This keyword essay discusses how the terms friend and family are used by same-sex-desiring women in Trinidad to mask and facilitate queer becoming. For many, friends can be like family; for some, those words might be synonymous. The paper questions how cultures of exclusion within Trinidadian society and its queer communities facilitate the women’s formation of kin and kin-like bonds. In Trinidad, the term friend has multivalence, suggesting a sexual relationship, an inevitable betrayal, a confidante, or a go-between. Finally, the essay draws on other models of female homosociality, cooperation, and desire, such as zami and mati, as well as sakhi, Indo-Caribbean traditions of ritual friendship, to help contextualize women’s passionate friendships.
Kith and Kin: The Making of Queer Communities
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan is an Indo-Trinidadian queer scholar, activist, educator, and artist. Her research and writing have documented Indo-Trinidadian cultural forms, such as pachraat folk songs; critiqued cultural practices like ritual purity, specifically the religious purdah of menstruating women; and detailed the identity politics, personal resilience, and collective space-making practices of Trinidadian same-sex desiring persons. She is the author of Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022), which focuses on the subjectivities and decolonial praxis of same-sex desiring Trinidadian women.
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan; Kith and Kin: The Making of Queer Communities. Small Axe 1 July 2024; 28 (2 (74)): 147–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-11382556
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