The violent heritage of colonial enslavement and plantation society continues to shape the regulatory gender norms in circulation in the Caribbean. These can be broadly defined in terms of a binary of über-masculine pose, on the one hand, enacted loudly and publicly in order to authenticate male heterosexuality and reiterate one's reputation, in opposition to respectable femininity on the other hand, which is played out in private, domestic spaces, considered to be closely aligned with the coloniser's culture and judged to European moral constraints (Wilson, 1973: 233; Burton, 1997: 158; Murray, 1996: 252). One of the aims of this study is to re-view these norms within the francophone Caribbean and foreground contemporary gender complexities and binary-resistant subjectivities that challenge their legitimacy. By eliciting audience talk, and dialogue between an authored representation on the one hand and the day-to-day lived realities of francophone Caribbean spectators on the other, this chapter traces how a nuanced, culturally specific examination of gender and sexuality within Creole society negotiates universal power structures of colonialism and globalisation.

Minoritarian performative machinations of gender that navigate the majoritarian social design of francophone Caribbean normative masculinity are examined here in relation to Guadeloupean dramatist Jean-Pierre Sturm's 2004 play Ma commère Alfred. My approach privileges tactics of opaque and ephemeral transvestism, which do not necessarily demand heightened visibility, but rather emerge within and between normative discourses of sexuality and gender in the French-speaking Caribbean. It is concerned with how temporary transvestite acts are ‘encoded’ into visual representation through performance events and filmic texts, and how the spectator negotiates, complicates and responds to these depictions whilst constructing their own self-image. The analysis is informed by audience responses which the production and dissemination of this play generated, collected during research trips to Martinique and Paris.

As becomes evident through patterns emerging from the audience talk around Sturm's play, it would be reductive to limit the discussion here solely to the gendered, or even sexual identities, being (re)enacted through acts of viewing. Marjorie Garber highlights how the act of cross-dressing, albeit in a Western context, comes to symbolise not only fears around destabilising the fixity of gender but also the crossing of a range of categories and binary ways of thinking (1993: 9).