Let’s Liberate the Bullers: Queer Activism and Community-making in the Anglophone Caribbean

This dissertation interrogates the work being done by activists and non-governmental organizations in the Anglophone Caribbean, and theorizes that current interventions fail to adequately address the complicated ways that queer people negotiate and resist homophobia and transphobia in the region. In this work I draw on transnational feminist, Black queer theory, and Caribbean studies frameworks to posit that queer sexual praxes extend beyond dominant human rights tropes of disease, mortality and the imperative to escape a violently homophobic region. I am also particularly interested in the ways that working class gay men and trans people create communities of exile within the region as a radical praxis of space making despite being deeply affected by politically and culturally sanctioned homophobia and transphobia. My multi-sited ethnographic study is based on fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. In these sites I conducted extensive online ethnography and participant observation, as well as semi-structured interviews with representatives from prominent queer advocacy groups. I also collected life histories from trans and gender non-conforming persons in order to better understand how they make life in the region. My scholarship offers an interdisciplinary intervention that engages and extends transnational feminist theory, critical race theory, human rights theory, queer theory, anthropology, and Caribbean studies by focusing explicitly on the under-interrogated area of queer sexual and gender politics in the Anglophone Caribbean. This project starts by examining the nature of queer human rights organizing by activists from Toronto’s Caribbean diaspora, aided by financial and administrative support from human rights organizations in Canada. I then interrogate the ways that such activities materialize in the four research sites, and some disconnects between the work being done by funders and activists located in Toronto, and the dynamics on the ground in each space. Finally, I explore three important moments across the four research sites that disrupt human rights narratives of a violently homophobic Anglophone region.Ph.D.2021-07-16 00:00:0