Sponsored by the African Gender and Expressive Arts working group
Considering Early Caribbean "Queerness:" Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Family in 19th C. Trinidad
Rosamond King, English, Brooklyn College
Abstract:
This talk explores nonheteronormative gender, sexuality, and family construction among poor, urban blacks in nineteenth century Trinidad. A focus on “double-cross” race and class transvestism in carnival explores the elasticity and boundaries of gender in that time and place. And a focus on Afro-Trinidadian family structures – which usually were not marital, nuclear families – reveals a history of nonheteronormative communal care that sometimes resisted colonial power even as its creators sought economic advancement.
Tyrone St William Palmer
Email