By Svetlana Marshall
The Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) celebrated its 21st Anniversary today with the launch of the book, ‘Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean’.
The book was written by Trinidad and Tobago Academic and Community Activist, Dr Nikoli Attai.
It captures the complex nature of queerness across different spaces and places, and addresses the nuances of queer sexual and gender politics and community making across the Caribbean, which Dr Attai believes continues to elude human rights activists, who utilize international financial and political resources to influence interventions and the region’s engagement on issues of homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Dr Attai said the book acknowledges and celebrates “defiant bodies”
“Formal activism often fails to capture the everyday forms of resistance that become part of embodied experiences, including how queer people claims space. In this chapter I share glimpses of how queer people occupy spaces in North-East Trinidad and Georgetown, Guyana, and the queerest of culture, in which they exercise agency by negotiating race, class, gender and economic geographies. While like the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean, issues of non-hegemonic gender and sexuality continue to define legibility, bars, rum shops and night clubs are actively negotiated and radically occupied at nights that disrupt the very structures that maintain hegemonic heteronormality and binary gender conformity,” Dr Attai explained, as he read excerpts from his book.
He explained that the book also offers critical insight into the ways that queer people negotiate, resist, and disrupt homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination.
“This book would not have been possible without the willingness of peoples in communities on the ground, who really shared freely, deeply and openly with me, when I spent time across the Caribbean. And, I really want to say special thank you to participants from Guyana, Trans United, from SASOD, persons from West Bank Demerara, others on the streets, in the clubs, other party spaces, across the Caribbean, whose stories really enrich and inspire the work that I am doing,” Dr Attai said.
Dr Attai said while he is pleased to return to Guyana after visiting in 2017 for the conduct of his research, the launch of the book is taking place at a time when another transgender sex worker was the victim of extreme violence resulting in death.
“Despite this excitement I am keenly aware that our communities continue to navigate hostility, violence, discrimination and death. And in preparing for this talk, I learnt of a community member, last Thursday in Georgetown, and again, this reminds us of the horrific violence that the most marginalized in our society, and our communities are faced on a daily basis,” he said.
Founder and Managing Director of SASOD, Joel Simpson, said the book comes at an opportune time, as SASOD continues to champion the rights of LGBTQ people across Guyana.
He said while the organisation has made tremendous progress in advancing the rights of LGBTQ people, there is still work to be done.
“So, 21 years into working to achieve full equality for LGBTQI people seems like a lifetime for an organisation, and I think we are proud of some accomplishments that we have seen over the last two plus decades, in particular, our work to decriminalize cross-dressing, took nearly 10 years. We started that advocacy work since May of 2006 when there was a single arrest of the late Petronella Trotman, and when the crack down happened in February 2009, we realized that we needed to do more than just advocating in the public’s sphere and hence why we filed that case, and it took a long time, and it took a lot of work and we had to go to Guyana’s final Court – the Caribbean Court of Justice – in order to have a completely successful decision,” Simpson said.
He said there has also been social change, with more and more Guyanese becoming supportive of the LGBTQ community, while adding that the work continues.
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