Transfiguring Trinidad and Tobago: Queer cultural production, erotic subjectivity and the praxis of black queer anthropology

To date, a book-length scholarly study of same-sex desiring anglophone Caribbeans has yet to be published. This gap is only widened by the popular misconception that a particularly violent homophobia has successfully banished same-sex desire from the region. This study not only confirms the long presence of same-sex desiring peoples in the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, but it focuses in upon the artistry and community-building techniques of these subjects as part of a paradigmatic shift in Caribbean cultural analysis. By foregrounding the work and the perspectives of same-sex desiring Trinbagonians in an analysis of Carnival masquerade, Calypso music and HIV/AIDS activism, this project also proposes a novel theoretical framework for the study of subjectivity.;Informed by sixteen months of ethnographic field research, this epistemological proposition---which I have termed erotic subjectivity---combines attention to politicized power hierarchies, spiritual metaphysics and sensual intimacy in performances and conversations crafted by mostly self-identified gay and lesbian Trinbagonians. My elaboration of erotic subjectivity is deeply indebted both to Caribbean-American lesbian writer Audre Lorde's powerful 1978 essay "Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power" and representative work from two queer Trinbagonian artists and a Trinidad-based NGO. This project juxtaposes the 2006 band of internationally lauded Carnival masquerade designer Peter Minshall; a 1968 tune by Calypso's indisputable grand dame McCartha "Calypso Rose" Lewis; and a conversation-based HIV/AIDS prevention and support program that has for nearly a decade been the charge of Friends For Life, Trinidad's oldest HIV/AIDS organizations run principally by and for self-identified gay men.;However, the alignment and assessment of these elements serve a dual purpose for this project. When taken together, all three subjects of this dissertation not only provide particular sites through which to map the intelligibility of erotic subjectivity as a potentially expansive theoretical intervention, but they also collectively enact a methodological proposition. By holding situated, black queer speaking subjects in the foreground during nearly every stage of this analysis, this study also makes a definitional claim within a recently emergent black queer anthropology.