Sumario: | For decades, transformationist Venezuelans have ‘paraded’ along the Avenue of the Liberator in Caracas to exhibit themselves and exercise their trade as sex workers. In Venezuela, the word “transformationist” refers to a persona assigned the masculine sex who occupies the female gender. This essay is an attempt at understanding the transformationist role of the avenue within the framework of queer of color theory and Venezuelan modernity. The Avenue of the Liberator is an urban space developed in the course of a long modernizations process. It is said that the Avenue of the Liberator was born with democracy. Through their location on this avenue, the transformationists negotiate modernity with their bodies and in the Caracas imaginary. From the runway to the ‘perolón’, the transformationists project a powerful presence on this stage that renders them visible while, simultaneously, subjecting them to incredible violence.
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