Trans Lives in the Anglophone Caribbean

It seems that it is always a good time for our present to throw us toward an idea of the future in which community is strengthened. In Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean, Nikoli A. Attai invites us to delve into an extensive ethnographic work in which he attempts to capture queer experiences that account for LGBTQ+ ways of life in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. By focusing on the trans identities involved in his ethnographic work, Attai works with narratives about the Anglophone Caribbean that have not yet been studied closely and that involve a reflection on communitarian ways of living.In the introduction, Attai puts forth the argument, based on the work of theorists such as Marquis Bey, that the category “queer” at times accounts inadequately for trans Caribbean experiences, since it can be understood as an imposition of a neocolonial category that tends to universalize LGBTQ+ experiences, especially those of trans communities. In this sense, Attai chooses to differentiate a queer framework from a trans one and avoid using these terms as if they functioned as synonyms. With this gesture, the author signals a position that will accompany him throughout subsequent chapters and that allows the book to highlight trans identities when thinking about community in these territories.In the first chapter, Attai analyzes the problematic relationship between NGOs (mostly financed by foreign capital) dedicated to human rights in the region and grassroots activists or organizations. Here, Attai reflects on the construction of Canada as a liberating country, as a territory dreamed of or longed for by Caribbean queer people. These narratives contribute to conceiving of the Caribbean as an uncivilized and violent space, in which queer and especially trans people are not able to survive. At the same time, these people are called upon to victimize themselves in order to receive the help that (white, wealthy) gay Canadians can send them or to be granted refugee status. In this chapter, Attai analyzes the work of UNAIDS and different NGOs, such as AIDS-Free World and Envisioning LGBT Human Rights, among others, to account for the neocolonial actions of neoliberal organizations in the region.In his second chapter, titled “On the Ground,” Attai explores the relationship between activists belonging to regional organizations and the legislation of each of the countries in the region. He focuses on two particular cases — Jason Jones v. Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago and McEwan, Clarke, Fraser, Persaud and SASOD v. Attorney General of Guyana — to reflect on the role that religious nationalism (particularly in Trinidad and Tobago), colonialism, the NGO CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice, and moral codes have on their respective regions.The third chapter, focused on Barbados, features photographs taken by the author that illustrate the narrative he constructs in relation to abandoned hotels, tourism, and real estate speculation. Dialoguing with the concepts of “ruin” and “ruination” from Ann Laura Stoler, Attai argues that abandoned hotels are “sites of ruin, telling of their loss of financial utility for Global North investors, while also having meaning for others who occupy them as spaces of local pleasure” (81). At the same time, these territories are expansive spaces of ruination, since they reflect the imperial powers that have occupied (and continue to occupy) them, even if only symbolically. Attai narrates how these neglected architectures function as spaces for casual encounters between LGBTQ+ people and, therefore, have been marked through graffiti as “dirty” constructions accordingly “infected” by sexually transmitted diseases.After the third chapter, Attai initiates what could be considered a second part of Defiant Bodies. This second part, which begins in chapter 4, focuses on his ethnographic work, presenting the testimony of LGBTQ+ people who belong to different social classes and races and who hold a more or less close relationship with activism. Attai's field research focuses mostly on the world of nightlife, that is, discos, bars, and parties. This life of the night is understood here in parallel with McKenzie Wark's (2023: 4) notion of “raving”: a “collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.” What interests Attai is how such collaboration is organized and how people occupy the space in the club. Attai also takes as reference drag pageants (such as Miss Queen of Queens or Diva World in Trinidad and Tobago) as spaces of encounter and disagreement, in which different generations express their anxieties about the future of drag and the survival of their dissident identities. I think it is pertinent to highlight that this chapter is also largely dedicated to thinking about transmasculine kinship relationships based on the experiences of the community groups TransMan (Jamaica) and I Am One TNT (Trinidad); as Attai points out, academic production around transmasculinities in the Anglophone Caribbean is not abundant, which is why he decided to focus on these organizations. The fifth chapter, “Rumpshops, Nightlife, and the Radical Praxis of Internal Exile,” finally provides a first-person look at communities beyond the lens of activism and human rights organizations. Attai walks through different nightclubs, where he witnesses parties, sex work, and the formation of unexpected queer kinship in the territory. The entries from Attai's diary stand out here, which allow us to access a second layer of first-person experience related to his participation in the region's nightlife.Defiant Bodies is a call for the work of community against neocolonial individualism; it is a commitment to a present and a future in common. It is a “defiant politics of hope” (165). It is, in short, a perpetual reminder of queer solidarity for resistance.