The representation of transgender celebrities in Vietnamese online news media

The visibility of transgender persons in Vietnam has been increasing over the last decade, an effect of community activism, research, and advocacy conducted by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), popular media, and self-representations produced by transgender people. Representations of transgender celebrities in popular media have been a particularly prominent contribution to social awareness of this minority community and may provide transgender people living in Vietnam with models of identity formulation. Media visibility, however, raises the question of how the media represents transgender people? This chapter takes up this question by examining the dominant representations of the most famous transgender celebrities in Vietnamese online news media from 2015-2016. We argue that, on the one hand, transgender persons have won partial recognition in the media when their voices have often been shared through a sympathetic lens. On the other hand, narrative, and visual focus on the beauty of transgender celebrities, their bodies, and the ‘wrong body’ discourse, through their self-representation as well as in their representation by others, tend to reinforce heteronormativity and create transnormativity, marginalizing those outside these narrow forms of non-conforming gender expression.