New Orleans in the 1990’s tried to pass a law making all carnival festivities equal for all. Eliminating the private sector of all “discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation (page 242)” The public people ignored this law, because they thought, “carnival tradition ought to supersede the law (page 242).” This resulted “in a ethnically complex and divided city… for the playing out of the cultural politics of social identity and difference (page 243).”
Carnival and law seem to largely contradict themselves. Carnival is “limited only by human imagination or stamina (whichever exhausts itself first) (page 243).” This seems to “apparently flourishes beyond the law, above the law and even against the law (page 243).” With this idea the “common people become powerful and the powerful people become ridiculous (page 243).”
Carnival, itself, becomes the law, based on the “historical process: in earlier times, especially under slavery, many carnivalesque practices were unpunished illegalities (page 244).” Today this concept has made carnival a law. Carnival traditions still “asserts and enforces historical claims of entitlement, priority and exclusivity (page 245).”
In regards to the racial politics; it still exists in today’s Mardi Gras celebrates and lives silently in the community “on a year round basis (page 245).”
The people of New Orleans “are ‘conditioned’ to restrain themselves to innocent fun (page 246)” until Mardi Gras arrives, where the people unleash themselves mental and physical. They throw beads, cups, coins and other souvenirs from the floats and balconies into the streets for the people to claim. “Grown men plead for these rifles. Young women flirt with the masked riders, and now some expose their breasts, bartering for the prized tokens (page 256).” These women, who flash their breasts to those who throw the beads, have become known as “Bead Whores (page 256).”
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