The "Sexualities" edition of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies has just been published online, and features original contributions from:GLORIA WEKKER
JASBIR PUAR
YASMIN TAMBIAH
DAVID MURRAY
TARA ATLURI
MICHELLE MOHABEER
CAE JOSEPH MESSINA
ANTHONY LEWIS & ROBERT CARR
and many others!
Check it out at http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/
From the Editorial:
The essays collected in this volume provide an indication of some of the activities, insights and questions disturbing the often quiet compliance with the heteronormative models of citizenship and social organization that were introduced at and have been institutionalized since the beginning of colonization of the Caribbean region. Contributors from English-, Dutch-, Spanish- and French-speaking parts of the region turn their attention to a number of events and issues in the collection. Yasmin Tambiah recalls Alexander’s seminal examination of sexual citizenship in Trinidad, and uncovers new insights into how post-colonial states use law to refine sexual norms in their constitution of nation. Some scholars provide glimpses into the complex sexual cultures of Caribbean communities, such as David Murray’s examination of Barbados’ “nebulous queens,” and Dwaine Plaza’s and Amar Wahab’s ethnography of queer-identified Caribbean immigrants in Canada. Four contributors—Tara Atluri, Tanya Saunders, Robert Carr and Anthony Lewis—reveal how nationalist struggles about sexuality inhabit and are negotiated in forms of Caribbean popular culture, and two activists—Colin Robinson and Akim Ade Larcher—weigh in on controversial transnational campaigns targeting one form claimed to be particularly productive of homophobia, Jamaican dancehall. Vanessa Agard-Jones and Rinaldo Walcott trouble disaporic claims for sexual rights being made on behalf of Caribbean people, from outside the region, while Jasbir Puar revisits her previous fieldwork in Trinidad, and many of the questions outlined in this volume, to consider how certain queer subjectivities may be induced through tropes of nationalism. Finally, Gloria Wekker shares her frank and compelling insights about some of the core matters underlying all these discussions: pleasure, desire, happiness, love.
Throughout the volume, authors face and engage multiple tensions that surround the production of sexual identity and the regulation of sexual practices, and critically consider some longstanding, but problematic claims about these processes in the contemporary Caribbean. Although the original call for papers was broadly defined, all contributions published here share a strong focus on transnational circuits of exchange. Many of them consider how “local” struggles for sexual rights and “local” ideas about liberty and personhood in the Caribbean interact with, inform and are also informed by Euro-American-centered concepts of identity. As gay activists, Robinson and Larcher, for example, share some important political commitments but hold quite different attitudes toward the engagement of North American and European gay activists in Caribbean struggles; where Larcher sees promise in deepening international collaboration, Robinson warns against what Walcott refers here to as their “white queer homonormative racism.” Agard-Jones, too, is similarly suspicious of some forms of transnational activism in French Caribbean territories. Murray’s study of Barbados queens offers us perhaps the most telling truth about the Caribbean’s sexual cultures and modes of sexual regulation. Contesting dominant depictions of the region as a uniformly homophobic space, or as one that merely takes cues from outside in negotiating sexual cultures, he concludes that Barbados’ ‘sexscape’ “is neither an illustration of a ‘creolized’, ‘hybrid’ culture, nor is it a ‘pluralistic’ compendium of multiple, discrete cultures,” but rather “illustrate[s] the ongoing tension between differentially located and produced subjectivities and values, which are pieced together in myriad, contextually shifting ways.” We must foreground this complexity if we are to deepen knowledge and analysis of Caribbean sexualities.
- Andil Gosine
