What Love has to do with it? Sexuality, Intimacy and Power in Contemporary Caribbean Gender Relations - Violet Eudine Barriteau (original) (raw)
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Caribbean Sexuality: Mapping the FIELD1
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Caribbean sexuality is both hypervisible and obscured. That is, it is celebrated in popular culture as an important ingredient in Caribbean social life and flaunted to attract tourists to the region, yet is shrouded in double entendre, secrecy and shame. In this article, I present a review of the main trends in studies of Caribbean sexuality, arguing that while there are few exclusive studies on the subject there is much we can draw upon for insights into Caribbean sexual relations, sexual expressions and sexual identities. Drawing from published as well as “grey ” materials, this article points out that Caribbean sexuality is often perceived and analysed as linked to force and (domestic) violence against women and children, sexually transmitted infections (i.e. HIV and AIDS), and economic imperatives. It is also widely accepted as attached to heterosexuality and gendered imbalances of power, as well as to men’s sexual agency. Studies of same-sex relations, transactional sex, prosti...
Introduction: Women and Gender: Looking Toward "Caribbeanness
Journal of international women's studies, 2016
In this special issue of the JIWS, fourteen authors explore varying iterations of "Caribbeanness" and what it means to identify its specific cultural unity through diversity in literature, various forms of activism, and constructions of feminism, identity, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. In the closing essay of his seminal Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant distinguishes between the identification of Caribbeanness as both a dream and a reality; "The notion of antillanite, or Caribbeanness, emerges from a reality that we will have to question, but also corresponds to a dream that we must clarify and whose legitimacy must be demonstrated" (Glissant 221). As the just late Jamaican poet, novelist, and essayist Michelle Cliff, who lived in Jamaica and the US wrote, "Caribbeanness as a concept cannot be narrowed down to a particular space" and thus any clarification of the term must move beyond the physical geography of the region into the diaspora...
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2013
This essay is a collaborative project that interrogates the role of the diasporic researcher and writer around issues of sexuality/sexualities in the Caribbean in a way that also describes methodologies useful to anyone working in this field. We outline and address the significance of feminist methodologies in Caribbean sexuality studies through embodied theories that encompass the importance of community organizing and attention to the local. We will identify various theories and languages that offer insights into the experiences and multiplicities of identity in terms of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race, class, and religion. This project troubles the divide between academia and community and demonstrates the myriad ways our theorizing must bridge this gap. We engage the work we both have done with the Caribbean International Resource Network in terms of marginalized populations, oral histories, building digital archives, and community organizing (local, regional, and diaspora). We address the following questions: how and where do we disseminate information about marginalized Caribbean sexual minority communities? Do this information, research, and data benefit these communities? How do gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, and religion for Caribbean sexual minorities? What have been some of the successes of community organizing in the region and what impact has this had, or not, on academic research and methodologies related to Caribbean sexuality studies? Overall, this project will assert the importance of feminist methodologies that are embodied theories and grounded in local knowledge and community building.
Should We Still Hope? Gender Policy, Social Justice, and Affect in the Caribbean – Michelle V Rowley
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies , 2017
National gender policies continue to be offered as redemptive, an instrument that saves us from inequity, and excessive – an instrument that challenges scarce resources if implemented. In this paper, I try to engage this tension by first examining the ways in which engagements with these policies are rendered and narrativized by Caribbean nation-states. I then argue for an affective turn, noting that if policy is to be effective it must first matter – people must care (as distinct from want). To this end, I argue for the building of “gender polities” and point to the work of queer activism in the region as a possible model for how this idea of a “gender polity” might prove to be effective.
Research is integral to Caribbean feminist studies on gender and sexualities and encompasses specific approaches as well as common methods and techniques. It can include participant observation, discourse or media analysis, statistical analyses, oral histories, community discussions, focus groups, archival research, interviewing, questionnaire surveys, or even research in library holdings. Research, after all, is what makes studies of social relations, practices and identities plausible, relevant, action-or policy-focussed, or, simply, interesting. Yet as we, the editors of this special issue, have found through our teaching in the academy about Caribbean feminisms, there is a paucity of materials that explicitly and consistently take up questions of how to do feminist research in the English-speaking Caribbean, that interrogate relations of power in the regional context, or are grounded in Caribbean cultural, social, or political experiences. We rely mostly on texts that are drawn from and relate to Caribbean sociology or to North American and European feminist experiences and examples. The paucity is even more evident when we are engaged in training Caribbean researchers-to-be outside the academy or when conducting research for government departments, international agencies, or non-governmental organizations. So, while there is growing interest in Caribbean gender and sexualities studies amongst different communities, and a growing demand for research in these areas by a variety of public and private organizations, there are few resources that can assist students and researchers in developing critical frameworks, analyses and skills for researching gender and sexualities. There are even fewer published resources to draw on which speak to feminist methodologies that emerge from specific Caribbean colonial and postcolonial histories and conditions. This special
Inescapable Entanglements: Notes on Caribbean Feminist Engagement
Introduction It is an incredible honour to have been invited to share this twentieth birthday of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. I would like to thank the faculty, staff and students for their amazing warmth and hospitality. Let me take this opportunity to also recognize Professor Barbara Bailey, whose commitment to gender equality is manifested not just in her contribution as Regional Coordinator of the IGDS, but in the work she has accomplished nationally, regionally and internationally. In particular, Professor Bailey’s commitment to education and the foundational texts in Caribbean Gender Studies that she has co-authored/coedited are an amazing legacy for generations of scholars to come. We know that the IGDS was a dimension of women’s and feminist activism in the Caribbean, from WAND to CAFRA, from Sistren to NUDE. We had taken our struggle to the academy, making these institutional spaces the site of our demands for recognition. Today the IGDS boasts a regional programme with a superb publication record, training undergraduate and graduate students, initiating collaborations with academic partners and communities. It extends itself to wider communities, whether it is the open access feminist journal at St Augustine, the work at Mona with Haitian colleagues after the earthquake to develop a certificate programme in Gender Studies, or the Summer Institute in Gender Studies at Cave Hill which brings together university students, farmers, civil servants, community activists and police officers from across the region.
Jamaica, known to its locals as the land of milk and honey, is also perceived as the most homonegative country in the world. Even though there is no research substantiating this claim, it is still a largely held belief by many people. The purpose of this study is to initiate a line of inquiry into the lives of women-who-love-women, a topic that is often neglected and silenced in Jamaica for a variety of reasons. The current study explores the lived experiences of women-who-love-women in Jamaica. Specifically, it investigates the phenomenon of homonegativity on the lives of women-who-love-women. Using post-intentional phenomenology as a methodological framework, I examined data from four self-identified Jamaican women-who-love-women to better understand the nuances and complexities of their daily lives. Post-intentional phenomenology allowed me to look at glimpses in the lives of these women to see slithers of the tentative manifestations of their lives. Data collection tools included written memories, interviews, participants’ reflections on two Jamaican dancehall songs, and my post-reflexive journal entries. I discovered tentative manifestations into the lives of these women that revealed how they operate daily with care, hope, fear, and a multitude of productive tension-filled emotions in a land permeated with homonegative attitudes. I analyzed data using Thinking with theory, a framework designed by Jackson and Mazzei (2012) that assumes data is partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-remembered. Thinking with theory allowed me to plug theoretical concepts into the data to see what new understandings could be produced. I also inserted the data into the theoretical concepts to garner varying interpretations. I ‘plugged in’ Ahmed (2006), Bulter (1990), and Lorde’s (2012) concepts of orientation, performativity, and the erotic as power to open up the phenomenon that I studied. This allowed me to explore varying perspectives of the lived experiences of women-who-love-women in Jamaica to see glimpses of their lives in its multiple, partial, and fleeting ways. This study has implications for policy makers, teaching, and learning.