Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between intergenerational intimacies and Black queer self-fashioning in contemporary Caribbean LGBTQ fiction and film, read alongside ethnographic works and life-writing. These texts that illustrate cross-age relationships were published/produced between the late 1980’s and 2016 and are set in varied Caribglobal locations- Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, the UK and the USA. They have in common an attention to intimacies across generations, specifically in relationships across age involving diverse forms of attachment, closeness, and exchange, including: care, friendship, love, spiritual guidance, mentoring, non-kin parenting, and when between adults, sensuality, sex, and romance. Some of the texts also examine the exploitative potential in these forms of relation, but more often they are sites of positive self-discovery for the younger queer character. This is an under-examined theme in queer Caribbean literature and in Caribbean black queer life more largely. These intimacies, mainly playing out in the private sphere, offer an alternative to the apparent choice between western modes of visibility (that often brings great risk in these contexts) and isolation/closetedness. These attachments and encounters across generation are culturally specific Afro-diasporic forms of relation. I am looking at varied texts from different Caribbean and Caribglobal locations, but they have this in common. Reaching across distances of time and space are both at stake in these texts and are imaginatively entangled. These texts also all share a specific aesthetic of “coming in” rather than “coming out” where characters find community and ultimately, in most instances, find themselves.