By Preity Kumar
Dr. Preity R. Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (Rutgers University Press, 2024), the first ethnography to examine the lived experiences of women-loving-women in Guyana, challenging conventional notions of violence, embodiment, and survival. Her research is widely published, appearing in the Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies; Journal of Lesbian Studies; Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies; Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies; Beyond Homophobia: Centering LGBT Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean, and the Routledge Companion to Applied Qualitative Research in the Caribbean.
The Caribbean archipelagoes remain a crucial space for examining how capitalism harnesses, generates, uses, and indeed, “saves” black and brown bodies queer bodies in the region. Yet, queer Caribbean bodies often labored to thwart and resist these projects, both in their embodiment and through their defiance of the dominant culture. In Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean, published last year by Rutgers University Press, Trinidadian scholar Dr. Nikoli A. Attai, an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University, pushes us to think about the commonly held assumptions about the Caribbean as a homophobic space, and what queer life might actually entail.
Defiant Bodies embarks on the journey of exposing how capitalistic processes, particularly funding by Western NGOs located in the U.S. and Canada, curate an image of the Caribbean as an inhospitable space for queer lives to flourish. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources from the Caribbean and beyond, Attai provides a cogent critique of those – particularly international human rights advocates – who posit that queer people “must leave to survive and embrace their queerness.” This perspective is shaped by the colonial gaze of Western powers and perpetuated by global banking, queer asylum seekers, and queer human rights activism. While exploitation of the region is not new, by linking the historical structures and contemporary forms of international funding flowing to the region, Attai’s analysis reveals an intensification of exploitation in the Caribbean through what he terms “conditional queerness.” This concept underscores how queer Caribbean bodies must perform “notions of queerness based on Global North, often white, ideals… dismissing the fact that queer people are actively maneuvering the prevailing homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination in radical and truly defiant ways.”
Attai’s theorizing of ‘conditional queerness’ importantly highlights the unintended, yet often negative, impacts of international funding on queer Caribbeans. “Conditional queerness” creates a situation where local organizations, lacking financial support, must depend on international funding to combat laws, conduct workshops on HIV/AIDS, and address homophobic and transphobic violence. Local organizations and queer bodies must continuously perform their suffering to secure this funding, laboring not only in their daily lives to navigate prevailing homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination but also in presenting a particular narrative to the Global North. Queer Caribbean bodies are perpetually laboring for livable lives, maneuvering through both local and global systems of oppression. They must negotiate their identities within a restrictive model that demands constant performance and validation from Western eyes, limiting their authentic expressions of queerness. In this way, the labor of queer bodies in the Caribbean is not only about surviving homophobia and transphobia but also about the additional burden of navigating and resisting the external impositions that seek to define and control their existence.
While the first part of Defiant Bodies pays careful attention to these complicated and intersecting global and national systems of power and exploitation, queer Caribbean bodies are more than one-dimensional—they are more than a story of suffering. This is precisely what Attai sets out to show us in the remaining chapters. Queer Caribbean bodies are always there, their presence felt even in absence. In the shifting sands of Barbados’ tourism economy, their voices linger, haunting like ghosts. Traces of existence—quotes etched into colorful concrete abandoned hotel walls, discarded condoms, empty rum bottles—tell stories of lives lived in between walls. Leaving political messages about the nation, critiquing political leaders, or seeking out other men for sex, gay men turn these bare surfaces into clandestine channels of communication and resistance. These traces reveal a rich history of queer life—a life full of sex, pleasure, and boundless erotic possibilities.
Readers gain further insights into queer life through the perspectives of predominantly Afro-Caribbean working-class gay men and trans-women. Interviews with several participants reveal their everyday struggles, mixed with a deep sense of collectivity, resilience, and self-determination. Despite facing severe challenges of discrimination, for instance, the exclusion of working-class trans women from mainstream LGBT organizing and spaces because they are not “respectable” enough, Attai offers us a unique picture of how working-class trans women and gender-nonconforming individuals form their own communities and carve out and co-opt spaces of belonging, kinship, and collectivity.
Faced with “internal exiles” –a term Attai uses to describe the exclusion of working-class gay men, transwomen, and transmen from dominant and hostile spaces—queer communities labor to create spaces of home, kinship, and solidarity through drag pageantries, rum shops, king shows, and nightlife spaces. These spaces, carved out with immense strength and effort, become sanctuaries for community building, organizing, and care, enduring despite the violence. The rum shop, a familiar icon in most Caribbean countries, stands as a symbol of defiance, as exemplified in this account in Attai’s book: “The bar provided space for trans men, trans masculine people, and other members of the queer community to share similar emotional, financial, and other kinds of support for each other…when a prominent lesbian in the community, Stacy Charles, died suddenly after a short battle with cancer, the rumshop became a space for support, togetherness, and mourning for members of the lesbian and trans masculine community.” Through such acts of creation and sustenance, black and brown queers transform these sites into spaces of pleasure.
Navigating the complexities of race, class, gender, and geographical tensions in the discussion of gender and sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean is no easy task. What sets Defiant Bodies apart is its mastery of interweaving participants’ lived realities within a global framework. Attai’s incisive analyses in each chapter render the text both accessible and instructive, offering insights that resonate for everyone.
As the Caribbean remains a space of pleasure and paradise in the popular imagination, queer and trans people in the region teach us about larger, global networks of power. Their local struggles cannot be viewed simply as isolated or contemporary forms of oppression; rather their struggles echo a deep-rooted colonial history of dispossession, dominance, and degradation. Amidst this neocolonial backdrop, these resilient people illuminate alternative ways of living, despite sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds. They claim spaces, forge connections beyond heterosexuality and norms of respectability politics, share meals, clink rum bottles together, and sometimes they may be at odds with each other, yet always within a spirit of Caribbean unity—perhaps this is our true defiance.
Dr. Nikoli Attai will be in Georgetown this week to launch his first book, “Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean,” which will be introduced by Dr. Preity Kumar at a research symposium being hosted by SASOD Guyana to commemorate its 21st anniversary.
In the second part of the event, Alessandra Hereman, a Guyanese MPhil candidate in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; and Guyanese-Barbadian researcher, writer and physician Dr. Nastassia Rambarran will present findings from their research into queer histories and activism in Guyana and Barbados.
Open to the public, the event will take place on Tuesday, July 16, from 10:00 am – 12:00 p.m. at the Herdmanston Lodge Hotel, 65 Peter Rose and Lamaha Streets, Queenstown, Georgetown.