Defiant Bodies

Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean

By Nikoli A. Attai

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

In the Anglophone Caribbean, international queer human rights activists strategically located within and outside of the region have dominated interventions seeking to address issues affecting people across the region; a trend that is premised on an idea that the Caribbean is extremely homophobic and transphobic, resulting in violence and death for people who defy dominant sexual and gender boundaries. Human rights activists continue to utilize international financial and political resources to influence these interventions and the region’s engagement on issues of homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This focus, however, elides the deeply complex nature of queerness across different spaces and places, and fails to fully account for the nuances of queer sexual and gender politics and community making across the Caribbean. Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean problematizes the neocolonial and homoimperial nature of queer human rights activism in in four Anglophone Caribbean nations -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- and thinks critically about the limits of human rights as a tool for seeking queer liberation. It also offers critical insight into the ways that queer people negotiate, resist, and disrupt homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination by mobilizing “on the ground” and creating transgressive communities within the region.

Defiant Bodies honors the erotic autonomy and radical defiance of queer and trans people in the Caribbean. Through a fierce investigation into Caribbean sexual politics, the book offers an eloquent ethnographic study featuring engagement with Caribbean LGBTQ+ activists and careful critiques of human rights discourses. Ultimately, Nikoli Attai reveals the complex ways that queer people make community and create unexpected pathways for space and liberation in the region. Defiant Bodies is an outstanding contribution to the field of Caribbean queer and sexuality studies! Angelique V. Nixon, author of Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

In Defiant Bodies, we finally have a book that centers trans Caribbean experiences, voices, and agency. Focusing on the lived experiences of Caribbean sexual and gender minorities, this book is a signal intervention because of its focus on resilience and agency rather than death and abjection. Attai embraces our 'unruly' and 'disruptive' trans and queer cousins, revealing their everyday experiences and resistance, as they create a 'politics of hope' for themselves that benefits us all. Rosamond S. King, author of Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

NIKOLI A. ATTAI is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at Colorado State University.

Introduction: Queer Liberation in the
Anglophone Caribbean?

1 Liberating the Queer Caribbean

2 On the Ground: Challenging Sexual Politics in
the Region

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

4 Queens, Kings, and Kinship Networks: Queer Culture
and Trans(gressive) Community Making

5 Rumshops, Nightlife, and the Radical Praxis
of Internal Exile

Coda: A Defiant Politics of Hope in the
Queer Caribbean

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Related Titles