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

University of Sydney, Australia, vek.lewis{at}arts.usyd.edu.au

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.

Key Words: Anglo-Australia • constructions of race/ethnicity • mass media • transsexuality • tropical myths

Sexualities, Vol. 12, No. 2, 225-250 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1363460708100920


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