Tanty feminisms

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0059
• Published date: 08 July 2022
• Date: 08 July 2022
• Pages: 59-97
• Author: Ryan Persadie
• Subject Matter: Caribbean feminisms,Indo-Caribbean feminisms,queer Caribbean,Caribbean diaspora,erotics,Caribbean indentureship,gendered and sexual violence,coolie,drag culture,aunty studies

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Tanty feminisms

The aesthetics of auntyhood, #Coolieween

and the erotics of post-indenture

Ryan Persadie

Ryan Persadie is an artist, educator, writer and PhD candidate

in Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies at the

University of Toronto, Canada.

ABSTRACT

A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty femi-

nisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of

the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the gure of the ‘tanty’, or

‘aunty’ as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the conse-

quential amital social relations they produce have been indispensable

to contemporary discourses and practices of Caribbean feminist

thought and praxis. The tanty cannot be read as indebted to a sin-

gular person, gure or monolithic legacy but operates as a uid and

transnational force of Caribbean feminist knowing that instructs us

through non-normative embodied transgressions, and pedagogies of

free up. Yet, despite their presence of vital integrity to Caribbean

popular culture, community organizing, history, politics and litera-

ture, discussions of the politics and pedagogies of tantyhood remain

underrepresented in scholarly Caribbean feminist literatures.

In this article, I reect upon my creative practice as a drag artist and

self-proclaimed tanty in an annual digital photography series I have

produced over the last three years entitled ‘Coolieween’. In this work,

I reference Indo-/Caribbean folklore and mythologies, and stories of

horror, the grotesque and the paranormal as entangled with queer

affects, embodiments and aesthetics. Drag artistry, which, like tanty-

hood, agitates the invisible boundaries of neo-colonial gender, racial

and sexual binaries, provides a critical feminist terrain to metaphorize

the institutional crossings of pain and pleasure held within historical

and contemporary ontologies of Indo-Caribbeanness. Investigating

the pedagogy of this crossing is central to understanding, as well as

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0059

60 RYAN PERSADIE

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

critiquing, long-standing attachments of pain, injury, pathologization

and trauma that have been commonly scripted to Indo-Caribbean

subjectivities, often in reference to genealogies of kala pani

poetics and other diaspora narratives that have sutured ideas of Indo-

Caribbeanness as always-already broken, fragmented and dislocated.

In this article, I instead centre paradigms of erotics and pleasure as

a transformative medium to turn our optics towards transformative

recongurations of Indo-Caribbean feminist selfhoods. As I argue

here, by thinking with and through tanty feminisms, we are provided

with intergenerational and transnational languages of unsettling

logic that continually instruct us through everyday modalities of Indo-

Caribbean feminist living and being.

KEYWORDS

Caribbean feminisms, Indo-Caribbean feminisms, queer Caribbean,

Caribbean diaspora, erotics, Caribbean indentureship, gendered and

sexual violence, coolie, drag culture, aunty studies

PRELUDE1

Donne Dojoy. Vanessa Bailey. Omwattie Gill. Riya Rajkumar. Stacy

Singh. Vanessa Zaman. Christina Sukhdeo. Andrea Bharatt. The

names listed here are just a mere fragment of the lists upon lists of

diasporic Indo-Caribbean women in Canada and the US who have been

recently injured, harmed and murdered at the hands of heteropatriar-

chal power – whether that be in the form of their parents, community

members or even partners.

We know the names of these women not only because we hear about them

in the news but because we have seen these acts of death in multiple forms

in our everyday lives and families, oftentimes passing through us genera-

tionally, physically, emotionally, unsolved and unhealed.

These forms of gendered and racialized violence are not just contained

to the realm(s) of the past, historical, and that which can be unheard,

unseen or unfelt today. Rather, these harms enacted upon the women men-

tioned above remind us time and time again how the afterlife of colonialism

is not really an afterlife at all – but a continuity, an ongoing maintenance

and a harmful lingering of regimes of power.

TANTY FEMINISMS 61

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

In ‘Coolie Woman’, journalist Gaiutra Bahadur (2014) notes that just like

the women named above, during times of indenture an overwhelming majority

of Indo-Caribbean women’s deaths were caused at the hands of kin, those in close

relation, and specifically intimate partners. Some of these acts came be referred to

as ‘wife murders’, where death became the consequence of the surveillance and

regulation of Indo-Caribbean women’s sexualities – particularly as the mere

potential of infidelity, immodesty or non-respectable behaviour was enough

Figure 1 ‘Tanty Feminisms’ (2020); Models (from left to

right): Premika Leo, Anjuli Shiwraj, Ryan Persadie.

Photography by Mashal Khan.