Be sure to take advantage of the Rutgers University Press Introductory offer for Defiant bodies by using the following discount codes:

Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies announces the cohort chosen to participate in the 2024 DocX Development Lab–Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures, co-created by Stephanie Owens and Nyssa Chow. This lab supports artists and researchers whose archival practices, documentary art practices and scholarship explore the history and possibility of living, thinking, being and sensing “otherwise.”

Gathering at Duke from April 4-12 and coinciding with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 4-7), these 11 fellows will be guided by Chow, serving as lead artist facilitator, to engage in dialogue, share their practice and proposed work, explore interdisciplinary collaboration and receive feedback.

Find more information: https://documentarystudies.duke.edu/docx

Thematic engagement: How are LGBTQI people taking up space and place across the region?

Title: Between the Walls: Ruination and New Sexual Worlds in Barbados

LGBTQI+ people are claiming and co-opting space in creative and radical ways in the Caribbean, and this allows us an opportunity to understand the queer experience beyond limiting notions of disease, violence, and mortality. In this paper I examine how abandoned hotel projects in Barbados are haunted by traces of queer life and present opportunities to understand the actualization of queer desire within a context of disease and state-sanctioned discrimination. Colonialism has long been at work ruining the Caribbean, evident in economic drain, political rivalries and the racialized gender systems established by colonial powers, that are exacerbated by neo-colonial discursive, economic, and political practices. The abandoned hotel tells the history of colonial empire in the Caribbean: its having been treated as the brothel of Europe; its continued framing as a sexual destination and thus reliance on the tourist industry. Simultaneously, the empty building provides an opening for the contemporary queer co-opting of the space, intended for leisurely use by wealthy foreigners, now a playground for locals. Still, queer praxis occurs in the shadows, not visible, relegated to the margins and having to confront religious homophobia, and discourses of disease and decay. I resist a limiting depiction of queer life and shift the narrative to demonstrate how queer people make life happen, make life happy, healthily, pleasurable, and whole (enough). I explore graffiti, some warding off the gays, promising them punishment, and others inviting them to fulfil their desires. I also think about debris, like empty rum bottles and discarded condom boxes left in the wake of sexual encounters, to understand the erotic placemaking practices that occur in such spaces of excess.

Find more information: https://www.beyondhomophobia.info

I attended several academic events this fall, including these:

I participated in a roundtable discussion with Cogut Visiting Professor Kamala Kempadoo and Dr. Preity Kumar (University of Rhode Island) around the theme of "Defiant Bodies: New Research in Caribbean Sexualities. We celebrated the publication of our books and explored the following questions:

1. What does queerness look like outside of a global north or western framework? 

2. How is queer violence resisted? 

3. How can we embrace gendered and sexual diversity in our imaginings of the Caribbean? 

View webcast here:

Participants: 

Dr. Nikoli Attai. Dr. Angelique Nixon, Dr. Krystal Ghisyawan, Dr. Preity Kumar, Dr. Suzanne Persard.

About the Roundtable

Caribbean feminist and queer/sexuality scholarship has been instrumental in understanding how marginalized groups negotiate patriarchy, misogyny, and domination by the power structures that define life in the region. Indeed, the most marginalized people are impacted by the region’s neoliberal economic structures, indigenous land rights issues, climate change, and the lack of adequate protections for women, children, and LGBTIQ+ people, among other issues. Scholars, activists, artists, and communities on the ground have been rearticulating social, political, and economic solidarities and relationships of belonging and loving, which opens up avenues for bringing together those communities historically marginalized and excluded by the dominant group. These negotiations offer new ways of seeing and undoing colonial legacies.

This roundtable was structured by the following questions:

1. How are creative queer communities envisioning dissidence and resistance in the face of ongoing homophobia, transphobia, and violence? 

2. And, what bearings do decolonial praxes of resistance have on Caribbean feminist and queer and trans scholarship? 

We addressed these questions in close conversation with Caribbean feminists, queer and trans-Caribbean studies, and post-indenture queer theories to examine how women who love other women, queer, and trans people respond to multiple layers of violence. Additionally,  we examined how they utilize such violence as a resource for understanding the queer worlds that they inhabit. By reflecting on the work of (deceased) Guyanese dancer Gora Singh, we examined how queer dance performances interrupt the gendered discourse of Indo-Caribbean dancing as purely the sphere of cisgender women. We will also interrogated modes of resistance deployed by working-class queer and trans people through kinship networks, queer urban night space, and unmentionable forms of queer sex that disrupt the Caribbean’s respectability politics. In this discussion, we wrestled with the urgency of articulating a vision for queer Caribbean freedom that is attentive to and impacted by lingering colonial legacies and their impacts on the race, economic, geographic, and ideological tensions that structure life in the Caribbean.

Paper Title: Naming Queerness in the Caribbean

Abstract

The term “queer”, like many other Euro-American identity markers, has been gaining increased legibility in the Anglophone Caribbean. However, it resonates unevenly with people in the region because of the baggage it carries for being largely unrepresentative of nuanced and deeply complex Caribbean experiences. Still, it has been used widely in academic discourse, among people engaged in transnational discussions about LGBTIQ+ experiences and by non-government organizations who benefit from international LGBTIQ+ funding. Indeed, the ways that queer terminology and theorization has been adopted is also influenced by race, class, and ethnicity (among other things), and many persons located outside of these communities have a contested relationship with its usage. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in four Anglophone Caribbean countries – Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago – I think about how sex and gender transgressors are envisioning their unruly and disruptive praxes as they negotiate and resist dominant heteronormativity. I also reflect on how scholars of Caribbean gender and sexuality are engaging with these kinds of identity markers and wrestling with what it might mean to center such terminology in relation to other more culturally legible ideas of sex and gender transgression in ways that refuse to align neatly with and disrupt Euro-American identity politics and theory.

Summer 2023 Engagements

I spent summer 2023 traveling and engaging with various communities about my research. Here are some highlights:

I am one of 40 participants from the Caribbean to participate in his exciting summer institute at the University of Miami that allows us to collaborate on our various digital archival projects. Here we are learning more about the following topics:

• Building Digital Archives

• Minimal Computing for Caribbean Scholars

• Critical Digital Pedagogy

Learn more about this institute here: https://cdscollective.org/summer-school/ 

I am presenting a paper titled "Wrestling with the Wajang: Trans femininities and the queer potentiality of gendered defiance - An ode to Trinidad and Tobago’s Saucy Pow." at this conference.

ABSTRACT

Stereotypical femininity, as it is framed in the hetropatriarchal Caribbean imagination, is docile, domesticated, and controllable on one hand, and lascivious, loose and slack on the other. Lived realities of the feminine, however, point to the varied experiences of feminine praxes that refuse to exist within the confines of heteropatriarchy. In this paper, I draw on the concept of the wajang - a term typically used in Trinidad and Tobago to refer to unruly, disruptive and unmannerly women - to think about the queer potentiality of wajang femininity as a defiant tool utilized by Caribbean people to embrace the fullness of their lives as they negotiate violence and discrimination. I use this moment to celebrate Saucy Pow’s life - a Black working class trans woman from Trinidad and Tobago who occupied and disrupted public space before her untimely death. I meditate on the lessons we can learn from such a peripheral location to help us think more deeply about the kind of disruptive agency that is necessary for destabilizing restrictive gender in the Caribbean.

Learn more about this conference here: https://acwws.org