss Galaxy beauty pageant held annually in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, is, at first glance, a show of transgendered glamour, but it is equally a display of translocality. Through the performance of an exotic otherness (through costumes, names, dances, etc.), the socially marginalized contestants claim to define the local, in ways that may oppose the received order, in which the difference between locality and nonlocality is controlled by the privileged. The juxtaposition of gender transformation and translocality in the same event reinforces their stereotypical linking in the eyes of both transgendered and mainstream Tongans. For transgendered persons, this linking provides an escape route from local dynamics of social exclusion and poverty, but it also potentially offers mainstream persons a pretext to marginalize transgendered persons from their local groundings. Privileged transgendered persons are less vulnerable to these dynamics of exclusion and use tokens of translocality to assert their social standing vis‐à‐vis both underprivileged transgendered persons and society at large. [transgenderism, beauty pageants, locality, globalization, resistance, language use, Tonga]