Through an examination of Henrique Cirne-Lima and Josué Pellot’s 2010 documentary film I Am the Queen about transgender Puerto Rican beauty queen pageants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, this chapter discusses how queer diasporic communities in the US navigate family and kinship in light of racial, sexual, and gender difference. Underscoring the importance of decentering conventional notions of kinship while remaining attuned to the way “given” families may in fact link up to “selected” families for purposes of communal sustenance and endurance, the chapter highlights the film’s aim to represent alternative formations of family and kinship as they relate to diaspora and displacement. Ultimately, Cirne-Lima and Pellot’s film offers a vision of the struggle to belong in the context of the loving competition of the beauty pageant while also accounting for the struggles of historically marginalized and maligned communities such as the transgender Puerto Rican women the documentary represents.

Chapter 5 examines what specific cultural meanings were applied to the modern woman by virtue of the country’s youthful age structure, reconceptualization of adolescence, and generation gap during the late Pahlavi era. Within this framework, the discussion introduces "the modern girl" that hitherto was not acknowledged as an important figure in Iranian historiography, while addressing the magazines’ engagement with the beauty culture and discussions on issues like makeup, fashion, and weight concerns. The overemphasis on the female body in women’s magazines, and their excessive promotion of social values of beauty and slenderness, conflicted with their attempts to empower femininity through representations of female determination, dedication, and educational accomplishments. Iranian editors and journalists were familiar with this conflict, and their responses become evident in two distinct and equally challenging images that receive special attention in this chapter: the Teen Princess (dokhtar-e Shayesteh) elected in Zan-e Ruz’s annual flashy beauty pageant and the female volunteers who served in the Literacy and Health Corps, after completing a short military training. In the late Pahlavi era, both these programs targeted young, single, high school graduates and college students, and substantially expanded women’s entry into the formerly segregated public sphere.