Global circuits: transnational sexualities and Trinidad.

Abstract

n 1998, from January to March, I was in Trinidad for the entire length of the Carnival season. The purpose of my presence as an "ethnographertourist" in Trinidad was to evaluate the relationships between globalization, gender, and sexuality.' Specifically, my aim was to query how globalization could be defined in terms of gay and lesbian identities and what, in turn, was shaping gay and lesbian identities in Trinidad in the wake of contemporary processes ofglobalization. Certainly, palpable effects of globalization on gay and lesbian communities seemed to be surfacing in Trinidad at every moment.2 Gay and lesbian activists were taking part in national, regional, and international networks even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean had generated a tremendous amount of funding and research support from former colonizing countries in the last fifteen years, and the Internet had enabled global connections that were formerly impossible.3 An increasing number of gay and lesbian tourists, both "diasporic expatriates" and otherwise, were learning about gay and lesbian community meetings and fetes as well as gay-friendly Carnival masquerades specifically