Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque – spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic – to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

NIKOLI ATTAI is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2023). 

SUE ANN BARRATT is a lecturer in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. She is the author of Dougla in the 21st Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).