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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. This article examines the use of gender and race as sites of contention in popular media visualizations of sex/gender non-normativity and cultural difference. It critically analyzes the case of the June 2004 appearance of the Latina transsexual, Miriam, on Australian reality television, drawing attention to practices of objectification and the spectacularization of sexuality and sexual identity, as well as cultural-symbolic processes of racialization and the production of 'otherness' in the Australian context. It considers in some depth the fraught problematics of contemporary modes of visibility for sexual and ethnic minorities in the Anglo-dominant and Article Sexualities

This roundtable discussion took place January–July 2016 via e-mail after participants and special issue editors initially met in virtual mode online. The editors posed the initial questions, and participants e-mailed their responses. Two further rounds of questions and responses ensued, and participants also viewed the responses of their peers on the roundtable. The questions were intended to generate rigorous dialogue about the uses of and problems associated with political economy (PE) as a lens to analyze the experiences of trans men and women and sex- and gender-diverse peoples in different but connected geopolitical locations. The emphasis was on bringing into conversation what is underprioritized in much PE work and also transgender studies as a formation, and how, from their own academic and activist knowledge, methodological bases, and experiences, respondents might see the (re)configuration of trans* political economy toward liberatory, antiracist, decolonial, and economically transformative ends.

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