Making the Birthplace of Mardi Gras: Race, Sexuality, Cultural Structures, and the City

• In Event: 4323 - Culture and Identity

Abstract

American sociology has paid scant attention to the role of urban festivals in socially and culturally producing the city. Major urban festivals—with their attempts at place branding, involvement of people from across the city, and creation of rich symbolic resources—play a central role in the social and cultural production of cities. Through a combination of interviews, participant observation, content analysis, and archival research, this paper takes a “bottom-up” approach to studying the cultural traditions of Carnival and the way it shapes Mobile as a place. Mobile is culturally and socially produced and contested as a certain kind of city during Mardi Gras. I analyze the cultural structures or institutionalized cultural repertoires of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. I argue that these cultural structures replicate power dynamics around race by using cultural symbols and rituals that reinforce a segregated festival system. Simultaneously, the cultural structures of Mardi Gras in Mobile create opportunities for lesbian and gay participants to socially and culturally challenge the city, including challenging racial power dynamics.

Author

• Amy L. Stone, Trinity University