Beneath the Mask: Baby Dolls, Protest, and the Politics of Black Female Performance in Trinidad Carnival and New Orleans Mardi Gras

Carnivals have historically provided a space for performance and celebration. In Trinidad, Louisiana, and the Atlantic world, Carnival originated as a European pre-Lenten festival, initially controlled by the local elites, but later co-opted by enslaved people to challenge oppressive social hierarchies. Through music, song, and dance, Carnival provided a space to challenge societal norms of sexuality, race, gender, and class, making it a powerful tool for resistance. However, authorities repeatedly attempted to repress subaltern Carnival as it disturbed the entrenched racial and social hierarchies that determined power and visibility in both Trinidad and New Orleans. Therefore, Carnival functioned as a political site of both transgression and repression for subaltern participants, serving as both an alternative form of cultural resistance and a living archive, offering insight into Black lives.

Carnival in both Trinidad and New Orleans was deeply shaped by gender, race, and class, particularly in its exclusion of Black women, who were arguably the most marginalised in racially stratified societies. However, working-class women reclaimed Carnival as their own. Emerging from this context were the Baby Dolls, groups of Black women who dressed up as dolls and utilised their bodies and movements to protest their sexual exploitation under oppressive systems. First recorded in Trinidad in 1885 and New Orleans in 1912, this masquerade tradition became a powerful form of resistance and self-expression.

My undergraduate dissertation adopted a decolonial and intersectional framework to centre Black women’s voices and challenge traditional historiography shaped by colonial and patriarchal power. A fundamental difficulty in researching Black women’s history lies in the tension between their lived realities and how those realities are (mis)represented in the archive. Though often treated as objective, historical archives have inherent prejudices that construct historical knowledge which misrepresents the realities of marginalised people. Few archival sources are written by Black women, forcing historians to rely on sources filtered through the lenses of dominance and oppression. My research sought to confront and deconstruct this epistemic violence. In response to these archival silences, I turned to a wide and diverse range of unconventional sources, including newspapers, travel accounts, fiction, first-person testimonies, folklore, and calypso lyrics, as well as select visual sources. By reading these sources against the grain, I pieced together fragmented but revealing insights into the lives and performances of the Baby Dolls, and in doing so, recover stories long obscured by traditional historical narratives.

I argue that the Baby Dolls should be understood as part of a diasporic Black feminist tradition of resistance and activism; and further, one of communal celebration and liberation. In Trinidad, the Baby Dolls used costume and performance to demand financial accountability from men who sexually abused them and neglected their responsibilities as fathers. In doing so, they rejected colonial gendered norms that prescribed domesticity and silence to women, turning Carnival into a space of bodily protest and creative social disruption. In New Orleans, the Million Baby Dolls similarly challenged racial and gendered norms during the Jim Crow era, resisting the hypersexualisation and containment of Black women, particularly sex workers in the Storyville district of the city. They defied prescribed norms of femininity and asserted economic and personal independence, pursuing self-liberation through sexual freedom and bodily autonomy, similarly challenging power hierarchies to seek out pleasure. 

These findings speak to the importance of reading sources against the grain and spotlighting historically marginalised and disenfranchised groups. They call for a re-evaluation of the study of power dynamics within colonial societies, challenging traditional historiography that has overlooked or minimised women’s participation in Carnival. I argued that the performances of the Baby Dolls should be recognised not as trivial or folkloric gestures, but as acts of radical feminist resistance, which deliberately challenged systemic racial, gendered, and economic oppression. In doing so, my work contributes to ongoing efforts by feminist scholars to re-evaluate and reconstruct the archive of Black feminist politics, expanding how we understand activism and cultural expression. 

My work also acknowledges the harsh realities of the lives of these women. In New Orleans’ Storyville district, African American women were commodified, objectified, and exploited in their jobs as sex workers, while being framed as hypersexual and unruly. In Trinidad, Afro-Creole women faced similar oppression, cast as sexual objects located outside the boundaries of European femininity. While Carnival and masquerade offered moments of defiance and temporary freedom, they existed within a broader context of violence and marginalisation that must be recognised. 

Ultimately, my dissertation underscores the urgent need to re-examine history through a decolonial and intersectional lens, one that disrupts Eurocentric frameworks and makes space for alternative forms of resistance that have long been overlooked. Traditional historiography has sidelined Black feminist histories, particularly those expressed through performance and cultural expression, because they fall outside dominant narratives of political activism. By centring the Baby Dolls, both their historical presence and modern revival, which now engages with issues such as LGBTQ+ rights and migration, this dissertation project contributes to the growing archive of Black female resistance. My work aims to inspire further exploration into forms of resistance that emerge from lived experience at the intersection of performance, protest, and identity.

Author biography

Olivia Norbury is a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s School of History, Classics, and Archaeology and currently studying MA Gender Studies at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in shaping power and identity, with a particular interest in amplifying marginalised voices and challenging dominant historical narratives.