Tinsley starts from a question put to her at a conference: does queering the tropes of the region risk hypersexualizing the Caribbean all over again? Her answer runs through Ezili, the Vodou lwa whose pantheon, from Gran Ezili and Ezili Freda to Ezili Danto and Lasyrenn, matters most to practitioners who embody or desire femininity.

Rather than claim that religion gives room for self-expression, she treats songs, stories, possessions and dream interpretations as black feminist theorizing in its own right, the kind Barbara Christian described as arriving in narrative, riddle and wordplay. She asks what it would sound like to cite Ezili with the explanatory authority scholars grant Judith Butler, and locates the discussion in a lineage of women-of-color feminism rather than in queer or transgender studies.

The close reading centres on Lescot and Magloire's 2002 documentary Of Men and Gods, about Vodou practitioners whose genders and sexualities are complex, in a religion outlawed repeatedly where same-sex practice never was.