Eighteen drag artists from Caribbean backgrounds shared their perspectives on the meaning and urgency of their work with the Caribbean Equality Project. CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
The Global North often imagines — and continues to position — the Caribbean as an ongoing site of queer death, violence, and impossibility. Legacies of colonial buggery laws, ongoing and escalating rates of queer and trans hate crimes, and nationalist politics within the region that privilege the cisgender heterosexual as always the ideal citizen work to position gender and sexual difference as always marginal and outside the space of Caribbeanness.
In addition, myriad articles and Western news outlets work to amplify narratives and mythologies that Caribbean nations — specifically, countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and the Bahamas — are “the most homophobic places on Earth” and often need to be “saved” through the lessons of the “free” queers of the North to achieve queer modernity.