Reworking Gender, Race, and Class in the Mardi Gras Landscape

Reworking Gender, Race, and Class in the Mardi Gras Landscape: The Dynamism of New Orleans’ Women’s Dance Troupes

About the Event:

This lecture examines some of the social-spatial interactions that create new spaces of integration in the cultural landscape of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras (and possibly beyond). Using nonfiction composite storytelling about an Uptown parade route and all female dance troupes, the rhythms of the parading are examined. The milieu of the parade provides the time as well as space for (un)scripted interactions that sometimes transcend normative spatialities of gender, race, and class. While discriminatory practices in Mardi Gras continue, the continued, almost exponential, increase of on-the-ground dance troupes (and other groups) that seek inclusion and connection with an array of people is meaningful. This phenomenon is meaningful because it illustrates how new social-spatial integrations are lived and witnessed publicly. That is, they may be sensed, impacting the social worlds of New Orleans and beyond.

About the Speaker

Rebecca Sheehan earned her B.S. in landscape architecture at Purdue University and then worked in land planning in Austin, Texas. While in Austin, she earned a Master’s in Applied Geography at Texas State University before moving to Baton Rouge, where she earned her PhD in Geography at Louisiana State University. As a cultural geographer, Rebecca has long researched and taught about public spaces and concerns of identity, inclusion, and exclusion – in short how society as well as its individual members and groups make meaning in these built and lived cultural landscapes. Most of her scholarship has focused on public spaces in the South, especially New Orleans, Birmingham, and Montgomery. Rebecca is a Professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University, having spent all her academic career (almost 19 years!) there. Since the Fall of 2024, she is also an Associate Dean of the Graduate College, but she continues to advise graduate students and do research, most recently on regenerative memorialization.

Host or Publisher Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses (HGGHH)