Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Procession

This article investigates the contradictions that characterize Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Day celebration. We look at the official narratives that established Mobile’s Mardi Gras origin myths and the event’s tradition invention in 1967 with a People’s Parade centered around Cain’s redface character, Chief Slacabamorinico. Then we discuss the complicated and ever-evolving symbolism surrounding the character by discussing more recent iterations of this public performance. In its inception, the Joe Cain celebration was a clear example of Lost Cause nostalgia, yet it has been adopted, adapted, and embraced by historically marginalized people who use it as a way to claim their space in the festivities. Employing both historical and ethnographic research, we show that carnival can simultaneously be a space for defiance and reaffirmation of social hierarchies and exclusionary discourses. We discuss here some of the concrete material elements that lend this public performance its white supremacist subtext, but we also want to complicate the definition of “materiality” by claiming a procession as a Confederate monument/memorial.

Whole Lotta COVID Goin' On

It's been a long year-and-a-half or since the initial outbreak arose down here in Louisiana, right after Mardi Gras 2020, February. New Orleans and its widely attended Mardi Gras looked to be the "spreader event" of our region, it seemed like.

Les anthroponymes italiens délexicaux formés sur des issues de protoroman régional */karne-lakˈsare/ ‘mardi gras’ ou : comment PatRom complète le LEI

The comparison of the lexical data gathered by the LEI and the medieval and contemporary anthroponymic data gathered by PatRom makes it possible to measure, on a concrete example (the delexical personal names formed on continuators of regional Proto-Romance */karne-lakˈsare/ ‘Shrove Tuesday’), the contributions, modest but not negligible, of anthroponymy to historical lexicology.

Social media, police excessive force and the limits of outrage: Evaluating models of police scandal

Recent criminological research has developed a processual conceptualisation of scandal to analyse policing and criminal justice transgression and its attempted management. Through media content analysis and in-depth interviews with police and non-police respondents, this article applies criminological theories of scandal to a case of bystander-filmed police excessive force at the 2013 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade and uploaded to YouTube. The article renders scandal more complex than existing models, emphasising outrage and surprise in cases of bystander social media police scandals involving police excessive force, in conjunction with Mawby’s processual model. However, it argues that despite the mobilising force of outrage through social media, police capture of police complaint mechanisms and political opportunism can normalise police transgression and blur lines of responsibility. Individual transgressions can be linked to a macro, ‘chronic’ scandal of police excessive force, diminishing scandal’s conceptual and practical purchase as a police accountability lever.

Emergence of an early SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in the United States

The emergence of the early COVID-19 epidemic in the United States (U.S.) went largely undetected, due to a lack of adequate testing and mitigation efforts. The city of New Orleans, Louisiana experienced one of the earliest and fastest accelerating outbreaks, coinciding with the annual Mardi Gras festival, which went ahead without precautions. To gain insight into the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. and how large, crowded events may have accelerated early transmission, we sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in Louisiana. We show that SARS-CoV-2 in Louisiana initially had limited sequence diversity compared to other U.S. states, and that one successful introduction of SARS-CoV-2 led to almost all of the early SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Louisiana. By analyzing mobility and genomic data, we show that SARS-CoV-2 was already present in New Orleans before Mardi Gras and that the festival dramatically accelerated transmission, eventually leading to secondary localized COVID-19 epidemics throughout the Southern U.S.. Our study provides an understanding of how superspreading during large-scale events played a key role during the early outbreak in the U.S. and can greatly accelerate COVID-19 epidemics on a local and regional scale.

When My Parents Came to the Gay Ball: Comfort Work in Adult Child–Parent Relationships

In addition to the emotion work that occurs in families, I theorize that adult children also engage in comfort work with their parents, navigations, and strategies to reduce the discomfort of parents with their adult children’s lives. This study analyzes how gay and lesbian adults navigate the participation of their parents at events run by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) clubs or “krewes” in the Gulf South during Carnival season. I conducted over 50 days of ethnographic fieldwork during Mardi Gras events and 26 interviews with gay and lesbian members of krewes in Mobile, Alabama, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I argue that gay and lesbian adults negotiate their parents’ attendance in gay spaces by comfort work, mostly by creating comfort for their parents and managing disreputability through education. Ultimately, I conclude that parents’ attendance at LGBTQ events results in supportive reciprocation, “payoffs” of acceptance that are rich in emotional and symbolic significance for adult children.