Copyright by Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: PERFORMANCE OF FLUID IDENTITIES AND BLACK LIMINAL DISPLACEMENTS BY THRESHOLD WOMEN Committee: Joni L. Jones, Supervisor Jennifer M. Wilks, Co-Supervisor Charlotte Canning Deborah Paredez Hannah Wojciehowski PERFORMANCE OF FLUID IDENTITIES AND BLACK LIMINAL DISPLACEMENTS BY THRESHOLD WOMEN by Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2013 Dedication Mama Granny Julie Isabella Stewart Isabella McPherson (nee Forbes) and Amybelle Roselda Forbes Acknowledgements For the many detailed questions, comments, critiques, clarifications, responses, generous time and labor, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my esteemed dissertation supervisor and co-supervisor, Dr. Joni L. Jones/Omi Osun Olomo and Dr. Jennifer M. Wilks. Special thanks to Dr. Jones for her brilliance, expertise, insights, care and guidance in my work over the years. I am deeply grateful and appreciative of my co- supervisor Dr. Wilks’s keen intellect, eagle-eyed comments, clarity, and focus throughout my dissertation. To my dissertation committee members Dr. Charlotte Canning, Dr. Deborah Paredez and Dr. Hannah Wojciehowski, thank you all for your responses and mentorship in my graduate career at the University of Texas at Austin, including your nurturing guidance in graduate and conference courses. I would be remiss if I did not thank my Director of Graduate Studies Dr. Pamela Christian for navigating me through administrative hurdles and red tapes this past year toward some clear direction and strong support. I owe a debt of gratitude to all my professors, colleagues and friends in the Performance as Public Practice program and the College of Fine Arts. I am truly grateful for the rigor in lively and engaging debates in classrooms and studios that have shaped and honed some of my research interests for years to come. Many thanks to my fabulous Caribbean artistes Trinidad carnival performer par excellence Denise “Saucy Wow” Belfon, Jamaican dancehall artiste extraordinaire Carlene “The Dancehall Queen” Smith, and the illustrious Jamaican performance poet v Staceyann Chin for their lived experiences, embodied knowledge and theories that so enriched my dissertation. Thanks to Belfon, Smith and Chin for the many hours of great conversations we had in Patois and Creole, and their generosity and outpouring of wisdom that further the work in Anglophone Caribbean performances. Without you, this project would not have been possible. I would like to specially thank photographer Lee Abel1 based in San Francisco, California for permission to use her photographs of Carlene “The Dancehall Queen” Smith at Reggae Sunsplash in my dissertation. Sincere thanks to Dr. Barbara Gloudon and the late Professor Rex Nettleford of the Little Theatre Movement (LTM) National Pantomime Company of Jamaica. Thank you for giving me my first break in theatre as a designer, and for believing in me to go further. Throughout the years you have supported every dream, every endeavor, and longing hope, and there are not enough words to express my gratitude. This past year, I received an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship 2011-2012, and am truly grateful for the support from the AAUW that allowed me to research, draft five chapters, and facilitate the three interviews contained in this study. Special thanks to AAUW members that I have become acquainted with including Marsha Endahl Kramer and Mary Ellen Scribner for their wit and kind words of encouragement. I look forward to even more robust conversations about issues affecting women in the United States and internationally. 1 For further information, contact photographer Lee Abel at http://www.leeabelphotography.com/regae- portraits/jamaican and telephone: (415) 821-2271. vi To my friends and colleagues who read various versions of this project, and to those who never tired from listening to me talk through ideas about fluid identities and Creole culture. I thank you for your insights and ears. Sincere thanks to Heather Barfield Cole, Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares, Gustavo Melo Cerqueira, and my sisters Diane Forbes Berthoud and Dawn Yee who continue to inspire me with their excellence. My close friends, Vivian Ojogun, Abigail Ramsey, Annette Harris, Camille Stewart, Camille Jacks Morgan, Margot Rodway Brown, and Jeanette Whyte Birtles were there with me over decades, and deserve special note for their undying friendship, long conversations, laughter, and too much coffee at times. Honorable mention to my parents Baron Forbes and Hyacinth Forbes, who raised and supported me through thick and thin. I love you forever. Special thanks go to my loving husband Larry Erickson for supporting me through what seemed like insurmountable obstacles. I love you without end. And to the joy of our lives, little Isabella, thank you for teaching me play and patience. It literally takes a “village” of close and extended family, and those who became “family” to help me up along the way. I am deeply grateful for aunts and uncles, well-wishers, too many to mention here; some of whom have passed during the writing of this dissertation. Thanks to my mother-in-law June Erickson who died tragically too soon, for all her loving support and incredible inspiration. Thanks to Bob and Margaret Erickson, Dave and Roberta Erickson, Tim and Kristy Smith, Ryan and Cory Keefe, Jane Erickson and Christine Howard for cherished holiday memories and unwavering love. vii When I think about all the gifts, generosity, words of encouragement, and conversations at the kitchen table, I would like to thank my late Aunt Cynthia Forbes; and Aunt Kathleen Brown, affectionately called “Aunt Pinnie,” holder of family histories right back to slavery days, to remind me never to forget. Heartfelt gratitude to my late Grandmother Enid Chin for her unselfish love and kindness in giving me whatever she had just to see me to succeed. Thank you to my late Grandmother Amybelle Roselda Forbes, affectionately called “Miss Amy,” my namesake and inspiration who passed away during the writing of this dissertation just weeks shy of her 101st birthday. I will never forget you. Tenky-Tita.2 2 Tenky-Tita is an old Patois (English Creole) expression for “Thank you, Father” or “Thank God for small favors” (Cassidy and Le Page 440). viii PERFORMANCE OF FLUID IDENTITIES AND BLACK LIMINAL DISPLACEMENTS BY THRESHOLD WOMEN Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisors: Joni L. Jones and Jennifer M. Wilks Many scholars in the field believe that identities are fluid without question. Butler’s “fluidity of identities,” for instance, describes the numerous variations in gender identities that denaturalize gender, but not consider its racial dimensions (179). Butler analyzes drag performance as a model to show how gender identities are fluid, suggesting agency and social mobility in everyday life. But what is most striking to me about fluidity of identities is the assumption that everyone has fluid identities with scarcely any regard for how racialized stereotypes fix identities (Hall 1997, 258). Fixity is the repetition of colonial power over racialized subjects rendering them without agency and access (Bhabha 94). Fixity uses stereotyping, which is a process of constructing “composite images” about groups of people, and that hold certain identities within “symbolic boundaries” (Brantlinger 306). As a result, this dissertation challenges the universality in a fluidity of identities by examining three case studies in Caribbean racialized gender identities, often thought to be fluid because of multi-ethnicity, but discriminate against, and erase blackness or “Africanness,” in race theories of “whitening” (blanquemiento), ix “darkening” (negreado), color-casting, and colonial stereotypes of “miscegenation” throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Through performance analyses of three black and "miscegenated" Anglophone Caribbean performers Denise “Saucy Wow” Belfon in Trinidad carnival crossdressing, Carlene “The Dancehall Queen” Smith in Jamaican dancehall transvestism, and Staceyann Chin in American performance poetry with racialized “androgyny,” I examine the figures of Creole, La Mulata, Dougla and “half-Chiney” by these women in their performance genres in order to investigate whether identities are as fluid as Butler suggests, and to chart their fixities. Focusing on fluidity alone risks denying inequalities and the lack of social mobility restricting access to marginalized people. Belfon, Smith and Chin manipulate racialized “drag” by simultaneously crossing race and gender in masquerade traditions of Trinidad carnival, Jamaican dancehall, and in the orality and embodiment in American performance poetry in performances I call black liminal displacements, defined as self-stereotyping and self- caricaturing. However fluid racialized gender identities may appear to be, I argue that racialized gender identities are not definitively fluid because racial stereotypes fix identities. x Table of Contents List of Tables .........................................................................................................xv List of