The "Queerness" of Ceremony: Possession and Sacred Space in Haitian Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a lens to consider how the ceremonial space of Vodou functions as a queer site, allowing for experiences of spiritual possession by Vodou spirits, as well as unconventional expressions of gender and sexuality for participants, especially Black women. I draw from theorists of religion, gender, and diaspora studies in order to frame this argument. Historian of religion Mircea Eliade develops the notion of "sacred space" to elucidate the participants' transformation through direct contact with the divine. Religion scholar Tracey E. Hucks explains how Black women's worship of and devotion to African-derived goddesses empowers them, grounding them with a strong sense of self-worth and history. Additionally, gender studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath expands definitions of queer diaspora, describing how "queer desires, bodies and subjectivities become dense sites of memory in the production and reproduction of culture and communal belonging." Lastly, drawing from the work of Gina Athena Ulysse, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neale Hurston, I use an auto-ethnographic approach to analyze my own experiences within a Haitian Vodou community in Montreal as a participant observer in order to explore these complex notions of Black womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality. I also rely on ethnographic and historical research and interviews with practitioners on Haitian Vodou. It is my hope that this and other such studies will demonstrate the value of pursuing critical research on gender and sexuality in Haitian Vodou.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".