Event

The Institute for Gender and Development Studies presents the Graduate Research Seminar for Amilcar Sanatan, MPhil in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies on the topic "Carnival Capitalism: Gender, Feminization and Commoditization." 

This event takes place at 10-11am.  

Please see the abstract below and for further details click here to see the event's flyer: 

 This study examines the production and consumption of gender, and particularly classed and racialised femininities, in “All-Inclusive” Carnival fetes. It particularly focuses on how these fetes draw on and reproduce the discourse of “Carnival is Woman” by creating a feminized experience of Carnival through the number of women, the gendered ideologies and stereotypes that shape the experience as part of a capitalist production of the fete, crowds (participants), women and Carnival as cultural products. Primarily, it proposes to use the concepts of feminization and commoditization to understand Carnival as both culture and commodity in Trinidad and Tobago. This study therefore aims to fill a gap in the feminist scholarship on Carnival by interrogating the gendered political economy of the festival. This is because All-Inclusive fetes particularly enable the examination of the intersection of gender and capitalism. This unveils the economic infrastructure that helps explain the positioning of bodies in Carnival along gender, race and class hierarchies.