Papers by Gabrielle Hosein
Caribbean Quarterly, 2024
This article examines spoken word poetry created by adolescents
participating in gender-based vio... more This article examines spoken word poetry created by adolescents
participating in gender-based violence (GBV) education in Trinidad and
Tobago. It situates the spoken word poetry methodology used in workshops
with adolescents within the wider fields of GBV prevention, arts-based
methodologies and youth engagement. This methodology was created for
a collaborative research project “Representing Gender-based Violence:
Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean”,
which aimed to produce a spoken word, theatre-based facilitation model
for peer-education on issues of GBV in the lives of adolescents.1
The article frames the cultural significance of oral traditions including
spoken word poetry in the Caribbean context and the issues of GBV that
impact adolescents in Trinidad and Tobago. In collaboration with the
University of Leicester, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies
(IGDS) at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies,
and the community organisation, ROOTS Foundation, the research project
set out to facilitate young people’s exploration of GBV through spoken
word poetry. This arts-based methodology (ABM) was chosen because of
its cultural relevance, popularity among youth, and links with political
activism in the Caribbean.
Small Axe, 2026
Written over the weeks that I was crafting a post-indenture Caribbean feminist mas called Nachori... more Written over the weeks that I was crafting a post-indenture Caribbean feminist mas called Nachorious, this reflection traces nearly thirty years of reading and relationship with Professor Emerita Rhoda Reddock. Nachorious is a nach gyal whose lineage, from the Bhojpuri 'nach' for dance, is the "dancing girls" who came on indenture ships and who, like other indentured Indian women, were stereotyped as immoral and even prostitutes by colonial authorities. Found in Guyanese Mahadai Das' oft-cited poem, "They Came in Ships," these bad gyal historical figures brought familiarity with economic autonomy, sexual and political freedom struggle, legal rights, and rebellion. Nachorious is the spectre of these women who also defied punitive and violent sexual repression in Caribbean colonies. A plantation-confined and segregated Indian sistren of the Afro-Caribbean urban working-class women of the 19th century and foremother of the loose-waist matikor tradition and Indo-Caribbean chutney-soca, the character came together from materials glued, stapled, taped, drawn, painted, and photocopied. For Carnival 2025, I continued a practice of using Jouvay to connect to legacies of Indian indenture through feminist aesthetic praxes in Carnival. Jouvay or Jour Overt is the fore day morning that precedes Carnival Monday and Tuesday in Trinidad and Tobago, and is typically associated with the political, dirty, spectral, vulgar, and rejected, and home-made masquerade.
Masculinities in Motion
Zed Books Ltd, 2006
Social sciences, Dec 31, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Journal of Participatory Research Methods
Interdisciplinary, local, regional, and cross-regional efforts are required to further men’s gend... more Interdisciplinary, local, regional, and cross-regional efforts are required to further men’s gender justice engagement on a global scale. There is limited understanding of how cross-regional collaborations account for intersectionality, geo-political differences among stakeholders, and the value of local strategies when designing and sharing prevention frameworks. Catalyzed by emerging and long-standing gender equity movements, our interdisciplinary research team from Canada, the Caribbean, Nepal, and Pakistan employed a community of practice (CoP) framework to share and mobilize research and experiential knowledge with the purpose of promoting regional and cross-regional strategies to involve men in gender justice efforts. Through a collective process, we co-created position statements, process dimensions, and key CoP activities to root our international collaboration. In this article, we emphasize the unique local contexts for our work and the learnings that emerged from our CoP. ...
Masculinities in Motion
Zed Books Ltd, 2006
Gender, generation and negotiation: adolescence and young Indo-Trinidadian women's identities in the late 20th century
Food, Family, Art and God: Aesthetic Authority in Public Life in Trinidad
This article examines suburban, adolescent Indo-Trinidadian girls’ engagement with gender-differe... more This article examines suburban, adolescent Indo-Trinidadian girls’ engagement with gender-differential processes of modernization and creolization at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that girls’ experience of these processes should be understood in terms of their divergence, rather than their interlock. This divergence is a reflection of the globalized, Indian diasporic and locally racialized contexts within which processes of creolization and modernization are given meaning. Specifically, modernization’s associations with white metropolitan femininities and being up-to-date with everything, cool, and liberal enable these girls to legitimately negotiate and navigate ethnic, gender, age and generational boundaries regarding their personal choice, femininity, sexuality and participation in national belonging. This does not mean that girls do not reproduce patriarchal expectations of Indo-Trinidadian girlhood. Rather, it explains how and why they both contest and reproduce ...
The sub-title for this issue, “Blending Flesh with Beloved Clay”, comes from Dominican writer and... more The sub-title for this issue, “Blending Flesh with Beloved Clay”, comes from Dominican writer and politician Phyllis Allfrey’s poem, “Love for An Island”. i The poem speaks to the essays, creative works and reflections contributed here by scholars, artists, poets, students and activists. Its ironic voice critiques romantic and nationalist visions of the Caribbean and its history, but empathy nonetheless quietly emerges from within its scathing lines. The lingering image is one of people’s attempts to define their relationship to a space and, at times, to define the space itself. While in Allfrey’s verse, nationalists’ “legendary politics decay” and ultimate belonging only comes with death, the piece opens questions about the other ways that more ordinary women and men establish their relationship to their homes. Beyond the ways that they seek identities, attachments and symbols of power, it positions the impact of the Caribbean landscape on bodies, lives and desires.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2018
Abstract:This commentary on Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture contextualiz... more Abstract:This commentary on Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture contextualizes its themes and contribution through engagement with its creative nonfiction form. It places the text within the intellectual trajectory of Indo-Caribbean feminist historiography, highlighting how this literature has long drawn on matrilineal genealogies to examine indentureship, its afterlife, and its significance for contemporary Caribbean feminisms. Critically seen, a focus on mutilated womanhood as individually experienced overshadows decades of Indo-Caribbean women’s empowerment through education and their involvement in associational politics, theater, and publishing. Tracing narratives of Indo-Muslim womanhood also emphasizes significant religious and class differences in participation in public life, suggesting the limitations of Hindu-centered interpretative devices. Coolie Woman exemplifies postindenture or “coolietude” aesthetics otherwise documented in art, performance, and photography. Taking this up, the commentary’s letter form is counterarchival, an imaginative and intergenerational object that cites Bahadur’s techniques of memory work and her provocation to a Western world of publication and criticism.
Social Media + Society, 2017
Despite scholarly and popular assertions that social media transforms the possibilities for polit... more Despite scholarly and popular assertions that social media transforms the possibilities for political engagement, there is little investigation to the relationship between public life and political discussion on social media platforms in the everyday lives of people in different cultural contexts. Based on 15 months ethnographic inquiry in a Trinidadian town, this article examines a political event (the hunger strike of Dr Wayne Kublalsingh) as it unfolded and how those not directly involved with the issue or activism more generally engaged with the protest on Facebook. We find that confrontational political opinion and commentary risks unfavorable kinds of attention: the judgment of others and being the subject of gossip and scandal. We conclude that political engagement over social media needs to be better understood within public life and the cultural specificities of a given context.
Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization
Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 2016
As an Indian mother of a Dougla (mixed Indian-African) daughter, I bring together the personal, e... more As an Indian mother of a Dougla (mixed Indian-African) daughter, I bring together the personal, epistemological and political to interrogate conceptualizations of Dougla poetics and feminism in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. Analyzing the politics of knowledge production in six texts, I show that their focus on Indo-Caribbean women misrepresented and displaced Dougla particularities and politics, foreclosing theorizing of Douglas’ different negotiations with race, class, gender and sexuality. I therefore argue for a Dougla feminist literature instead defined by complexities of Dougla embodiment. Following this, I then reconceptualize these six texts as a genealogy for an Indo-Caribbean poetics and feminism open to embodiments of Indianness which neither displace nor efface Douglas in scholarly writing. In this way, I examine openings as well potential displacements in Indo-Caribbean feminist intellectual trajectories.
Islam and the Americas, 2015
Love for Mas: State Authority and Carnival Development in San Fernando, Trinidad
Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, 2008
Everybody have to eat: politics and governance in Trinidad
This ethnography examines Trinidadian politics by exploring everyday forms of participation in au... more This ethnography examines Trinidadian politics by exploring everyday forms of participation in authority and what they signal about governance of public life. It first delves into the relationships, values and actions that most matter to ordinary women and men. More specifically, it looks at the ways male and female market vendors, Carnival masqueraders, illegal squatters and religious leaders manage and engage with others, ideas, things, spaces, processes, institutions and habits. It then examines how these inform their participation in informal, formal and state-centred aspects of public life. I argue that Trinidadian politics is grounded in the taken-for-granted norms of informal social life or lore. Lore is crucially significant to deepening analysis of those state institutions, rules and practices, or law, typically studied in political scholarship. In fact, the ways formal processes of state and government actually work can hardly be understood without a grounded understanding of informal social life. This study, therefore, examines the relationship between lore and law and, at another tier, the interaction between social politics and a legal politics. It explores the values, practices and negotiations associated with sociality, and the dispositions that articulate them. These dispositions reach across and engage ideas connected to legality as well. They created habitual and homologous ways of expressing, participating in and negotiating authority. They give life to what is considered desirable and legitimate, and become the basis for women and men's participation in governance. Together, they inform an approach to authority defined by values of reasonableness and advantage. People refer to these when legitimizing how they make sense of the world. This is exemplified in the ways that vendors and police enforce legislation, party activists and squatters depend on patronage, women and men participate in associational life, and Carnival masqueraders and local governmental officials compete to lead a national event. In each instance, and comparing them, I explore what matters to individuals and groups and what kinds of authority, including emotions, family, need, God, and gender, weigh in on the moment. Such styles of legitimization point to an aesthetic that normatively orders overlapping individual, social and state-centred ways of doing things. Aesthetic authority is, therefore, the basis for my approach to everyday, lived aspects of governance in Trinidad.;KEYWORDS: Politics, Governance, Authority, Informality, Public Life, Gender, Trinidad and Tobago.
What Does Feminism Mean to Young Women?
CAFRA News. December, 2002
Earth, Water, Woman: Community & Sustainability in Trinidad
American Anthropologist, 2014
Survival stories: challenges facing youth in Trinidad and Tobago
Race & Class, 2007
Page 1. Survival stories: challenges facing youth in Trinidad and Tobago By Gabrielle Jamela Hose... more Page 1. Survival stories: challenges facing youth in Trinidad and Tobago By Gabrielle Jamela Hosein Abstract: While marginalisation is a term usually used to refer to the experience of young Caribbean men, it is women who are the poorest and most economically exploited. ...
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Papers by Gabrielle Hosein
participating in gender-based violence (GBV) education in Trinidad and
Tobago. It situates the spoken word poetry methodology used in workshops
with adolescents within the wider fields of GBV prevention, arts-based
methodologies and youth engagement. This methodology was created for
a collaborative research project “Representing Gender-based Violence:
Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean”,
which aimed to produce a spoken word, theatre-based facilitation model
for peer-education on issues of GBV in the lives of adolescents.1
The article frames the cultural significance of oral traditions including
spoken word poetry in the Caribbean context and the issues of GBV that
impact adolescents in Trinidad and Tobago. In collaboration with the
University of Leicester, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies
(IGDS) at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies,
and the community organisation, ROOTS Foundation, the research project
set out to facilitate young people’s exploration of GBV through spoken
word poetry. This arts-based methodology (ABM) was chosen because of
its cultural relevance, popularity among youth, and links with political
activism in the Caribbean.