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Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward Carolyn E. Ware. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
"Mardi Gras" is the term for the masked participants as well as the festival, and both are disorderly. Disruptive of hierarchy, Mardi Gras allows the common people to challenge their superiors and notions of right order in the world. Carolyn Ware's feminist analysis of women's participation in the traditional Mardi Gras runs of rural Louisiana highlights the role of women in a festivity where men have traditionally been the focus of attention. Far different from the more famous revelry of New Orleans, the Mardi Gras runs of the rural prairie Cajuns are the product of working class people, members of small, tightknit communities who enact a ritual comic perversity on their neighbors every year on Shrove Tuesday. As many as thirty traditional Mardi Gras runs now take place in Acadiana, and in about half of them, women participate, either in separate women's runs or alongside the men in coed runs. The women's runs typically have male captains, and much of the fun-and the powerful comic motif-is...