The Culture of Gender and Sexuality

in the Caribbean




edited by Linden Lewis

 Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
The Culture of Gender and Sexuality
in the Caribbean

edited by Linden Lewis

University Press of Florida

Gainesville/Tallahassee/Tampa/Boca Raton
Pensacola/Orlando/Miami/Jacksonville/Ft. Myers
Copyright 2003 by Linden Lewis
Printed in the United States of America on recycled, acid-free paper
All rights reserved

08 07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The culture of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean /
edited by Linden Lewis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8130-2677-6 (c: acid-free paper)
1. Sex roleCaribbean Area. 2. Sex customsCaribbean Area.
I. Lewis, Linden, 1953
HQ1075.5.C27C88 2003
305.3'09729dc22 2003061692

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency

for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M
University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University,
Florida International University, Florida State University, University
of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida,
University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida

15 Northwest 15th Street
Gainesville, FL 32611-2079
http://www.upf.com
 For all the men and women of the Caribbean
whose lived experiences have in one way or another informed
the contents of this volume, and for Rosemarie Mallett,
with whom the idea for such an anthology first germinated
 Contents

Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Culture in the Carib-

bean: An Introduction 1

Theoretical Mediations on Gender in the Caribbean

1. Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in
the Twentieth-Century Caribbean 25
Violet Eudine Barriteau
2. The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender and Its Impact
on the Caribbean 53
Hilbourne Watson
3. Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative 94
Linden Lewis

The Political Terrain of Gender and Sexuality

4. A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad: Exploring Gender Mythology
through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s 129
Patricia Mohammed
5. Popular Imageries of Gender and Sexuality: Poor and Working-Class
Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies 169
Carolle Charles
6. The Infamous Crime against Nature: Constructions of Heterosexuality
and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico 190
Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

Sexual Orientation and Male Socialization in the Caribbean

7. The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males 215
Barry Chevannes
8. Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico 234
Rafael L. Ramrez
9. Queering Cuba: Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel
Granados 251
Conrad James
Gender, Sexuality, and Historical Considerations
10. Struggling with a Structure: Gender, Agency, and Discourse 275
Glyne Griffith
11. It Hurt Very Much at the Time: Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave
Body-Semiotic 294
Joseph C. Dorsey

List of Contributors 323

Index 325
 Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Sexuality,
and Culture in the Caribbean
An Introduction

Linden Lewis

Caribbean Cultural Configurations and the Emerging Discourses

on Gender and Sexuality

What constitutes the Caribbean has long been a contested issue but has nev-
ertheless masqueraded as settled and unproblematic. Different colonial pow-
ers laid claim to different parts of the region, leaving a legacy of national and
cultural chauvinism. Cultural contradictions developed over time, with so-
cial identities split along the lines of North American and European affinities
on the one hand, and regional and cultural commonality on the other. Much
of this cultural duality was in fact overdetermined by the socialization of
transnational capital of the political economy of the region. It is this dual-
itythis ambivalence about belonging, location and cultural affinitythat
raises so many vexed questions about the notion of the Caribbean and of
Caribbean identity. What is clear is that the region is much more than its
geography. Traditionally, many have defined the region as a chain of islands
extending from just outside the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Straits, arch-
ing its way from Cuba and the Bahamas in the north all the way around to
Trinidad in the south. Yet historically, politically and culturally, Belize, Suri-
name, Guyana and French Guiana are also considered part of the Caribbean,
though they do not fit into the narrow geographic description. There is a
growing sense of the importance of the Greater Caribbean, which includes
Panama, Honduras, and the Caribbean littorals of Bluefields (Nicaragua),
Limn (Costa Rica) and Cartagena (Colombia).
In addition, given that migration has served as a safety valve for most of
the region, at least initially, there is a huge and important Caribbean Dias-
2 / Linden Lewis

pora, every bit as big as the population in the region and in some cases
perhaps even bigger. For many Caribbean countries, more members of the
population live in North American and Europe than in their homelands, yet
they are profoundly tied to their countries of origin in a number of ways that
are economic, political and cultural (see Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994).
These people define themselves and live out their daily lives as culturally
Caribbean. They operate and patronize Caribbean restaurants, nightclubs,
record stores, barbershops, beauty salons and grocery stores. These estab-
lishments become sites of cultural signification. It is here that Caribbean
people meet, scrutinize their compatriots, and catch up on news, gossip and
developments from back home, here that they purchase their regional news-
papers, chat, and secure ingredients for their favorite Caribbean dishes.
These commercial outlets are thus sites in which the Caribbean Diaspora
reproduces its understanding of its culture. The people who occupy such
spaces also undeniably extend the meaning and scope of what we understand
as the Caribbean. They participate in state making and electoral politics,
some returning home to engage in political campaigning or to vote in general
elections, while others become actively involved in political fund-raising at
home or in their country of residence.
It is in the cultural interstices of negotiating issues of blood and belonging,
location and identity, that consideration of gender and sexuality in the Car-
ibbean must be located. Gender relations in the Caribbean must start with
the social interactions between indigenous men and women and within cat-
egories of indigenous men and women who first humanized the landscape of
the region. This understanding of the gender relations among the indigenous
Arawaks, Caribs, Tainos is violently interrupted by the advent of the Europe-
ans, and their decimation of the first occupants of the region in the service of
primitive accumulation. From this point and throughout the colonial period,
different, conflicting and contradictory notions of European masculinity and
femininity are imposedthough not without resistanceupon the peoples
of the region.
The remarkable story of resistance by Caribbean men and women against
European cultural hegemony, through three hundred years of slavery and
seven decades of indentureship, is still evolving and has recently begun to be
refracted through the lens of sexuality and gender relations. What emerges in
this crucible of European conquest and colonial resistance is an amazing
drama of retrieving, constructing and redefining of social relationships and
identities in the context of the Caribbean. This process of reclaiming, adjust-
ing and reconstructing social relations, particularly gendered relations, rep-
resents an ongoing challenge to the regions peoples.
Examining the intersection of socially constructed phenomena has be-
 Introduction / 3

come fairly routine in contemporary academic writings. Yet it seems not so

long ago that we compartmentalized all these phenomena, not merely for
analytical purposes, but because the theoretical and often the methodological
tools we sometimes employed constrained a broader and more nuanced vi-
sion. The approaches that some now find imperative for the exploration of
the intersections of social phenomena are indeed not new but built on a long-
established tradition of theorizing. Armed with new epistemological lenses,
some acknowledge their debts to the perspicacity of Marx, Weber, Durk-
heim, Gramsci, Oliver Cox, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney. Others stead-
fastly retain an oppositional stance to what they perceive as metatheory and
the much maligned metanarrative. Some of the new approaches offer novel
insights into the complex layers of social meaning that imbricate these phe-
nomena, while some lead to meaningless wordplay and political sterility.
Insofar as issues of gender, sexuality and culture are not disemboweled con-
cepts but have important material consequences for how we live our lives,
under what conditions we reproduce our means of existence and how we
relate to each other as social beings, the intersections of these concepts are of
crucial importance. Still, we must all guard against the danger of fetishizing
the intersections to the point that this derails our analysis of the real social
phenomenon and the conjuncture that gives rise to particular manifestations
of it.
This collection seeks not merely to explore these intersections of gender,
sexuality and culture but to interrogate their meaning in the context of Car-
ibbean social reality. Further, the essays published here are intended to create
a dialogue on various dimensions of these concepts between men and women
and across disciplines. The essays in this volume break new ground in explor-
ing issues of gender and sexuality in disciplines such as international rela-
tions, in relation to power at the level of popular culture and in literature, in
the construction of masculinity, and in such areas as feminist and lesbian
practice.

Gender

In the Caribbean we have tended to treat gender as the preserve of women.

Women have gendered identities, men are sexed. The gender of men was only
tangentially importantthat is, its relevance to the narrative of womens
experiences was read largely in terms of mens troubling behavior and their
lack of responsibility. The focus was mostly on men behaving badly. The
discourse up until roughly the late 1980s has been largely oppositional. It is
perhaps within the context of this dialectal relationship between masculinity
and femininity in the Caribbean that we may begin to appreciate how gender
4 / Linden Lewis

is indexed by the history and culture of domination of one over the other (see
Sedgwick, n.d.). Moreover, many men in the Caribbean as elsewhere did not
view themselves as gendered beings and therefore did not articulate their
positions and behaviors in such terms. Men interpreted what they did and the
views they held as normative, and therefore felt no particular compulsion to
be aware of the gendered implications of their actions. Much of this thinking
is rooted in the hegemonic nature of heterosexuality and masculinity in the
region.
The acknowledged point of departure for gender studies in the Caribbean
came sometime during the 1970s with a number of international issues af-
fecting women, crystallizing around the United Nations declaration of the
International Womens Year in 1975. The emphasis at this stage was specifi-
cally on the concerns and issues of women. A number of institutional mecha-
nisms were established to address the needs of women in the Caribbean.
Among these were the Women in the Caribbean Project (WICP), 197982,
the Women and Development Unit, and the Women and Development Stud-
ies Project (of which more will be said), all of them sponsored by the Univer-
sity of the West Indies (UWI). Many regional governments also established
bureaus of womens affairs.
The Women in the Caribbean Project was a major research undertaking
which focused essentially on the English-speaking Caribbean. The research
was conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, UWI, and
was funded by regional and international organizations. The results of these
investigations were published in two widely read volumes of the journal So-
cial and Economic Studies. In commenting on the work produced from this
research, Janet Momsen in her introduction to Women and Change in the
Caribbean notes:
Despite the enormous importance of this work in extending our under-
standing of gender relations and gender roles in the Caribbean society,
it has provided a somewhat unidimensional view of the women of a
multi-faceted complex region (1993: 3).
Momsen argued that much of the work focused on Afro-Caribbean women
and particularly the poor in the Commonwealth region, and that the women
of the Caribbean were much more diverse than the WICP orientation would
suggest.
From the outset however, the lives of women in the region were perceived
as more nuanced. Barrows observation is apropos here:
Caribbean women just did not fit received images and rhetoric. They
were not marginalised in the same way as their Third World counter-
parts, they could not be accommodated into private/public dichotomies
 Introduction / 5

which confined them to home, domesticity and motherhood, and

though constrained by patriarchal ideology and practice, they did not
suffer the same subordinate status in relations with their menfolk
(1998: xi).
In general it is agreed that, while significant progress has been made with
respect to the status of women in the Caribbean, much more work is still to
be done. Among the most pressing areas are sexual harassment laws, the
enforcement of child support laws and the collection of child support, and
protection against physical abuse and against the capriciousness of employ-
ers in the Export Processing Zones and in the informal sector.
Momsen observed that for many feminists from the English- speaking
Caribbean, theory development was heavily influenced by American and
British white middle-class ideas (1993: 4). Though one might agree broadly,
there are some inherent limitations associated with the assertion. For ex-
ample, while North American and European influences are present in Carib-
bean literature on gender, there are several areas of research from which
feminists and other female and male scholars have shied away. One such area
is the subject of sexual orientation, which is discussed in a subsequent sec-
tion. Third or other genders are not part of the discourse on gender in the
Caribbean. Transgendered identity formation is also essentially off limits for
researchers, or, to be generous, constitutes an area of neglect. There is in fact
a very cautious and conservative orientation pervading the scholarship on
gender in the Caribbean. This conservatism constrains the intellectual hori-
zon of the research agenda in the region. Indeed, there are issues addressed in
this volume that may appear pass to North American or European readers
but are only now emerging in the context of the Caribbean and must there-
fore be read against that background; such is the status of the discourse in the
region. Even at this level, however, one can begin to see some progress being
made.
With the institutionalization and consolidation of gender studies in the
Caribbean, other kinds of issues emerged. First, there was a change in name
from the Centre for Women and Development Studies to the Centre for Gen-
der and Development Studies. Rhoda Reddock provides insight into the con-
troversy that swirled around the politics of renaming the three Centres for
Women and Development Studies on the three campuses of the University of
the West Indies. Some, she suggests, were concerned that to remove the
word women from the title of the program would be a step backward
(1994: 11112) and that women as agents who were central to the concerns
of the program might become subordinated under the broader rubric of gen-
der. Women, whose concerns were finally placed on the agenda, feared being
marginalized in a forum that they had essentially fought for and created.
6 / Linden Lewis

Reddock herself seemed quite reluctant to embrace this name change. In any
event, the change may have had less to do with progressive developments in
the field and more to do with the specific politics of compromise with the
university administration, funding agencies and the regional governments.
Ultimately, however, it is the current dynamics of gender relations that con-
tinue to exert pressures on the Centres on the three campuses, to respond to
changing circumstances, especially as they relate to issues affecting men,
masculinity and the performance of mens roles in Caribbean society.
Another important development in this new orientation of the discourse
on gender is that women are actively involved in shaping its terrain. As in the
lived experience, women are influential in the construction of notions of
masculinity. In the current discourse on gender, women have demonstrated
little reticence in making their views known about the character, problems,
putative crisis and direction of Caribbean masculinity. Christine Barrow
(1986) did some early work on the attitudes of men, and Patricia Mohammed
(1995 and in this volume) has also done some very important work in this
regard, essentially blazing the trail among women writing on masculinity in
the Caribbean. Belinda Edmondson (1999) has recently explored the con-
struction of masculinity from a literary perspective, mapping the canonicity
of male writing in the region. It should be noted, however, that men in
Edmondsons project are the background music to an understanding of the
establishment of a tradition of writing by women in the Caribbean. In effect,
Edmondsons book Making Men is in some ways misleading. In addition,
Odette Parry (1996) has explored the issue of the socialization of young boys,
and Erna Brodber (1997) has taken up this topic as well. Rhoda Reddock
was responsible for organizing a major symposium on masculinity at the
Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies, and Eudine Barriteau
has established a two-semester course around mens studies for the Centre for
Gender and Development Studies in Barbados.
Of course, there have been some objections from men to the role and
contributions of women in this discussion of men and masculinity, but this
has largely been done in muffled tones. In short, women are central to the
emerging discourse on gender which is inclusive of men and masculinity, in
ways that men were never really active participants in the earlier discussions
about womens issues. No doubt spurred on by the contribution they have
made to politicizing the issue of gender in the region, women in academia, as
in other areas of the society at large, appear to feel no compunction about
making pronouncements on matters of masculinity and manhood in the
Caribbean. It may be true that many men were not interested in joining a
discussion about womens issues, but it would also be correct to argue that
other men either did not feel comfortable becoming involved or perceived the
 Introduction / 7

discourse to be exclusionary and, for some, threatening. The current orienta-

tion therefore represents a major departure from the earlier discourse on
gender in the Caribbean and seems better able to accommodate genuine dia-
logue between men and women.
The caution issued above with regard to the fetishization of conjunctures
can also be appropriately applied to the discourse and analysis of gender in
the region. Gender does not occupy a house that stands alone and apart from
other social relations. There is a tendency in some quarters to treat gender as
totally autonomous. Very often the roles of social class and/or race or even
religion and culture are sacrificed on the altar of gender. The project of gen-
der analysis must be that of humanizing the social order. It should never be
reducible to a process of empty genderization, that is, a tendency to conceive
gender purely in terms of women as an inherently special, and ahistorical,
category, which stands outside the social relations of production. The femi-
nist project of gender analysis in the Caribbean has always been strongest
when it addresses issues of oppression, inequality and power in a rigorously
historical fashion. Gender becomes reified in some accounts as possessing
special characteristics that cannot be easily attached to other social forms.
Though there are clearly times when gender as a social relationship prepon-
derates in a given conjuncture, it does not stand outside other social relations.
Moreover, at times these other social relations may determine the form of
gender. Though much has been written in the region about gender, the work
on sexuality has not correspondingly developed.

Sexuality

In the Caribbean, sexuality seems to be something that men have and are free
to explore, while women are expected to relate to it only defensively. Though
from time to time there are claims of female sexual autonomy in the region,
womens sexuality is still policed by social and gender conventions in ways
that do not seem to constrain the behavior of men. In a decidedly hetero-
sexual culture, how men manage to explore their sexuality while women
remain marginally involved remains a perennial mystery to the casual ob-
server. There is a strong correlation between sexuality and popular culture in
the Caribbean. Indeed, it is perhaps only at the level of popular discourse that
sexuality is given its full airing.
One of the earliest vehicles for engaging in a sustained discourse on sexu-
ality and gender at the popular level is the medium of the calypso. In her
chapter in this volume, on the calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s, Patricia
Mohammed makes a strong case for the framing of issues of gender and
sexuality through the use of the lyrics of these early songs. This approach also
8 / Linden Lewis

forms part of the analysis in Lewiss chapter on masculinity. At the popular

level, in the lyrics of reggae or dancehall music, the calypso, the folk song and
in popular speech, jokes, ole talk, these are all sites inhabited by sexuality
in the Caribbean. In her chapter Mohammed also offers useful insights about
humor in the calypso as a means of discussing the unpalatable and the ta-
booed in the area of gender and sexuality. Particularly at the level of speech,
sexuality in the Caribbean is discussed in some rather intriguing ways. The
language of sexuality and sexual double entendre in speech are discussed in
relation to the sport of cricket in Lewiss essay in this volume. The language
we use to describe sex or sexual activity is itself revealing. There was a time
in Jamaica when to make love to a woman was described as beating up your
woman. The Jamaican dancehall diva Lady Saw not long ago sang a reggae
number called Stab up the Meat, which was a reference to engaging in
sexual intercourse and the celebration of female sexual autonomy. Indeed, in
a rather revealing juxtapositioning of sexuality and popular culture, the
dancehall singer Mad Cobra in a 1996 hit tune, Plant It, having convinced
himself that She love how me inflict pain, ruminated in song about his
sexual prowess and practices. With a concern for sexual dexterity and profi-
ciency, Mad Cobra proclaimed that girls love his maneuverability (how me
turn it), his sexual precision (how me slant it), and his powers of penetra-
tion (how me launch it, plant it):

She want it bat up and bruise up

Swell up and hurt up
Let she get scared and nervous.

The situation is not much different in the Hispanic Caribbean, where the
lyrics of the popular bachata music resemble those of reggae and calypso. A
quick foray into the musical offerings of Zacarias Ferreira, Bachata Gorda,
Luis Vargas, or Fernando Echavarra would speak volumes on the issues of
misogyny, gender and sexuality. Bachata Gorda, for example, sings the popu-
lar song El negro pega con to (The Black hits it with everything), where
the verb pega could mean variously stick or hit or match. The song is
replete with racial and sexual stereotypes about people of African descent. In
the Dominican Republic where whiteness and near-whiteness are celebrated,
and blackness is vilified if not outright denied, this song may not be as inno-
cent or humorous a comment on race and sexuality as it appears to be on the
surface.
Both Grenadians and Jamaicans talk about sexual intercourse as jook-
ing (poking), as in I want to tek a jook off of a Jacquline but a ha fi draw
for me rubber, for my rubber from the popular reggae song Rubber by
 Introduction / 9

Frisco Kid. To put a lash on the ting, to brek it up, to hit it, to mash
it up, to kill it or wear it out are all popular heterosexist, masculinist
expressions of varying degrees of sexual activity, sexual satisfaction and/or
control. What is remarkable, however, is how easily many have all come to
accept the juxtapositioning of sex and violence in the culture of the Carib-
bean. Equally noteworthy is our failure to connect this language of violence
with the way we relate to each other as social beings.
Furthermore, it is at the popular level that sexuality is negotiated and
performed. For it is in the Carnival, the Crop Over Festival, the calypso tent,
the Queh Queh, the Dig Dutty/Mati kore, the dancehall, at the beach, the
fete, that the sexuality of the Caribbean people is displayed in its full glory.
Though these sites of sexual expression and performance are known, not
much sustained and systematic treatment of sexuality in the scholarly litera-
ture of the region exists. It is as though this subject of sexuality is appropriate
for discussion in the popular arenas of the region but is somehow unworthy
of serious or rigorous academic attention. When one does find academic
material on sexuality in the region, it tends to be very clinical, revolving
around issues of sexual practice such as frequency of intercourse and number
of partners. This work tends to form the basis of official reports from Family
Planning Associations around the region. Though it is important work, nec-
essary for planning with respect to contraceptive prevalence and for tracking
the spread of the AIDS virus in the region, it is not an area in which many
academics labor or generate theories of sexuality. The work of Kamala Kem-
padoo (1996) and Jacqui Alexander (1997) are important recent contribu-
tions in this regard. The special issue on gender and sexuality of Small Axe,
the Caribbean journal of criticism, in 2000 was a welcome addition.
Another important site of discourse on sexuality is the literature of the
region. The creative writers of the Caribbean have treated the subject of
sexuality much more seriously and explored it much more fully than their
academic counterparts. Alfred Mendes was among the earliest writers to
examine the subject. In his 1935 novel Black Fauns, not only did he address
the topic of sexuality but he dared to explore the theme of lesbian love at a
time when few felt comfortable pursuing the subject, let alone bringing it to
the attention of the public. Paule Marshalls The Chosen Place, the Timeless
People, published twenty-seven years later than Black Fauns, also addresses
this subject of forbidden love between women, admittedly in equally prob-
lematic ways. In the novels of the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Cond, sexu-
ality is often the leitmotif, especially in Hrmakhonon and in I, Tituba,
Black Witch of Salem, and perhaps only less so in Tree of Life. And a good
example of the discourse on sexuality can be gleaned from a conversation
between two young women in George Lammings Season of Adventure:
10 / Linden Lewis

You too green, Veronica, too green for this world, said Eva, one
hand akimbo, and the towel hanging like a cape across her bosom. Is
what a full, ripe man understand, your young men never know.
A full, ripe man like a full ripe horse know the ground he riding.
Excitement can make a young man get so wild that he start behaving
like a hose-pipe inside you, cause he green, he think is only on the inside
that a woman make her music. And he never give himself a chance to
find the little keyboards that waiting for the right fingers to play, all sort
a little secrets places that mean more than his big lamp-post business.
Some women got it in the nose, an I dont know where yours is, but
mine is a little spot no bigger than your finger-nail just behind my ear.
(1960: 161)
The willingness to address the topic of sexuality, often exploring its impli-
cations for gender or race, is of increasing importance in the works of Carib-
bean writers of a younger generationHarold Bascoms Apata, Lawrence
Scotts Witchbroom, H. Nigel Thomass Spirits in the Dark, Patricia Powells
A Small Gathering of Bones. What is different about these writers is that they
do not restrict themselves to addressing issues of heterosexuality in their
work but are prepared to explore homosexual desire as part of the terrain of
Caribbean sexuality in ways that most of the writers of an earlier generation
did not.
Sexual orientation is very much a taboo subject, especially in the English-
speaking Caribbean, and is therefore not always considered important
enough for academic analysis. Despite a developed feminist literature from
the Caribbean, there is a marked silence in place of any serious theoretical
engagement with lesbian issues in the region. To date, only four notable
articles deal explicitly with this aspect of female sexuality: Wekker 1993,
Silvera 1992, French and Cave 1995, and Clemencia 1996. Elizabeth
Crespo-Keblers essay in this book therefore serves as an important corrective
to the current discourse on sexuality in the Caribbean. She raises some crucial
issues about the status of homosexuality in the context of the Puerto Rican
judicial system which ought to be addressed in the broader Caribbean region.
It is still much too soon to tell if the research on masculinity will follow a
similar trajectory to that of the feminist literature, but early indications
would suggest more sensitivity to the issue of homosexuality; see the essays
by James, Lewis and Ramrez in this volume. Alternative sexual orientations
such as transvestism, bisexuality and transsexuality are almost unmention-
able in the academic literature of the Caribbean. In this regard, Punar (2001)
raises a number of intriguing, if not problematic, issues in her discussion of
the space of desire in the Trinidad carnival for transsexual, lesbian and gay
individuals. Admittedly, transvestites appear in tiny pockets in certain parts
 Introduction / 11

of the CaribbeanCuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Barbados,

Trinidadbut few scholars have bothered to do any work on these groups.
The epidemic of AIDS in the region has in fact been forcing researchers to
address the issue of sexual practices and mores in ways that could not easily
have been anticipated. This development may create some space for more
rigorous treatments of sexuality in the Caribbean. It is to be hoped that such
investigations will not be truncated within the realm of the purely clinical. All
this notwithstanding, the issue of sexuality has yet to become a significant
part of the focus of research in the broader area of gender studies in the
Caribbean. There are signs of change emerging out of the research on sex
workers in the volume edited by Kamala Kempadoo (1996) cited above.
Indeed, the whole complex field of sexuality in the Caribbean needs to be
examined carefully if we are to move beyond mere crude barbs about sexual
pathology, particularly as it relates to men in the region.

The Intersection of Gender and Sexuality

In the discussion above, the concepts of gender and sexuality are treated as
separate or autonomous entities for analytical purposes and, in a way, to map
the genealogies and trajectories of these concepts as they play themselves out
in the social reality of the Caribbean. In reality, however, these spheres of
being are not nearly as discretely or conveniently compartmentalized. There
is always a dynamic interplay of gender and sexuality within the lived expe-
rience. As Ruth Hubbard puts it, The point is that many manifestations we
decide to designate as natural are shaped, or at least affected, by cultural
factors, while biologygenes, hormones, and suchaffects manifestations
we choose to attribute to nature (1996: 158). There is a sense, then, in
which gender and sexuality are refracted through the practice and lived expe-
riences of a culture.
The analytical schema alluded to in the preceding section follows a popu-
lar notion of sexuality being predicated on biological imperatives and gender
being interpreted in cultural terms. The determination of the biological is
itself culturally coded. In other words, there is already imbricated, in what is
regarded as purely biological, a specific cultural meaning of biology and the
body. The body, which is the principal signifier of the biological, is rendered
comprehensible in cultural and historical terms. Indeed, the body can be
interpreted culturally in different ways. As Joan Scott argues, It follows then
that gender is the social organization of sexual difference . . . gender is the
knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences (cited in Nichol-
son 1995: 39). In this way, what it means to be a man or woman, masculinity
or femininity, is always contingent on issues of national identity, class, race,
12 / Linden Lewis

religion, ethnicity, et cetera. Similarly, with respect to gender, the behavior

that is transmitted through socialization and culture is largely made intelli-
gible through perceived differences based on biology. It is therefore difficult
to separate notions of sexuality, gender and culture. These intersecting phe-
nomena must be understood in historical terms if one is to appreciate fully
their genealogies.
Hubbard pushes the issue even further by suggesting that our gender
dichotomy does not flow naturally from the biological dichotomy of the
two sexes. The absolute dichotomy of the sexes into males and females,
women and men, is itself socially constructed (1996: 161). Other permuta-
tions are possible, as in the case of the thirty-eight hermaphrodites found in
several villages of the Dominican Republic. These individuals, born with
what is called unspecified genitalia, were considered sexually ambiguous.
Some were categorized as male, while the majority were labeled female be-
cause of their appearance. Those who were defined as girls were socialized
according to their sex. What is noteworthy, however, is what Herdt calls the
virilization process that occurs to these individuals at puberty (1994: 425).1
The Dominican word for this condition is gevedoche (testicles at twelve) or
machihembra (male-female). The gevedoches of the Dominican Republic
thus point to the very ways in which such phenomena are culturally coded, in
that Dominicans consider them to be more complex than mere hermaphro-
dites; as Herdt notes, they have a triadic sexual code (1994: 428). In short,
in the Dominican Republic the gevedoches are neither male nor female, they
inhabit a different category that complicates the binarism of male and female
in Caribbean society. There are examples of other similar phenomena
throughout the region, contained within local contexts because of shame and
embarrassment. The case of the gevedoches in the Dominican Republic
underscores the argument made by Nicholson (1995: 39) that society frames
the way the body appears and is interpreted. The realm of culture therefore
is an important site for exploring the intersection of gender and sexuality,
and this can be seen in many of the chapters of this volume.

Culture

Culture is used here in its broadest sense, as a means of producing and repro-
ducing ones social existence. Properly understood in this broad sense, it
becomes clear that a peoples entire way of life constitutes their culture. Be-
yond the point of providing the means for human existence and continuity,
culture also refers to that constellation of values, beliefs, myths, rituals and
practices by which the world is made comprehensible and by which we un-
 Introduction / 13

derstand each other. Culture lies at the heart of the most important social
relationships. Within such terms of reference, therefore, notions of gender
and sexuality are fundamentally shaped by culture, which accounts for the
interconnectedness of these two aspects of the lived experience, as suggested
in the preceding section. Through the process of socialization, people come
to understand and internalize specific meanings of the body, of gender and
sexuality, and establish the norms of socially acceptable behaviors. It is in this
sense that we can talk about gender and sexuality being culturally con-
structed. As Cornelius Castoriadis argued, we understand ourselves as indi-
viduals insofar as we have already been socialized by the institutions of soci-
ety that bring us to a particular understanding of ourselves. Though many
speak very loosely about Caribbean culture, as though it were a homoge-
neous entity, it remains a contested site on closer examination. The purpose
here is not to attempt to bring closure to this issue, but rather to suggest that
it is at the level of culture that we might find clues to the entrenched and
hardened attitudes and beliefs about the appropriate roles of men and
women and about issues of sexual identity. This, then, is the sense in which
one must understand Watsons discussion of religion as a cultural form,
which seeks to subordinate women while making men the guardians of fam-
ily, state and nation.
Though popular culture had been long neglected as the subject of schol-
arly pursuit, particularly in the Anglophone Caribbean, there are some who
have struggled for many years to record aspects of it and to celebrate its
intellectual contributions. Among such people are the writers and poets of
the Caribbean; Andrew Salkeys Anancys Score (1973) and Wilson Harriss
work on Amerindian myths and legends (see his Guyana Quartet, 1985)
come to mind. The work of Louise Bennette, Paul Keens Douglas, Muta-
baruka, Mark Matthews, Ken Corsby, Robert Lee and others, as perfor-
mance poets and actors, has done wonders for acceptance of popular culture
in the region. There are also the less well known individuals throughout the
region who work tirelessly chronicling and often rescuing from obscurity or
extinction the folk songs, folktales, folk practices and folk expression of the
Caribbean. The contribution of Wordsworth McAndrew of Guyana is in-
valuable in this regard. Richard Allsopps Dictionary of Caribbean English
Usage (1996) is a magnificent contribution to this tradition as well. These
efforts to address the popular are, however, often absent from the scholarship
of the Caribbean and, when present, tend to be treated as divorced from
issues of gender and sexuality. Carolyn Coopers Noises in the Blood (1993)
and Gordon Rohlehrs Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad
(1990) are notable exceptions to this tendency. Much more work needs to be
done in this area.
14 / Linden Lewis

This volume, then, contributes to the intersecting discourses of gender,

sexuality and culture in the Caribbean, in ways that pull together what are
often thought of as disparate strands of research interests. The authors bring
new insights and new approaches to their subject matter. Moreover, the vol-
ume represents a dialogue across gender boundaries. In a volume that ad-
dresses the issues this one attempts to tackle, the traditional approach would
not be the most fruitful. This volume seeks to create a much broader discus-
sion and to bring men into the dialogue. In keeping with the idea of dia-
logue, the volume also attempts to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research.
Represented in this book is research done in all three of the major linguistic
areas of the Caribbean. It is unfortunately still unusual to find a text in
English that has contributions from the Spanish and French Caribbean. We
are hopeful that this effort will stimulate further cross-cultural collabora-
tion.
Lastly, at no time has there been an effort to impose homogeneity on the
essays and thoughts presented here. A wide range of theoretical perspectives
is expressed within this volume, from postmodern feminism and semiotic
approaches to Marxist cultural studies and more traditional paradigms. In-
evitably these different approaches collide with each other from time to time
in their understanding of the problematic of gender, sexuality and culture.
No effort has been made to intercede in any such disputations. The purpose
here is to capture the full flowering of expression and argumentation in the
thoughts of the authors about these unsettled and unsettling issues of signifi-
cant import at this conjuncture in the Caribbean.

Thematic Explorations

In the first section of this volume, there are two very engaging theoretical
approaches that deal with the issue of gender in the region. These two differ-
ent approaches engage each other over some important ideological and
philosophical issues at the very heart of the discourse on gender and sexuality
in the Caribbean. First, Eudine Barriteau situates the discourse on gender in
the Caribbean within a definite theoretical and historical framework heavily
influenced by postmodern feminist thinking. She argues that the dawn of the
new millennium brings new and complex challenges for gender relations and
for the status of women in the region. The author investigates the material
and ideological underpinnings of the established gender systems in the Carib-
bean from the colonial period to the present. Barriteau also sets herself the
task of critically reviewing the project of modernity and the way it has mani-
fested itself in the Anglophone Caribbean. A principal argument of her chap-
ter is that the philosophical contradictions inherent in the liberal model that
 Introduction / 15

was adopted in the region led to unequal and unjust structural arrangements,
which in turn became routinized and ultimately militated against women.
In Barriteaus project the gender systems of the Caribbean are interrogated
in order to expose both their inequities and the limitations of the philosophi-
cal foundation upon which they were established. Pushing her analysis be-
yond a mere identification of the asymmetrical and hierarchical arrange-
ments that inhere in Caribbean gender systems, she is clearly very much
interested in setting the agenda for gender transformation and gender equal-
ity in the region. Ultimately, Barriteau is concerned with contesting the proj-
ect of modernity in the English-speaking Caribbean, and she proceeds to
develop a gender analytic model to this end.
In addressing the globalization of the discourse on gender and its impact
on the Caribbean, Hilbourne Watson focuses specifically on the changes tak-
ing place within capitalist relations of production. For him, these capitalist
relations are pivotal to an understanding of gender relations at the national,
regional and international levels. Watson argues that indifference to capital-
ism in gender analyses compromises the likelihood of developing a theory of
gender power and nationalism in the Caribbean. His chapter focuses on three
studies, all rooted within the global context of gender. First, the author criti-
cally evaluates the postmodern feminist paradigm advanced in the work of
Eudine Barriteau. Second, Watson examines an approach to gender analysis
that emphasizes the production of power through the intersection of class,
gender and ethnicity under peripheral capitalist conditions; here he uses the
work of Kevin Yelvington as a point of departure. Third, the chapter exam-
ines the relationship of sex, sexuality and gender in Cuba. Watson engages
the work of Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula to address concerns around
these issues of gender within the ambit of Cubas socialist experiment.
The chapter by Linden Lewis continues to explore the theoretical media-
tions of gender, essentially mapping out the terrain of issues dealing with
masculinity and its construction in the Caribbean. In an overview, the behav-
iors and identities that constitute masculinity are addressed and defined. The
chapter then takes the reader through the evolutionary process by which men
acquire power in society and the reproduction of that power through the
institutionalization of patriarchy. Lewis argues against glibly essentializing
Caribbean men through stereotypes and instead advances the case for a more
nuanced reading, using a number of approaches to address the construction
of masculinity in this region. Lewis moves from sociology and history to an
analysis of popular culture in the form of reggae and calypso, in order to
unpack the narrative of masculinity in the Caribbean. The chapter ends by
considering the ways in which sport acts as a metaphor for masculinity in the
region, paying particular attention to cockfighting and cricket. The focus of
16 / Linden Lewis

Lewiss work shifts across the Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean to create
the space for a more general discourse on masculinity.
In the second section of the volume, Patricia Mohammed works through
the specific contributions of the Trinidad calypso to assess the gender myths
of the early-twentieth-century Caribbean. She advances the argument that
the calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s were the media through which the soci-
ety expressed notions of masculinity and femininity at the popular level. The
themes of masculinity and femininity are played out fully in the calypsos of
this era, identifying the goals, aspirations and misgivings of men and their
relationships with women. Issues of race, color and social class mediate these
notions of masculinity and femininity articulated in the calypso. Mohammed
also argues that some gender themes are so consistently articulated in this art
form that they constitute a sort of gender blueprint of the perioda blueprint
that simultaneously projects and reflects the popular discourses around is-
sues of manhood, desirability, accessibility of certain types of women, love,
sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and control over the opposite sex.
Mohammed demonstrates the connection between mythmaking and the con-
struction of gender in Caribbean culture. She also raises some very intriguing
points about the impact of the colonial legacy on the patterns of culture that
emerged in the region.
Carolle Charless focus on the popular discourse in Haiti on gender and
sexuality, and its relation to the exercise of power, makes for a very important
chapter. She emphasizes the broader connections made by working-class
Haitian women between gender and other social categories, especially sexu-
ality. She argues that poor and working-class Haitian women established an
alternative discourse in which the politics of the body and sexuality take on
a more subversive meaning. Charles claims that at the working-class level,
the majority of Haitian women use sexuality as a means of subverting and
diverting power relations. Using a sociohistorical approach, the author ad-
vances the thesis that as Haitian women redefine the politics of the body, they
also reconceptualize the meaning of sexuality, particularly in relation to is-
sues of social class, economic survival and race/color hierarchies. The use of
sexuality among working-class Haitian women has therefore become an
important site of the brokerage of power and resistance. As Charles demon-
strates in her essay, not only does sexuality mediate access to economic re-
sources but it also has the potential to create space for the relative autonomy
and empowerment of some Haitian women. For Charles, therefore, in order
to comprehend the complexity of this alternative discourse on sexuality and
sexual politics, one has to place the discourse in a framework that explores
the underlying interconnections with other important social categories.
In addressing the issue of sexual orientation, Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler
 Introduction / 17

examines the legal prohibitions against homosexuality in Puerto Rico, noting

the way in which certain sexual acts are defined as perversions. Crespo ana-
lyzes the cases seen before the Puerto Rican Supreme Court that defined
sodomy as the infamous crime against nature, investigating the way in
which women were included in the prohibition after 1974. The chapter ex-
plores the juridical pathologizing of sodomy, which in turn had the effect of
reinforcing the constructing of heterosexuality as normative. Crespo also
investigates two ways in which the reinvention and renaming of outlawed
identities occurred, one within a private and secretive world, the other in a
more public defiance through political action. In short, Crespo is concerned
to show the dynamic interplay of constraining forces and possibilities of
liberation within gender construction, played out within the context of the
juridical terrain of Puerto Rican society.
Under the heading Sexual Orientation and Male Socialization, Barry
Chevannes articulates a general concern with the socialization of Caribbean
children, particularly male children. His focus here is on the role of the Street
as a powerful and overlooked agent of socialization of young boys in an
urban setting called Joetown. In Joetown the youth represent the largest sec-
tion of the unemployed. Chevannes paints a clear and disturbing picture of
the harshness of life in the urban downtown environment of Kingston,
Jamaica. The author notes that while young girls seem more protected and
more focused on educational goals, and attend school regularly, boys are far
more prone to truancy and delinquency. Many seem more interested in gam-
bling, basketball, drug running, stealing and gang activity. Chevannes ana-
lyzes this process of socialization of Jamaican boys in terms of the taxonomy
of Street and Yard. For him, Street and Yard are not only socializing
agents, as such; they also serve as embodiments of social identity. Che-
vannes notes that it is the male who is the target of socialization of the Street.
The sphere of operation defined by the community for girls (and by extension
women) tends to be the Yard. The fieldwork upon which this chapter is based
provides the reader with some rich insights into the political economy of
survival and social reproduction among poor and working-class families and
children in the urban milieu of Kingston, Jamaica.
Caribbean masculinity is currently emerging as a new focus of attention in
the discourse on gender in the region. In this volume there are three essays on
the topic. The chapter by Linden Lewis was discussed above. In this third
section Rafael Ramrez deals with the way power and sexuality intersect with
each other in the context of the construction of Puerto Rican masculine iden-
tity. Using a constructionist approach, he undertakes a critical analysis of the
concept of machismo as a way of addressing the phenomena of masculine
ideologies. For Ramrez, power is a specific and constitutive element of the
18 / Linden Lewis

masculine identity. Using power as a basis for understanding the practice of

masculinity, he explores what it means to be male in Puerto Rico. He is
careful to note the contradictory attitudes men hold in relation to this power
that they have or perceive themselves to have. Ramrez argues that, at one
level, the genitals of men become the locus of male power in Puerto Rico. He
concludes with a typology of male characteristics that define certain types of
masculinity in Puerto Rico.
Focusing on another part of the Hispanic Caribbean, Conrad James sys-
tematically analyzes the conceptualization of masculinity in the work of the
Afro-Cuban writer Manuel Granados. According to James, Granados con-
sistently contests popular notions of Cuban masculinity. Not only does
Granados address the ways in which certain gender conventions affect men,
he also focuses on the psychological fallout for men who fail to conform to
these conventions. James advances the argument that Granadoss work si-
multaneously contests two important Cuban discourses, those of race and
national identity. In the process, Granadoss fiction not only problematizes
these discourses but also nuances ones understanding of masculinity by plac-
ing the latter at the intersection of race, nationalism and national identity.
James investigates Granadoss ambivalent relationship with the Cuban revo-
lution and his concerns over the question of justice for Afro-Cubans. Jamess
chapter represents a close reading of Granadoss texts in an effort to under-
stand the importance he attaches to the nuancing of Cuban masculinity.
The final section of the volume is devoted to the importance of history to
an understanding of gender, sexuality and culture in the Caribbean. In this
section on historical intervention is an engaging essay by Glyne Griffith.
Griffiths contribution on struggling with a structure epitomizes, in a sense,
much of what this text representsthat is, the creation of a discourse about
gender, sexuality and popular culture that is inclusive. His objective here is to
be transgressive. He develops a project that transcends disciplinary bound-
aries and constraints. Griffith creatively explores issues of gender by examin-
ing two different genres of text, one historical and the other literary. In the
process he seeks to move beyond the oppositional ways in which gender is
constructed in the Caribbean. Griffith is also very concerned in this chapter
with the issue of agency. His chapter therefore represents an epistemological-
methodological-theoretical challenge for Caribbean scholarship to reimag-
ine research paradigms, particularly those that deal with contemporary dis-
courses. Griffith also brings fresh interpretative insights to the texts of Hilary
Beckles and Earl Lovelace, whom he examines.
In the final essay, And It Hurt Very Much at the Time, Joseph Dorsey
explores the relationship between historical practices of rape and constructed
notions of femininity in the context of slavery. He argues that rape has to be
 Introduction / 19

understood as a practice informed by the character of the times and the

conditions under which people lived. Rape, according to Dorsey, is neither
natural nor universal; it is learned behavior. Slavery in the Americas was an
institution that subjected African women to continual sexual oppression by
hegemonic white men who exercised power over the plantation and the lives
of their slaves. Shedding new light on Caribbean conflations of textual analy-
sis and history, Dorsey reads sexual violence at the confluence of two con-
structions of patriarchy: slavery and abolition. He blends feminist semiotic
theory with the fluid dimensions of South Atlantic culture in the nineteenth
century. In the second part of the chapter, Dorsey carefully examines a set of
rape cases that took place on board the Spanish slave ship Jess Mara in
1840 and 1841.

Conclusion

The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean is an attempt to ex-

pand the existing discourse on these matters within the region and across the
wider Caribbean Diaspora. This is an important dialogue to which all of the
contributors are committed. Exploring the intersection of gender, sexuality
and culture has been quite fruitful, as is demonstrated by some of the new
orientations and research foci articulated in this text. The Caribbean as an
area of social investigation remains both challenging and exciting. Much
more work still needs to be done, especially on the marginson the periph-
ery of the socially acceptablewhere certain behaviors and practices are
ignored and shunned. This collection of essays therefore makes a modest
contribution to bridging that gap, addressing some areas of inquiry that have
long been ignored in the scholarly literature of the Caribbean.

Notes

1. The hormonal defect in these male pseudohermaphrodites is caused by a ge-

netic deficiency in the enzyme 4 steroid 5-alpha reductase, which impairs the metabo-
lism of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Since DHT is the prenatal media-
tor of the masculinization of external genitalia, such persons are at birth sexually
ambiguous, with a marked bifid scrotum that appears labialike, an absent or cli-
torislike penis, undescended testes and associated hermaphroditic traits (Herdt,
1994: 425).

References

Alexander, Jacqui. Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Autonomy

of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy. In Feminist
20 / Linden Lewis

Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alex-

ander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 63100. New York and London: Rout-
ledge, 1997.
Allsopp, Richard, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1996.
Barrow, Christine. Male Images of Women in Barbados. Social and Economic
Studies 35, no. 3 (1986): 5164.
. Introduction to Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Iden-
tities. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1998.
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, eds. Nations Un-
bound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-States. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994.
Bascom, Harold A. Apata. Caribbean Writers Series. London: Heinemann, 1986.
Brodber, Erna. A Mirror for the Little Black Boy. Keynote address at the 1997
Humanities Festival, Cave Hill (Barbados) campus, University of the West Indies.
Clemencia, Joceline. Women Who Love Women in Curaao: From Cachapera to
Open ThroatsA commentary in Collage. Feminist Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 81
88.
Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the Vulgar Body of
Jamaican Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1993.
Cond, Maryse. Hrmakhonon. Translated by Richard Philcox. Washington, D.C:
Three Continents Press, 1982.
. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Translated by Richard Philcox. Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
. Tree of Life. Translated by Victoria Reiter. New York: Ballantine, 1992.
Edmondson, Belinda. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Womens Writ-
ing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
French, Joan, and Michelle Cave. Sexual Choice as Human Rights: Women Loving
Women. Paper presented at the conference Critical Perspectives in Human Rights
in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, January 2628, 1995.
Hall, Stuart. What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture? In Black Popular
Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 2133. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.
Harris, Wilson. The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
Herdt, Gilbert, ed. Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture
and History. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Hubbard, Ruth. Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender. Social Text,
nos. 46/47 (spring/summer 1996): 15764.
Kempadoo, Kamala. Prostitution, Marginality and Empowerment: Caribbean
Women in the Sex Trade. Beyond Law 5, no. 14 (1996): 6984.
Lamming, George. Season of Adventure. 1960. London: Michael Joseph, 1979.
Marshall, Paule. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1969.
Mendes, Alfred. Black Fauns. 1935. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books,
1984.
Mohammed, Patricia. The Representation of Masculinity in Caribbean Feminist
 Introduction / 21

Thought, or What Masculinity Has Made of Men in the Caribbean. Paper pre-
sented at the twentieth annual Caribbean Studies Association conference, Willem-
stad, Curaao, May 2227, 1995.
Momsen, Janet. Introduction to Women and Change in the Caribbean. Kingston: Ian
Randle; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1993.
Nicholson, Linda. Interpreting Gender. In Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity
Politics, edited by Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman, 3967. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995.
Parry, Odette. Caribbean Masculinities and Educational Failure: Academic Under-
achievement of Caribbean Males. Caribbean Perspectives, December 1996: 8
13.
Powell, Patricia. A Small Gathering of Bones. Caribbean Writers Series. London:
Heinemann, 1994.
Punar, Jasbir Kaur. Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad. Signs
26, no. 4 (2001): 100765.
Reddock, Rhoda. Womens Studies at the University of the West Indies: A Decade of
Feminist Education? Womens Studies Quarterly 3 and 4 (1994): 10315.
Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Tunapuna,
Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990.
Salkey, Andrew. Anancys Score. London: Bogle-LOuverture, 1973.
Segdwick, Eve Kosofsky. Gender Criticism: What Isnt Gender. http://www.duke.
edu/~sedgwic/WRITING/gender.htm
Scott, Lawrence. Witchbroom. Caribbean Writers Series. London: Heinemann, 1992.
Silvera, Makeda. Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of
Afro-Caribbean Lesbians. Feminist Studies 13, no. 3 (1992): 52132.
Thomas, H. Nigel. Spirits in the Dark. Caribbean Writers Series. London: Heine-
mann, 1993.
Wekker, Gloria. Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism: Two Idealtypical Expressions of
Female Homosexuality in Black Communities of the Diaspora. If You Seduce a
Straight Person, Can You Make Them Gay? Issues in Biological Essentialism ver-
sus Social Construction in Gay and Lesbian Identities, edited by John P. De Cecco
and John P. Elia, 14558. New York: Haworth, 1993.
Theoretical Mediations on Gender
in the Caribbean
 1

Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems

and the Project of Modernity in
the Twentieth-Century Caribbean
Violet Eudine Barriteau

Introduction

For women and men in the Anglophone Caribbean, the twentieth century
ended radically different from what it was when it began.1 At the beginning
of the last century Caribbean women were politically and economically sub-
ordinate to men. By the time this new century began, there were fundamental
changes and departures marking twentieth-century social relations. One key
departure was the rupturing of traditional relations of gender inherited from
the postslavery emancipated nineteenth-century Caribbean.
Womens lives and feminist scholarship and practice have destabilized the
inherited gender identity of woman as a barren ontological and epistemo-
logical category. Through a combination of indigenous and external pres-
sures the evolving Caribbean state has altered inequality of access to its re-
sources for women. It has attempted to remove, amend or reform the basic
legal inferiority or dependency assigned to women in constitutions and laws,
although there remain great discrepancies in applications and redress (Rob-
inson in press). By questioning the prevailing myths about Caribbean women
and by prioritizing the multiple, complex realities of our lives, feminist schol-
ars have destabilized the definition of masculinity as omniscient and omni-
present even as that definition sought to escape any commonality with the
concept of the feminine. Changes in the ideological and especially the mate-
rial relations of gender prove these constructions to be false and unaccept-
able. This work theorizes and examines these twentieth-century ruptures in
Caribbean gender relations.
I organize the chapter into two sections. In the first I develop a theoretical
framework around the concept of gender and gender systems and how they
26 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

operate within the political, social and cultural economy of states. In the
second I apply this theoretical framework to an historical analysis of gender
systems in the twentieth-century Caribbean. My specific aims are to create a
typology of gender systems and to illustrate how the ideological and material
dimensions reinforce each other through three distinct periods in the transi-
tions from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies. Ultimately I use
this theoretical framework to interrogate the project of modernity in the
Anglophone Caribbean. However, my larger objective is to generate a gender
analytical model that can be applied to studying a wide range of social and
economic phenomena inherent in Caribbean and other societies.
I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states inherited a complex of social
relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism.
These webs of social relations and structures contribute to creating gender
systems that pose critical challenges for women in the transition from colo-
nial to postcolonial modernizing state structures. A central theme of my
work is that the inherited philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies
have continually contributed to states unjust gender systems. These in turn
formalized and maintained hierarchical and differential roles for women and
men. These hierarchies became embedded in new social relations when states
actively pursue(d) the modernization project in the postCold War, postcolo-
nial phase of social and economic transformation.
Part of the difficulty posed for these states is that they seem unaware that
the project of modernity began with the Enlightenment discourses that cre-
ated colonialism and Western expansion and not with the active and prag-
matic approach to development that they pursued in the postwar period. The
greater difficulty for women is that the inequalities and contradictions inher-
ent in liberal ideology are replicated in gender systems. Permutations of late-
twentieth-century capitalist relations further distort womens and mens ex-
periences of economic relations. The misunderstanding of these changes
leads misogynists to argue that mens economic and social well-being is being
sacrificed for womens political and economic empowerment.

Theorizing Gender and Gender Systems

In the Anglophone Caribbean the concept of gender is used in popular discus-

sions, in women-in-development literature, and in the media, yet there is
obvious confusion as to what is meant by gender. As it relates to feminist
analyses of womens experiences of relations of domination, the concept is
misused and abused daily. At a popular level gender has come to stand erro-
neously as a trendier synonym for the biological differences and signifiers
implied by the word sex. A popular radio competition in Barbados tells
listeners to send your answers in with your name, age and gender.2 Errol
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 27

Miller writes, Also there is justification for exposing all students to all areas
of the curriculum without reference to the gender of the student (Miller
1994: 127).
These simplistic interpretations are not benign. They are used by those
who want to appear to be aware of gender issues without wanting to trouble
themselves to pursue the extensive scholarshipincluding Flax, 1989; Scott
1988; Chodorow 1995; Nicholson 1994; Barriteau 1992, 1998B; Moham-
med 1994on this aspect of feminist analysis.
Another common interpretation uses gender in the grammatical sense
of masculine gender, feminine gender and neuter gender. At least there is an
historical precedence for this usage (Baron 1986: 90). Rosi Braidotti reminds
us that Gender is not originally a feminine concept. It has a previous iden-
tity, derived from research in biology, linguistics and psychology (1991: 8).
Linda Nicholson adds, Prior to the late 1960s gender was a term that pri-
marily had been used to refer to the difference between feminine and mascu-
line forms within language (1994: 80).
Feminist investigations and insights on the pervasiveness of the social re-
lations of gender reconceptualized the meaning of the term to refer to a com-
plex system of power differentials played out in the different experiences of
women and men. Mary Hawkesworth notes that in spite of its linguistic
origins, feminist scholars appropriated the concept [t]o distinguish cultur-
ally specific characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity from
biological features (1997: 650).
In interrogating the project of modernity, I develop and use three interre-
lated aspects of the concept of gender. These are: the construct of relations of
gender and gender systems, the methodologies of gender analysis, the distin-
guishing features of gender systems. I define gender to mean complex systems
of personal and social relations through which women and men are socially
created and maintained and through which they gain access to, or are allo-
cated, status and power and material resources within society (Barriteau
1994; 2001: 26). My definition recognizes that there is an important per-
sonal dimension to gender as well as the cultural and the political. I support
the arguments of Nancy Chodorow (1995) for the relevance of understand-
ing the contributions of personal meanings to gendered subjectivity. How-
ever, in this analysis I emphasize the political, economic and cultural dimen-
sions of gender. I am especially interested in highlighting the interaction of
the political, economic and ideological dimensions of gender in the public
domain, since this is an area that is largely undertheorized in our analyses.
I use postmodernist feminist insights to define a concept of gender that
sees women as socially constructed beings subjected to asymmetrical gender
relations. In this definition women cannot be understood ontologically or
epistemologically through androcentric perspectives. The socially con-
28 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

structed relations of gender do not explain women-in-relation-to-men and

reject the definition of women as deficient men. From a postmodernist femi-
nist perspective, both women and men experience relations of gender, al-
though they experience these from radically different locations of personal,
social, economic and political power.
Gender relations constitute the continuous social, political, economic,
cultural and psychological expressions and interactions of the material and
ideological aspects of a gender system. Gender relations encode and often
mask unequal power relations between women and men and between
women and the state. The extent to which the material and ideological di-
mensions of gender relations reinforce each other is frequently ignored. The
extent to which prevailing ideologies augment or affect womens access to
status, power and material resources is often unexamined.
An unequal gender relation is a relation of domination. Its inequality is
rooted in an asymmetry of power that has differential material and ideologi-
cal outcomes. It does not necessarily follow that, because contemporary gen-
der relations are relations of domination, those experiencing that domination
are permanently victims. Women are not automatically or intrinsically vic-
timsand neither are men. The subtext of Errol Millers male marginaliza-
tion thesis (1994) and the backlash debate it has fueled is that it recasts
Caribbean men as the victims of a conspiracy among Caribbean feminists,
elite male power brokers and international development institutions.3 In-
stead of being permanent victims, Caribbean women, like women elsewhere,
experience conditions of inequality and asymmetric power relations that can
and should be altered.
By gendered relations I refer to the asymmetry in the contemporary social
relations of gender that generally inscribe inequalities for women materially
and ideologically. This asymmetry places one socially constituted being at a
disadvantage because of the absence of gender neutrality. Gender neutrality
assumes impartiality towards women and men in a social environment, irre-
spective of the issues at stake. We limit an understanding of gender relations
to the level of interpersonal relations between women and men and the op-
erations of gender ideologies. We do not view economic or political relations
between women and the state, or men and the state, as also influenced by
relations of gender.
There is a desire to privatize gender relations, to confine and relegate
discussions of gender to the private sphere of society. This reflects a deep-
seated desire to view relations of gender as external to the scope of a states
relations with its citizens, when in fact the late-twentieth-century capitalist
state continued to be a problematic arena for women, specifically with issues
of gender justice. Classic contradictions confront women when they interface
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 29

with the state in its liberal dimensions, underscoring the very gendered char-
acter and experience of citizenship.
A paradoxical state of affairs mediates the meanings of gender and the
deployment of gender analysis. Most analyses of gender relations concen-
trate on the construct of gender ideologies and the processes of gender social-
ization. They focus on the ideological dimensions of gender systems. Fre-
quently what is missing is a focus on the material relations of gender. Most
policy prescriptions for dealing with evidence of womens entrenched in-
equality create policy and programs that address material relations of gender.
They are not mutually exclusive but instead continuously reshape and mold
each other. Policy makers and analysts assume they do not overlap. When a
state removes discriminatory wage differentials between male and female
workers, it alters the material aspects of gender. As part of the thrust to
modernize the economy, governments in the postindependence Caribbean
opened up womens access to public resources. They did so without paying
sufficient attention to the need for changes in the ideological dimensions of
gender or how changes in the material relations complicate and reconfigure
ideological relations of gender.
For an epistemological project and to advance political agency, Caribbean
feminist scholarship cannot afford to have the concept of gender reduced to
an adjective, a descriptive term that modifies other words. We should not
attempt to do gender analysis without a commitment to understanding, in-
vestigating and explaining the multiple relations of domination that women
experience. The social relations of gender intersect with other oppressive
relations such as those that arise from race, class, ethnicity, age, sexual pref-
erences and any other social relation that has the potential for individuals
and groups to dominate each other. Henrietta Moore correctly argues that
the concept of gender has no meaning outside its interactions with other
social relations (1994: 15).

The Methodologies of Gender Analysis

The second aspect of gender I prioritize is an analytical frame with its own
conceptual tools and techniques, its own methodologies that allow us to
investigate and interrogate social conditions affecting the constituted beings
women and men. As an analytical category, gender has been pivotal to
feminist scholarship. Mary Hawkesworth categorizes the multiple and var-
ied contributions of the concept to feminist investigations: feminist scholars
have used the concept analytically to repudiate biological determinism, ana-
lyze the social organizations of relationships between men and women, in-
vestigate the reification of human differences, conceptualize the semiotics of
30 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

the body, sex, and sexuality, explain the distribution of burdens and benefits
in society, illustrate the microtechniques of power, illuminate the structure of
the psyche and account for individual identity and aspiration (1997: 650).4
The several components of the concept cannot be understood in isolation
from each other. Jane Flax (1989) and Joan Scott (1988) indicate how our
understandings of particular social worlds and histories and the perceived
differences between the sexes will change when gender is used as an analyti-
cal category. Deploying gender as an analytical category changes what is
asked in research. Nevertheless, many aspects of that analytical shift to a
methodology of gender need to be problematized and theorized if we are to
minimize the conceptual and practical confusion that now bedevils the use
of the concept. Epistemologically, abandoning the practice of explaining
womens multiple, complex and continuously contested experiences through
male-centered approaches opens up a fuller, richer focus on the heterogeneity
of all dimensions of woman the constructed being. Practically it reveals
ongoing attempts to simultaneously maintain rigid gender rules for women
as a way of separating women from any belief that they are free and equal
citizens with autonomy over their lives.

The Distinguishing Features of Caribbean Gender Systems

The twentieth-century Caribbean state inherited a set of social relations in-

fluenced by the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism. Gender systems con-
stitute a significant aspect of that inheritance. I define a gender system to
comprise a network of power relations with two principal dimensions, one
ideological and the other material. These dimensions map out the broad
contours of gender systems. The material dimension reveals access to and the
allocation of power, status and resources within a given community or soci-
ety. The material dimension exposes how women and men gain access to or
are allocated the material and nonmaterial resources within a state and soci-
ety. Feminists analyses of the material relations of genderFolbre 1994;
Barriteau 1996; Sparr 19949make visible the distribution of economic and
political power and material resources.
The ideological dimension concerns the construct of masculinity and femi-
ninity. It indicates how a given societys notion of masculinity and femininity
is constructed and maintained. The ways in which masculinity and feminin-
ity are constructed reveal the gender ideologies operating in the state and
society. The statements of public officials, the bureaucratic and social prac-
tices of institutions and individuals, and representations in popular culture
provide evidence of what is expected of or appropriate for the socially consti-
tuted beings women and men.
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 31

Gender ideologies operating within a gender system reveal what is appro-

priate or expected of the socially constituted beings women and men.
They also expose how individuals create gender identities. The social expec-
tations and the personal constructions of gender identities form the core of
gender ideologies within a particular society. These ideologies establish the
sexually differentiated, socially constructed boundaries for males and fe-
males.
These boundaries are complex and interact often in unexpected ways.
They encode differing penalties, rewards and outcomes for Caribbean
women and men who transgress them. At times these boundaries are rigid
and overt, and the penalties for attempting to subvert them are great. Sub-
verting societal boundaries that encode gendered relations of power invokes
the greatest penalties for women in patriarchal societies. At other times the
boundaries for the expression of appropriate gender identities are more nu-
anced. At times Caribbean society may permit women to take on responsi-
bilities essentially constructed as masculine as long as these do not produce a
corresponding shift in gendered relations of power.
Tara Atluri examines the penalties for Caribbean men who dare to pursue
homosexuality in homophobic, heterosexist, patriarchal Caribbean societ-
ies. Atluri notes that attitudes towards homosexuality range from vehement
hatred, complete with death threats, to a maddening silence which is itself a
disavowal of sexual difference. Homosexuality is dismissed, loathed and ig-
nored by Caribbean culture. As homosexuality and lesbianism challenge the
theoretical fiction of heterosexuality that is required to underpin rigid gender
roles, Atluri argues, the fear of homosexuality keeps gender roles sharply
intact, thereby normalising sexism (2001: 4).
The maneuvers of the ideological and the material dimensions of a gender
system disclose whether it is just or unjust. In a just gender system there
would be no asymmetries of access to, or allocations of, status, power and
resources in a society, or in the control over and the capacity to benefit from
these resources (Barriteau 2000: 4). There would be no hierarchies of gender
identities, or of the meanings societies give to the concepts of the masculine
and the feminine. Conversely, in an unjust gender system there is unequal
distribution of and access to resources and power. Accordingly the thesis of
the marginalization of the black male implies that Caribbean gender systems
are unjust for men. On the contrary, I maintain that Caribbean gender sys-
tems are unjust for women. Feminists and male marginalization theorists will
agree that Caribbean gender systems are unjust, but differ on which sex is
disadvantaged. It is of course possible for gender systems to be unjust for
both sexes or for men, if it is the latter then they must be altered. When I
argue that they are unjust for women, I am accused of conflating gender
32 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

justice with justice for women. This misconstrues my argument, which is

simply that the historical and contemporary evidence exposes injustices for
women, and to the extent that injustices exist, the system as a whole is unjust.
For the skeptics, imagining this requires making an ideological transition
that is extremely difficult for women and men steeped in the seeming natural-
ness of patriarchal practices that they do not wish to see disturbed. Sidney
Mintz captures the implied naturalness of patriarchal resilience when he
writes:
Which male professional among us seriously entertains the possibil-
ity that where his equally professional wife works is more important
than where he works? Which of us is prepared to accept a job at a very
small or very isolated or very undistinguished institution merely to en-
able his tender comrade to accept a job at a large or distinguished insti-
tution? Underlying our professions of equality and the need for indi-
vidual fulfillment is the inescapable premise that the husbands career
comes firstnot equal, not next, but first. This premise is entirely con-
sistent with the history of western society; so is the concentration of
women in elementary school teaching rather than university teaching,
nursing rather than doctoring, stenography rather than business ad-
ministration, and so on. (1971: 267)5

I deploy the concept of gender justice to reposition it as a tool of feminist

political inquiry. The concepts of equity and equality are too deeply located
within the Enlightenment discourse of Liberalism and inherit the problems of
that construct. They imply sameness, homogeneity and linear measurement.
Both concepts are incapable of indicating when conditions of inequality will
cease for women and instead suggest equality has been attained when certain
structural indicators are met. The desire to make women equal to men
before the state suggests that masculine criteria of citizenship have already
defined the norms of citizenship. The pursuit of equality under these condi-
tions guarantees permanent inequality.
Instead the concept of gender justice can be used as an analytical tool to
interrogate developments within society and how these affect women or
men. For there to be gender injustice, conditions of injustice do not have to
exist for both sex groups. For example, there is no gender justice if women
face ongoing overt or covert attempts to maintain their subordination. Simi-
larly, there is no gender justice if men face sustained efforts to deprive them
of access to resources or to treat them as inferior to women.6 There is no
conflation of justice for women or men with gender justice, since the exist-
ence of the latter is premised on the presence of the former.
When I examine gender ideologies and the unbalanced distribution of
resources of power, status and material means, I conclude that twenty-first-
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 33

century Caribbean states continue to function with unjust gender systems

(Barriteau 1998A and 1998B). Contemporary gender systems are unjust be-
cause there are inequalities built into and continuously reinforced in their
structures and practices. These inequalities occur in both the ideological and
material dimensions of gender systems. Furthermore, gender systems in the
contemporary Caribbean continue to be unjust for women.
The interactions and operations of gender systems are messy and contin-
gent and are continuously contested and negotiated. Gender systems, like
other social structures and relations, can and do change over time. Particular
interest groups of the state and civil society will try to keep certain features
fixed or constant, and try to guarantee outcomes. However, women and
mens personal and collective contestations, their challenges to existing rela-
tions of power and their attempts to change those relations, will spawn unin-
tended outcomes. The representations of gender ideologies and the ways in
which women and men gain access to or are allocated resources of power,
status and material means, as well as their capacity to benefit from these
resources, are also constantly changing (for more on this, see Barriteau
1998B: 193).
Although a state may appear to act in the best interests of all its citizens
(something it never really does), this is insufficient to mediate unequal gender
relations. The policies governments implement may reproduce existing gen-
der asymmetries, they may intensify them or decrease them or capture them
for other state uses, but they are not and will not be gender neutral. To move
towards gender neutrality, the state must confront the hierarchies created
with the construct of the masculine and the feminine. It is a construct that
influences the distribution of resources and the capacity to benefit from
them. It also encodes relations of domination. States should address the na-
ture of the unevenness in their gender systems in the same way in which they
take stock of their political and economic systems and attempt to address
imbalances as defined by state interests. When states refuse to do this, the
gendered nature of state policies becomes more evident and problematic.
Unevennesses in contemporary gender systems that are ignored produce state
policy that is gendered and expose gendered power relations.
The fact that governments in the postindependence period have, by intro-
ducing redistributive measures to facilitate their own goals, also given
women access to public resources indicates the extent to which structural and
material aspects of gender systems can and do change.
Examining these measures also indicates that governments have concen-
trated on altering the material aspects of gender relations while deempha-
sizing the ideological aspects and the interconnectedness of the two. Re-
searchers generally analyze gender systems through ideological constructs.
The challenge is to forge an inclusive analysis. Caribbean women persistently
34 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

challenge prevailing gender ideologies. One way we do this is by reconstruct-

ing gender identities. This is a serious and welcome source of ruptures and
change in our gender systems for women. It is simultaneously resented by
women and men opposed to rupturing the conservative, controlling ideolo-
gies of old, patriarchal, capitalist relations.
When a state exists with an unjust gender system, it cannot have gender-
neutral policies. Gender-based powers permeate all social relations. This be-
ing so it becomes difficult to argue that some state policies really reflect
benign neglect. If these policies are indifferent to existing gender relations,
then the effect of these policies is to allow these situations to continue. For
example, if racism is rampant within a state and state policies are indifferent
to the asymmetric power relations that racism maintains, then those polices
permit racism to flourish. Similarly, if state policies do not recognize the
unevenness of gender relations, these policies are not neutral, they are
gendered. In some contemporary Caribbean societies, racist and gendered
policies are allowed to flourish.

The Enlightenment Legacy and the Postcolonial Caribbean State

The ideological foundation of the Caribbean state is the Enlightenment dis-

course of Liberalism with all its inherent, embedded contradictions for
women. The contemporary institutions and ongoing practices of the state are
stubbornlyand, according to some critics, proudlymaintained according
to the tenets of liberal political and economic theory (Lewis 1968: 22656).
Some of the foundational features of this discourse are:
1. The belief that rationality is the mechanism or means by which indi-
viduals achieve autonomy
2. The notion that an individual and citizen is a male household head
3. The separation and differentiation of society into the private sphere
(world of dependence) comprising family and kinship groups and the
public sphere (world of freedom) comprising work, economy and the
state
4. The gendering of that differentiation so that women are posed in
opposition to civil society, to civilization (Flax 1990: 6)
These features became significant in the postemancipation period. The
notion that an individual and citizen is a male household head held no civic
relevance for enslaved black women and men, since they were equal in their
inequality under slavery.7 However, European gender ideologies fed by the
Enlightenment discourse of Liberalism introduced a differentiation in the
material and ideological relations of gender for women. After emancipation,
that ideology promoted the notion of the male breadwinner and the depen-
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 35

dent housewife. It also generated subsequent psychic and material burdens

for women and men.
For women it introduced discrimination in land settlement schemes and
the treatment of their labor as supplementary to the labor of men (French
1995: 126). The critical point is not that nineteenth-century British colonial
policy took a vicious misogynist turn. Rather it is that Caribbean women
would now experience state policies informed by Enlightenment thought
that, whether originating in Marxism or in Liberalism, viewed womens la-
bor as secondary or supplementary (Folbre 1986; Marx 1967: 372).
By the project of modernity, I refer to the ongoing practices of politically
independent Caribbean states embracing a distinct set of policies, practices
and discourses dedicated to achieving the Enlightenment promise. This
promise of a greater understanding and mastery of nature, the progress of
reason in human affairs, and steady, sustainable development in the quality
of life (Hall, Held and McGrew 1992: 2) has lingered since the earliest colo-
nial encounters. The idea of modernity embraces a linear view of progress. In
the political economic expression of modernity, states are committed to pur-
suing modernization theories of development. A bourgeois, liberal state
structure expresses the sociopolitical dimension (Barker, Hulme and Iversen
1992: 15).
I theorize the postcolonial very differently from conventional interpre-
tations. Rather than focusing exclusively on the complications and continu-
ities of the colonial legacy, I hold states and governments accountable for
gendered features of civic and political life that continue and are sustained
beyond the formal dismantling of the colonial relationship. In other words,
even as I recognize the Enlightenment legacy, I see potentially transformative
spaces between what is bequeathed and what continues to be practiced. I
want to make visible the new political agency of state systems that are over-
looked, especially as these relate to transforming relations of gender and
exploitative, capitalist and racist relations. To the extent that all states in the
South face the hegemonic foreign policy and trade practices of Northern
states, why do some countries in the South, for example Anglophone Carib-
bean countries, fare comparatively better than others? I suggest because
some political directorates, with all their flaws, have a greater sense of ac-
countability to their national constituencies. They know they are subordinate
partners in a global economy, but some try to ensure accountability and
investment in a social infrastructure that mediates a quality of life in spite of
the colonial legacy.
Another feature of late-twentieth-century state systems is the interaction
of broad religious, political and capitalist ideologies. This has mutated into
conqueror Christianity fused with crass capitalism (Kintz 1997). We are see-
ing the embryonic development of conqueror Christianity in the Caribbean
36 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

with the Virgin Power movement. This is accompanied by an insertion of

Christian interpretations of many secular issues.
As feminists we are challenged to problematize and publicize possible
openings and insist that policy makers occupy them to subvert the legacy and
transform existing practices. Therefore I avoid blaming colonial powers for
the continuities in the modern constitution of asymmetric relations of gender,
even though the colonial relationship bequeathed a particular legacy. As it
relates to maintaining unjust gender systems, I argue that states have choices
and they choose to maintain unjust gender systems because these satisfy spe-
cific, indigenously defined objectives of state interests.
British colonial policy formally introduced modernization strategies of
development to the Caribbean in the 1940s. However, our history reveals
that the Caribbean/West Indian interaction with Europe is probably one of
the best examples of the unfolding of the European-defined project of moder-
nity (Beckles 1990; Mintz 1996). In the postindependence period many of the
government policies that benefited women were deliberate attempts to create
a modern labor force for expanded integration into a rapidly restructuring
capitalist world economy. These policies also generated ameliorative, reme-
dial measures on the material dimensions of gender. Governments articulated
these as part of the postcolonial project of modernity.
The phenomenon of the postcolonial state actively introducing measures
that generate benefits for women provokes contradictory and paradoxical
outcomes. The state intervenes to free women for expanded gender-defined
roles in a modernizing political economy. In the process, some women gain
by becoming empowered in ways that enable them to further challenge op-
pressive gender relations and identities. Compounding these developments is
the fact that the strategy the state employs destabilizes unequal gender rela-
tions through material means. One of the consequences is that women have
further ammunition to contest unequal ideological relations inscribed in hi-
erarchical gender identities and roles.
These developments fuel cries of the state selling out its interests to women
at the expense of men, and of the state participating in the marginalization of
men (Miller 1994). This has led to two unwelcome consequences. The Carib-
bean womens movement has become paralyzed, fragile and fractured. It has
been unable to operate confidently in the face of a charge it has no interest in
promoting. At the same time the movement has not developed a strategy to
expose the false and fraudulent character of these accusations. Far too many
men are willing to subscribe to an analysis of men as victims of a feminist
conspiracy and to adopt a stance of wounded masculinity.
The material changes the state oversaw were generated by a combination
of factors: changes in the international political economy combined in some
cases with pressure by donor governments, the activism of the Caribbean
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 37

womens movement (Wieringa 1995), and a reluctant recognition by some

governments that women have been and continue to be penalized in their
public as well as private lives. A lesser-known example of a donor govern-
ment attempting to force changes in womens access to resources in develop-
ing countries is the modification in 1978 of the United States Foreign Assis-
tance Act. The Percy Amendment to this act tied aid to developing countries
to the extent to which these countries attempted to integrate women into
development policy (Agency for International Development 1978).
Caribbean women do not interact with the state as a monolithic, ho-
mogenous, single entity; instead, the state is experienced as an incoherent
multifaceted ensemble of power relations. It is highly concrete and yet an
elaborate fiction; powerful and intangible; rigid and protean; potent and
boundaryless; centralized and decentered (Brown 1992: 12). These rela-
tions are a potential vehicle for subordination and domination, but they are
not fixed, immutable or uncontested (12). I conceptualize the Anglophone
Caribbean state as a liberal, democratic, masculinist state whose activities
and power relations affect the ways womens economic, political, social and
personal activities are perceived and constructed (14).
Power within the Caribbean state is neither centralized nor fixed nor im-
manent. It is continuously created and continuously shifts its sphere of opera-
tions between macro and micro institutional levels. For example, state power
is exercised by a minister of finance, and by customs officials charging duty
at entry ports. The latter may daily extend the boundaries of state power in
areas unknown both to the public and to ministers who may assume they
alone define the scope of that power.
The Enlightenment legacy remained unchallenged when the political sta-
tus of Caribbean countries changed from British colonies to independent
nations (Howard 1987; Thomas 1988; Lewis 1968). A dominant, recurring
feature of liberal political ideology is the division of society into private and
public spheres. In the dichotomies introduced into civic life, Liberalism theo-
rizes and locates women in the private sphere and conceptualizes our activi-
ties, contributions and relevance to society as occurring within that sphere.
That is not the core of womens problems. The difficulties occur in the
hierarchies created in the dichotomies of Enlightenment thought. Not only is
civil society divided into a public and a private sphere, but the private sphere
is subordinate and inferior to the public. Rationality, the use of reason, be-
comes the means by which individuals free themselves of the constraints of
domestic life and prepare for a public life of service, civic duty and freedom.
As developed in Kants work, the use of reason marks the beginning of au-
tonomy and the preparation for public life. Kant, however, excludes women
from the use of reason. He assumes we are too embedded in domestic life. In
Enlightenment thought, women represent the family and sexual life, not the
38 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

cerebral qualities of public virtue. This establishes one of the enduring dilem-
mas that Enlightenment thought poses for women. As Flax argues, Al-
though women may be hostile towards civilization, both our exclusion
from parts of it and our labor within its necessary outside continue to be an
ironic necessity (1992: 7).
Liberal political and economic ideology continues to shape the institutions
of the postcolonial Caribbean state. It sets the contours of the politics of
participation. It determines the development models followed, thus shaping
the political, economic and social environment in which women exist. Liber-
alism maintains one set of rules for the market, the polity and the arenas of
public discourse, and another set for the household. Womens lives are caught
in the contradictions and disjunctures between the two.

Historicizing Gender Systems in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean

Two outstanding features of Caribbean gender systems are their continuous
ruptures and contestations and their absence of gender justice. When the
material and ideological dimensions of gender systems advance opposing
interests, major disjunctures and contestations occur.
It is possible to have the material and ideological dimensions overtly pur-
suing the same goals and yet have an unjust gender system. Superficially,
gender relations may appear to be in equilibrium, because societys definition
of what goals the material and ideological dimensions should serve may cor-
respond and reinforce each other. In addition, the constellation of power
relations may mean the state can enforce the official ideologies governing
access and representation. During these periods womens contestations and
rejection of the unjust nature of a gender system will be diffused and more
covert. The appearance of equilibrium may mean that resistance to dominat-
ing relations of gender is not at the level of organized groups or movements,
or the latter may have been forced to be more circumspect in their quest to
promote gender justice. It may mean challenging constructs at the personal
level. From slavery and indentureship through to the contemporary Carib-
bean, women have always attempted to overcome violations of gender justice
(Reddock 1995; Mohammed 1995; Brereton 1995; French 1995; Vassell
1995).
Throughout the twentieth century, gender systems have been unstable and
unjust for women. Table 1 historicizes and summarizes some of the features
of Caribbean gender systems. My analysis is clustered around three historical
periods in the political, social and cultural economy of the region. Each pe-
riod registers significant developments in the political economy of Caribbean
states and the changing character of gender systems in the twentieth century.
Each period exposes the ruptures within relations of gender (see Barriteau
2001: 4957).
Table 1. Historicizing Gender Systems in the Anglophone Caribbean

Historical Features of Material Ideological State of Gender

Period Political Economy Relations of Gender Relations of Gender Relations

19001937 labor unrest; riots; severely limited inferior and appearance of

birth of nationalist access/distribution subordinate stability;
movements of resources to women status of women unjust
19371950s universal adult suffrage; public sphere subordinate status evidence of
(war years) colonial welfare state; opening to women of women instability;
modernization approach unjust
to development
1950s1990s postcolonial (independent) legal equality of subordinate status deep divisions
(nationalist state; industrialization access; some of women; strong between
governments) by invitation; economic biases in currents ideological
and social mobility distribution of misogyny and material
dimensions;
unjust
Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 39
40 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

19001937

The twentieth century began with the region mired in deep poverty. The
economic base was agricultural. These countries depended on the export of
primary agricultural crops of sugar, cotton and cocoa. Trinidad began an
embryonic industrialization program after pitch and petroleum were discov-
ered (Drayton 1997). The great depression of the 1920s following on the
heels of the First World War exacerbated the now endemic poverty of the
region. This level of economic deprivation had its roots in the inequities of
slavery and the institutionalization of economic, political and economic in-
justice for the vast majority of women and men in the postemancipation
period. The British Caribbean colonies were becoming more deeply inte-
grated into the world economy, and they experienced the traumas and shocks
of widespread unemployment and political upheaval.
In this period gender systems were distinguished by a mutual reinforce-
ment of the societal belief in the inferior, subordinate status of women. At the
level of the state and society, both the material and ideological dimensions of
gender actively supported the unjust character of early-twentieth-century
gender systems. As a result, gender systems appear to have been stable. Major
social groups mounted no organized, widespread challenge to the ideological
and material relations of gender. Combined, these relations foreclosed any
notions of economic equality, civic relevance and political participation for
women. Ideologically womens gender-role identity was confined to that of
homemaker, nurturer and reproducer of the labor force. The elite, propertied
and educated could vote, but the majority of women did not have the right to
vote, and their social status was derived from the male heads of households.
The West Indian family is certainly not matriarchal, since the status of
women in society is undefined and weak. Although it is the woman who
keeps the family together, it is the man who rules. (Simey 1946: 81).
In Trinidad, educated middle-class women resisted this restrictive defini-
tion of womanhood. They organized conferences, lobbied for seats for
women on the city council, wrote letters to the press and held public debates
(Reddock 1995), but the colonial state remained indifferent to articulating
womens self-defined interests.
Materially women enjoyed very limited access to a states resources.
Maxine Henry-Wilson observes that before 1942 in Jamaica the rules for
admission to the civil service made married women ineligible for any ap-
pointment (1989: 250). Bridget Brereton records a similar situation for
women in Trinidad: in 1919 government rules required that married teachers
resign from teaching (1995: 89). What about working-class women, women
who would not be denied permission to hold onto jobs after marriage be-
cause they would not have those jobs in the first place? In Jamaica at the
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 41

beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of these women held low-
paying jobs:
Men dominated the professional, industrial and commercial categories
with womens access to the higher occupations [being] quite limited
during these years (18911921). Women were primarily involved in
own-account activities, such as dressmaking, hairdressing, higglering.
According to the 1921 census, about 40 per cent of women were em-
ployed as domestics. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century,
there were two significant characteristics of the Jamaican labour force
participation. First, the sexual division of labour in industry relegated
women to the routine, labour intensive, monotonous and sedentary.
Secondly, there were significant differences in the wage structure and
working conditions of males and females. (Henry-Wilson 1989: 234)
For Indo-Caribbean women the rigidity of Asian cultural traditions com-
pounded the inequalities in gender systems. Rawwida Baksh-Sooden (1991)
writes, The predominantly Northern Indian culture which was brought to
Trinidad and Tobago included such practices as the denial of education to
girls, the segregation of men and women in public, the strict selection of a
marriage partner from within the same caste; arranged marriages, the joint
family system where young couples resided with the husbands parents, the
subservience of the daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law and husband; and
many others.
The colonial state maintained severely restricted educational opportuni-
ties in a context where education was the greatest means of social and eco-
nomic mobility (Cole 1982). Janice Mayers notes that during the first half
of the twentieth century there was discrimination against girls in access to
public secondary education both in terms of the facilities provided, and in the
means provided for taking advantage of the offering (1995: 258).
Mayerss recounting of an appeal by a female teacher to the Board of
Education for an increase in salary in 1921 provides an excellent illustration
of material and ideological relations of gender reinforcing each other to the
detriment of women. The Board rejected her application on the basis of
inadequate funds, the fact that the regulations would not permit it and the
customary rationalisation that male responsibility required that they be paid
more (1995: 271). Young women from the middle class were educated to
serve men as accomplished wives and homemakers. Those from the working
class were trained to serve as domestics, seamstresses and laborers (Carty
1988).
As the case of the teacher demonstrates, working women did not receive
comparable wages for comparable work. This did not only apply to white-
collar occupations. Women laborers also received lower wages than men.
42 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

Women had limited access to employment in the public sector. On marriage

they were forced to resign these positions. The ideological belief in the infe-
riority of the woman as citizen was supported by the economic realities of
restricted access to or allocation of public and private resources. Ideologi-
cally and materially the social relations of gender confirmed and reinforced
the inferior status and position of women in the early twentieth century. The
womans position in the community is by no means equal to that of a man,
who is generally accepted to have superior rights, and this apparent paradox
underlies many of the social problems to be discussed later. It may well be
that no general advance towards giving women their due place in society and,
in particular, public life can be made until the value of their contribution as
homemakers rather than as unskilled laborers is more clearly understood in
the West Indies (Simey 1946: 1718).

19371950s

The second period began with great economic and political upheaval in the
region. A wave of unrest swept through the Caribbean in 193538 (French
1995; Reddock 1994; Howe 1993). This appeared first as spontaneous pro-
tests over wages and labor conditions but subsequently revealed fundamental
political and economic dissatisfactions among Caribbean women and men.
The various British commissions appointed to investigate the sources of West
Indian discontent became acutely aware of the precarious conditions under
which women lived. Still they dealt with questions of womens societal in-
equality in the context of family life and reproductive work.
The ad hoc British colonial policy of trusteeship and funding of social
welfare schemes yielded to more systematic statements of policy on colonial
development and welfare (Simey 1946). The Moyne Commission recom-
mended a central planning committee to address the welfare of the colonies
(Colonial Office 1947: 4). The move towards planning also reflected interna-
tional changes in British economic policy following the devastation of Eu-
rope in the Second World War (Williams 1989) and the creation of the disci-
pline of economic development.
This period witnessed several changes in the political economy of Carib-
bean states. These in turn held specific implications for the material and
ideological relations of gender. Prewar nationalist movements gained impe-
tus from the anti-imperialist movements set in train by the Second World
War. The ethos of British colonial authority had weakened (Howe 1993:
139), and by the mid-1950s colonial parliaments in the larger Caribbean
countries had negotiated more direct control in their legislative, executive
and administrative affairs. They instituted the cabinet system of government.
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 43

During this period cardinal changes occurred in the way the colonial state
interacted with women. This altered the material relations of gender and
exposed deep upheavals in gender systems. All women and men who, be-
cause of restrictive property qualifications, had previously been denied the
right to vote were finally able to participate in choosing political directorates.
Adult suffrage opened up the public sphere to women, although full partici-
pation would remain hemmed in by the ideological belief in womens second-
class status as citizens.
Participation in the public domain was even more complex for Caribbean
women of Asian or East Indian origin. Gender ideologies mediated by an
Asian cultural legacy prescribed rigid gender-role identities as wife and
mother (Seepaul 1988: 90; Poynting 1987: 235). Education was particularly
problematic for Indo-Caribbean women during this period. Families gave
preference to educating boys, since it was accepted that women were destined
for the roles of wife and mother. In Trinidad in 1946 only 30 percent of
Indian women were literate, and of those over age forty-five, only 10.6 per-
cent could read (Poynting 1987: 235). Educational attainment and employ-
ment opportunities complemented each other. Poynting reports only 4 per-
cent of Indian women were recorded in the 1931 census as professionals,
while more than 83 percent were employed as domestic servants, general
laborers and agricultural laborers (235).
In 1948 the British government established the University of the West
Indies. Women, while only a small percentage of the original student body,
now had access to tertiary and professional education within the region. The
significance of this would be felt in the 1990s when government, officials and
public commentators began to express alarm that 70 percent of the student
body was female. The formation of a colonial welfare state further altered the
material dimensions of gender systems for women. The attention paid to
health and nutrition, and to primary and secondary education, meant that
the colonial state again supported women primarily in their reproductive
roles.
Despite an expanded state sector, the institutions of the colonial state and
colonial development plans articulated no official policy on women. How-
ever, a deconstruction of development policy exposed the opposite. A con-
struct of differentiated economic roles was instituted around womens repro-
ductive functions. Traditional gender roles were deliberately inscribed into
this phase of development policy. These policies referred to women on issues
of population, fertility, unemployment, health and labor force participation
(Barriteau 1994; 2001).
44 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

1950s1990s

By the 1950s the larger countries of the Anglophone Caribbean were on the
verge of achieving political independence, and gender systems remained un-
stable and unjust. Ideological relations of gender continued to reinforce the
notion of a subordinate status of women, even though Caribbean states re-
luctantly began to realize that changes in the political economy to facilitate
modernization were challenging traditional gender roles.
Indo-Caribbean women were also reconstructing their gender identities,
much to the concern of religious leaders and the Hindu and Islamic middle
classes:
In the current period, Indian girls and women from all classes are being
educated at increasingly higher levels, and are actively competing on
the job market. Segregation of the sexes presently still exists only at
Hindu and Muslim religious services and functions. The death of the
caste endogamy began during the indentureship period, and the institu-
tion of arranged marriages is now but a relic of the past, as both men
and women have over many generations fought their families for the
right to choose their partners. The joint family system has been crum-
bling; as many newly married couples have the financial independence
to live on their own. Daughters-in-law especially those who are edu-
cated and employed are refusing to play a subservient role to their
mothers-in-law and husbands in personal, household and financial
matters. (Baksh-Sooden 1991)
Expanded educational opportunities and the increase in employment pos-
sibilities owing to the industrialization by invitation approach to develop-
ment deepened the divisions and contradictions of ideological and material
relations of gender. Caribbean development planners drew extensively on the
theorizing of the Caribbean Nobel laureate Sir Arthur Lewis, who formu-
lated the two-sector surplus labor model (Howard 1987). This approach of
industrialization by invitation and Operation Bootstrap was repackaged
for subsequent implementation (Cox 1982: Carrington 1971). Lewiss theo-
rizing relied heavily on foreign investment as the main engine of economic
growth (Lewis 1955). He advocated export-oriented industrialization. This
of course is a policy prescription for the creation of export enclaves requiring
cheap labor, a euphemism in developing countries for womens labor (Kelly
1987; Ward 1990).
By the mid-1960s newly independent states replaced colonial welfare
policy with formal development planning. On examination, a few fundamen-
tal features of these plans remain consistent throughout the shifts in state
policy. The development planners remain committed to neoclassical modern-
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 45

ization strategies for development. Women now occupy an anomalous, un-

stable, contradictory position in the power relations of the postcolonial state.
The intent of postcolonial development planning has been to control popula-
tion, produce economic growth, improve living conditions, develop human
resources, create higher levels of industrialization and enhance technological
developmentin other words, to pursue the Enlightenment promise. Several
states have hinged the attainment of these objectives on regulating the fertil-
ity of women, so that population control and economic development become
inseparable.
Caribbean states introduced many changes in gender systems and con-
tinue to contribute to an ongoing reconstruction of gender roles. Three prin-
cipal features stand out: the states official recognition of a basic package of
womens rights, retrenchment of the welfare state, and expansion of private-
sector influence over economic policy and entrepreneurial development.
These features generate and at the same time obscure new and complex eco-
nomic and social relations for women. Many Caribbean states removed
many of the legal discriminatory measures against women entrenched in the
laws and constitutions of the state. In Barbados between 1976 and 1985 the
state introduced reform in twelve pieces of legislation ranging from the Mar-
riage Act to the Accident Compensation (Reform) Act (Bureau of Womens
Affairs 1985).
Between 1974 and 1979 Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados and Grenada estab-
lished womens bureaus, womens desks, advisory committees or some model
of a national government machinery to promote the advancement of women
(Mondesire and Dunn 1995: 33). By 1994 eleven countries reported having
national policy statements on women, of which nine had been ratified by
governments (35). Reforms like these underscore critical moves in the gender
systems of postcolonial states. By themselves they will not end gender-based
relations of domination. However, they stand as instances of the states will-
ingness to examine and alter some aspects of its gender system. Additionally
they illustrate the depth of the material and ideological conditions of inequal-
ity that exist for women.
In keeping with its liberal foundations, the state sponsors mechanisms and
legislation to maintain legal equality but shies away from activities directly
aimed at enhancing womens economic autonomy. The state does not exam-
ine the gender implications of economic crises and their consequences. As
part of the ongoing adjustments of national economies to global trends, the
retrenchment of the welfare state and the implementation of IMF-sponsored
structural adjustment policies have produced dire consequences for Carib-
bean women. Caribbean states have also failed to connect widespread social,
cultural and economic disruptions in womens lives to the shortcomings of
existing development policy and practice. This has led to superficial analysis
46 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

and irrelevant policies. The state ignores the contradictions between, on the
one hand, prioritizing the values of consumerism and mass consumption
advocated by the modernization paradigm and, on the other, the increasing
pauperization and subordination of many women. Caribbean women and
men are expected to consume more to fuel the economy, but the welfare state
is shrinking. Certain services of education, welfare, and health are returned
to the private domain to be supplied by womens unpaid labor at great cost
to their material and psychological well being (Barriteau 1995: 154).

Conclusion

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, ideological relations of gender

are at their worst for Caribbean women. Women exist in a hostile, antagonis-
tic climate of skewed gender relations. Men and women who argue that the
Caribbean feminist movement exists to emasculate and marginalize men feed
this antagonism. Repeated newspaper articles and editorials speak of the
damage done to boys by being raised in female-headed households, attending
coeducational schools and being taught primarily by female teachers (Bar-
riteau 1994: 283). This is a fairly pernicious charge, since women head an
average of 40 percent of households in Anglophone Caribbean countries.
There is increasing information on incidents of violence against women. This
is due to several factors. Women are more likely to report these and seek help
and protection. With the adverse economic climate of the last decade of the
twentieth century, some men have taken out their frustrations on women.
And some men admit to feeling hostile to and threatened by women who they
assume are gaining material and psychological advantages over them.
Material relations of gender have improved significantly for Caribbean
women since the beginning of the last century. Some Caribbean states deserve
credit for finally guaranteeing equality of access to basic resources. However,
there is no gender justice yet. Forms of gender discrimination are many and
nuanced, even though many women are questioning and resisting restrictive
notions of their gender identities. The basic belief in a subordinate role for
women still exists and is often reflected in state policy as well as in cultural
expressions. Womens contradictory position in society is complicated by
some negative developments for Caribbean men. The fact that the ratio of
women to men at the University of the West Indies is now 70:30 produces a
range of interpretations, none concerned with how men construct their gen-
der identities or what they subscribe to or reject in prevailing gender ideolo-
gies on masculinity. The troubling statistics on men involved in crime and
especially in a drug subculture are simplistically blamed on womens chang-
ing gender identities, with never a glance at the rapid material gains in the
international political economy of drug running and money laundering vis--
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 47

vis the creeping economic death of traditional male employment in agri-

culture and manufacturing.
Reactionaries and misogynists are unwilling or unable to examine the
pivotal changes in Caribbean gender systems. They offer silly analyses in
place of serious investigations. Whatever the inequities men experience, these
are not grounded in or supported by a societally or individually held belief in
the basic inferiority of men, and neither should they be. Gender ideologies
still construct men as superior to women and as primary citizens in the public
and private domains. The legacy lingers. The challenge facing us as a region
is to have boys and men, girls and women view masculinity as a much more
fluid concept that is currently understood. One of the major changes taking
place is that many young men are in fact experiencing masculinity as a much
more fluid set of behaviors and practices than men of previous generations.
They are altering the content of what constitutes masculinity for them, and
this is misunderstood. I do not agree with some of the practices they are
substituting, because I believe they create harm for themselves, their families
and their societies. However, they are clearly demonstrating that they reject
their fathers definitions of masculinity. We have to understand this and seek
interventions that recognize how young men are redefining Caribbean mas-
culinity (Barriteau 2000).
Prevailing gender ideologies construct men as superior, yet there are nega-
tive economic and sociological consequences in the experience of man-
hood for many. We need to know more on what informs the content of the
concepts of masculinity. We need investigations informed by the methodolo-
gies of gender analysis to attempt to unravel what it means to be male and
masculine and man in our societies. The hysterical statements made by
some within the mens movement do underscore the need for sustained re-
search on the construct of Caribbean masculinities and the gender identities
informed by these (Barriteau 2001: 169).
Too many young Caribbean men are making choices about their lives and
lifestyles that leave them with reduced life chances, stunted personal develop-
ment and inadequate career skills. Too many young men are killing each
other, wasting away in prisons, and opting out of civic and political partici-
pation. The permutations of globalization at the national level have meant
the rapid disappearance of occupations defined as mens work in the tradi-
tionally male-dominated sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. The dry-
ing up of migration as an outlet for surplus labor, particularly for men, is
another feature of the local/global economy reproducing negative outcomes
affecting mens traditional gender identities.
It is this nexus of developments in Caribbean masculinity that should
engage policy makers and academics, rather than rabid postulations that
women are seeking to marginalize men. Yet the thesis of the marginalization
48 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

of the Caribbean male posits the notion that men have a priori rights to the
resources of the state as clients and citizens. Any measures that create con-
ditions that move women towards equality are therefore interpreted as fur-
ther marginalizing men. This false construct creates an inaccurate, deeply
flawed examination of the issues confronting Caribbean men (Barriteau
2000).
We have to recognize that in spite of the long overdue and necessary ma-
terial gains for women, Caribbean gender systems continue to be unstable
and unjust. In this first decade of the twenty-first century, reactionaries have
a choice. They can abandon nostalgia and come to terms with the fact that
gender systems have changed and will continue to do so in response to the
interaction of societal and individual developments. Or they can bury their
heads in nostalgia for the nineteenth century. The developments of the twen-
tieth century have escaped them. Unfortunately, the past is never available.
There is no second round.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was published in Feminist Review 59 (Summer 1998):
187210.
1. I refer to the English-speaking countries of the Caribbeanthe former and, in
the case of a few, present colonies of Britain. They share similar state and political
infrastructures and practice Westminister-style politics. The relative homogeneity of
the state structures is important to my arguments. This definition of the Caribbean is
not intended to be definitive but rather to demarcate the countries with a similar
historical, political and cultural legacy. However, there are internal variations and
nuances within this grouping.
2. Voice of Barbados Call-in Competition, 790 Ways to Win, July 1996.
3. For a full examination and critique of the male marginalization thesis, see
Barriteau, Requiem for the Male Thesis, 2004; Barriteau, Examining the Issues of
Men, 2000.
4. Hawkesworth (1997: 650) identifies the authors and texts that contribute the
different types of gender analysis.
5. While there are more and more women in upper echelon professions such as
medicine and business administration women are still by far the greater majority in
nursing, elementary school teaching and clerical positions. The implications for
women, men and work merit separate treatment.
6. The question that male marginalization theorists must answer is, where is the
historical and contemporary evidence that men have been systematically denied ac-
cess to status, power and material resources on the basis of their sex and perverse
relations of gender? Men have been and continue to be denied access on the basis of
racism and class exploitation. Black feminist theorists have long ago critiqued the idea
of a monolithic understanding of man (Wiegman 2001: 360). However, they dem-
onstrate that for black women these discriminations become exponential, since they
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 49

are embedded with asymmetric, gendered relations. See Davis 1983; hooks 1984;
Lorde 1984.
7. This did not mean that enslaved women and men did not attempt to negotiate
gender relations and to conduct intimate relations uninformed by their ideas of ap-
propriate gender roles for each other. The Thistlewood diaries reveal complex, inti-
mate relations among enslaved men and women in Jamaica (Hall 1999). However, the
key point is that the patriarchal slave state did not recognize these.

References
Agency for International Development. Women in Development. Report to the Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, and the Speaker of the House of
Representatives. 1978.
Atluri, Tara. When the Closet Is a Region: Homophobia, Heterosexism and Nation-
alism in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Working paper no. 5. Centre for Gender
and Development Studies, UWI, Cave Hill, March 2001.
Baksh-Sooden, Rawwida. Letter to the Trinidad Guardian, May 17, 1991.
Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds. Postmodernism and the Re-
reading of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Barriteau, Violet Eudine [Eudine Barriteau-Foster]. The Construct of a Postmod-
ernist Feminist Theory for Caribbean Social Science Research. Social and Eco-
nomic Studies 41, no. 2 (1992): 143.
. Gender and Development Planning in the Postcolonial Caribbean: Female
Entrepreneurs and the Barbadian State. Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1994.
. Postmodernist Feminist Theorizing and Development Policy and Practice in
the Anglophone Caribbean. In Feminism, Postmodernism, Development, edited
by Marianne H. Marchand and Jane L. Parpart, 14258. London: Routledge,
1995.
. A Feminist Perspective on Structural Adjustment Policies in the Caribbean.
National Womens Studies Association Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 14256.
. Liberal Ideologies and Contradictions in Caribbean Gender Systems. In
Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities, edited by Chris-
tine Barrow, 43656. Kingston: Ian Randle, with Centre for Gender and Develop-
ment Studies, Cave Hill, 1998A.
. Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-
Century Caribbean. Feminist Review 59 (summer 1998B): 186210.
. Examining the Issues of Men, Male Marginalisation and Masculinity in the
Caribbean: Policy Implications. Working paper no. 4. Centre for Gender and
Development Studies, UWI, Cave Hill, September 2000.
. The Political Economy of Gender in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean. Lon-
don and New York: Palgrave, 2001.
. Requiem for the Male Marginalisation Thesis in the Caribbean: Death of a
Non Theory. In Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Per-
spectives in the Caribbean. Edited by Eudine Barriteau. Mona, Kingston: Univer-
sity of the West Indies Press, forthcoming 2004.
50 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

Beckles, Hilary McD. A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Na-

tion-State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Braidotti, Rosi. Theories of Gender; or, Language Is a Virus. Utrecht: Faculteit der
Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1991.
Brereton, Bridget. Text, Testimony and Gender: An Examination of Some Texts by
Women on the English-Speaking Caribbean from the 1770s to the 1920s. In
Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, edited by
Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 6393. Kingston: Ian
Randle; London: James Currey; New York: St. Martins Press, 1995.
Brown, Wendy. Finding the Man in the State. Feminist Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 1
34.
Bureau of Womens Affairs. Where Are We Now? An Assessment of the Status of
Women in Barbados. Bridgetown: Government of Barbados, [1985].
Carrington, Edwin. Industrialization by Invitation in Trinidad and Tobago since
1950. In Readings in the Political Economy of the Caribbean, edited by Norman
Girvan and Owen Jefferson. Kingston: New World Group, 1971.
Carty, Linda. The Political Economy of Gender Inequality at the University of the
West Indies. Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1988.
Chodorow, Nancy J. Gender as a Personal and Cultural construction. Signs 20, no.
3 (1995): 51644.
Cole, Joyce. Official Ideology and the Education of Women in the English-Speaking
Caribbean, 18351950. In Women and Education, 134. Bridgetown: Institute
of Social and Economic Research, UWI, 1982.
Colonial Office. Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 19451946. Colonial
Office, no. 212. London: HMSO, 1947.
Cox, Winston. The Manufacturing Sector in the Economy of Barbados. In The
Economy of Barbados 19461980, edited by DeLisle Worrell, 4780. Bridgetown:
Central Bank of Barbados, 1982.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.
Drayton, Kathleen. Women and Organising in the English-Speaking Caribbean
prior to 1975. University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, 1997. Mimeographed.
Flax, Jane. Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory. In Feminist
Theory in Practice and Process, edited by Micheline R. Malson et al., 5173.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
. What Is Enlightenment? A Feminist Rereading. Paper prepared for the
conference Postmodernism and the Rereading of Modernity, University of Essex,
July 911, 1990.
. The End of Innocence. In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith
Butler and Joan W. Scott, 44563. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Folbre, Nancy. Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics. World
Development 14, no. 2 (1986): 24555.
. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London
and New York: Routledge, 1994.
French, Joan. Women and Colonial Policy in Jamaica after the 1938 Uprising. In
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 51

Subversive Women: Historical Experiences of Gender and Resistance, edited by

Saskia Wieringa, 12146. London: Zed Books, 1995.
Hall, Douglas. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 175086.
1989. Mona, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999.
Hall, Stuart, David Held and Tony McGrew. Introduction to Modernity and Its Fu-
tures: Understanding Modern Societies: An Introduction, edited by Stuart Hall,
David Held and Tony McGrew, 111. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
Hawkesworth, Mary. Confounding Gender. Signs 22, no. 3 (1997): 64986.
Henry-Wilson, Maxine. The Status of the Jamaican Woman, 1962 to the Present.
In Jamaica in Independence: Essays on the Early Years, edited by Rex Nettleford,
22939. Kingston: Heineman; London: James Currey, 1989.
hooks, bell. Men: Comrades in Struggle. In Feminist Theory from Margin to Cen-
ter, 6781. Boston: South End, 1984.
Howard, Michael. Dependence and Development in Barbados, 19451985. Bridge-
town: Carib Research and Publications Inc., 1987.
Howe, Stephen. Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire,
19181964. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Kelly, Deirdre M. Hard Work, Hard Choices: A Survey of Women in St. Lucias
Export-Oriented Electronics Factories. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute of Social
and Economic Research, UWI, 1987.
Kintz, Linda. Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-
Wing America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Lewis, Gordon K. The Growth of the Modern West Indies. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1968.
Lewis, W. Arthur. The Theory of Economic Growth. London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1955.
Lorde, Audre. Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminists Response. In Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches, 7280. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing, 1984.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, The Process of Capital
Formation. Edited by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1967.
Mayers, Janice. Access to Secondary Education for Girls in Barbados, 190743: A
Preliminary Analysis. In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical
Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 258
75. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James Currey; New York: St. Martins Press,
1995.
Miller, Errol. Marginalization of the Black Male: Insights from the Development of
the Teaching Profession. 2d ed. Mona, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 1994.
Mintz, Sidney. Men, Women, and Trade. Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 13 (1971): 24769.
. Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean as Oikoumen.
Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 2 (1996): 289311.
Mohammed, Patricia. Nuancing the Feminist Discourse in the Caribbean. Social
and Economic Studies 43, no. 3 (1994): 13567.
. Writing Gender into History: The Negotiations of Gender Relations among
Indian Men and Women in Post-indenture Trinidad Society. In Engendering His-
52 / Violet Eudine Barriteau

tory: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd,

Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 2047. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James
Currey; New York: St. Martins Press, 1995.
Mondesire, Alicia, and Leith Dunn. Towards Equity in Development: A Report on
the Status of Women in Sixteen Commonwealth Caribbean Countries. George-
town, Guyana: Caribbean Community Secretariat, 1995.
Moore, Henrietta L. A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Nicholson, Linda. Interpreting Gender. Signs 20, no. 1 (1994): 79105.
Poynting, Jeremy. East Indian Women in the Caribbean: Experience and Voice. In
India in the Caribbean, edited by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, 23163.
London: Hansib, 1987.
Reddock, Rhoda E. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History.
London: Zed Books, 1994.
. The Early Womens Movement in Trinidad and Tobago 19001937. In
Subversive Women: Womens Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the
Caribbean, edited by Saskia Wieringa, 10120. New Delhi: Kali for Women; Lon-
don: Zed Books, 1995.
Robinson, Tracy. Beyond the Bill of Rights: Sexing the Citizen. In Confronting
Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean, edited
by Eudine Barriteau. Mona, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, forth-
coming 2004.
Scott, Joan W. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American His-
torical Review 91, no. 5 (1988): 105375.
Seepaul, Occah. Hindu Women in Todays Society: Moving Away from Stereotypes
of Dolls and Playthings. Caribbean Affairs 1, no. 3 (1988): 9095.
Simey, T. S. Welfare and Planning in the West Indies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.
Sparr, Pamela, ed. Mortgaging Womens Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Ad-
justment. London: Zed Books, 1994.
Thomas, Clive Y. The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the
Caribbean. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988.
Vassell, Linnette. Women of the Masses: Daphne Campbell and Left Politics in
Jamaica in the 1950s. In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical
Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 318
33. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James Currey; New York: St. Martins Press,
1995.
Ward, Kathryn, ed. Women Workers and Global Restructuring. Ithaca: School of
Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1990.
Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons: Men, Masculinity and the Sign Women. Signs
26, no. 2 (2001): 35588.
Wieringa, Saskia, ed. Subversive Women: Womens Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and the Caribbean. New Delhi: Kali for Women; London: Zed Books,
1995.
Williams, Fiona. Social Policy: A Critical Introduction: Issues of Race, Gender, and
Class. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
 Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity / 53

The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender

and Its Impact on the Caribbean
Hilbourne Watson

Introduction

The globalization of the discourse on gender encompasses the global spread

of academic and intellectual interest, and political debates and activism, as
well as measures by states, international governmental organizations (IGOs),
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and struggles by many women
and men to promote gender sensitivity and awareness, especially through the
medium of gender discourse. I approach late-twentieth-century globalization
as a process of the restructuring of capitalism via science, technology, pro-
duction, and various forms of information and communications technology
that facilitate the flow of old and new forms of capital, goods and services,
culture, and other processes in the age of electronics.
Humans engage in social relations as subjects of will and power
(Harvey 1996: 262; see Ebert 1996: 109). This chapter approaches the glo-
balization of the discourse on gender as an integral part of a much broader
discourse on global change. The chapter explores and analyzes three specific
themes around a number of recent studies that develop within the global
discourse on the state, class, gender, race, women, power, ethnicity, and sexu-
ality. The themes include Postmodernist Feminist theorizing by Eudine
Barriteau (1992, 1994, 1995, 1998), the production of power through class,
gender, and ethnicity under capitalism by Kevin Yelvington (1995), and sex
and sexuality in socialist Cuba by Lois Smith and Alfred Padula (1996).
Respectively, the three themes unfold around studies of Barbados, Trinidad,
and Cuba. The authors employ different theoretical frameworks, and they
draw on a broad range of literature around the discourse on gender. I begin
with Barriteaus work, followed by Yelvingtons study, and I conclude with
Smith and Padula. I will attempt to show how the three studies and their
themes are connected. In addition I will explore a number of concerns about
54 / Hilbourne Watson

nation, state, class, and nationalism in the context of capitalist globalization

where the discourse on gender unfolds. I will attempt to show the importance
of these concerns to the development of a theory of gender power for
explaining how the cultural construction of an ideology like nationalism may
condition perspectives on gender within national states under global capital-
ist restructuring.
Since World War II, many investigators and IGOs like the United Nations
(UN) have produced vast literatures about the advancement of women,
womens rights, women and development, and numerous other related sub-
jects (see United Nations 1996). The UN and other IGOs have promoted
liberal awareness about gender and have produced a variety of studies and
reports about gender mainly with emphasis on the expansion of womens
rights (see Byron 2000) within the framework of the liberal paradigm of
patriarchal power relations.
Twentieth-century anticolonial national liberation revolutions (NLRs)
also influenced the globalization of the discourse on gender. The NLRs devel-
oped along patriarchal lines, and the postcolonial states they helped to pro-
duce also subsumed womens and gender issues under their nation-building
strategies. Women have made many sacrifices and contributions to the mili-
tary, political, economic, intellectual, and other achievements of the NLRs,
yet they have had to make special demands for revolutionary states to ad-
dress womens rights and promote the advancement of women within UN
patriarchal guidelines. Debates within Western and non-Western religions,
and recent discussion around womens contribution to economic and social
development, have broadened gender awareness around the world. Litera-
ture from academic disciplines around postcolonial studies, gender studies,
womens studies, feminist scholarship in international relations, and other
fields influences the trajectories of the intellectual culture of gender studies.
Feminist theories span diverse areas such as liberal, radical, socialist, Marxist
and neo-Marxist, postmodernist, psychoanalytic, and other approaches.
Also, numerous NGOs that deal with womens and gender issues, including
many organizations that target the UN and other international governmental
organizations, attest to the impact of gender on all areas of human conscious-
ness and practice.
According to the UN report in 1996, while many issues of gender equal-
ity are moving to the top of the global agenda . . . better understanding of
womens and mens contributions to society is essential to speed the shift
from . . . policy to practice. Too often, women and men live in different
worldsworlds that differ in access to education and work opportunities,
and in health, personal security and leisure time.1 Historically, womens
contributions to history have been distorted, marginalized, or largely ex-
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 55

cluded from the record to the detriment of the growth of gender conscious-
ness (see Lerner 1986). The gendering of social reality is an undeniable fact,
but gender, like patriarchy and the peasantry, lacks a specific or peculiar
socioeconomic formation. It is necessary to locate gender within the social
relations of production that have characterized different historical socioeco-
nomic formations. At its core, patriarchy is a system that normalizes and
rationalizes the reproduction of inequality for men and women. Masculinity
conditions patriarchal imaginary networks of power and culture: hege-
monic masculinity keeps patriarchy flexible and adaptable.
Capitalism is the historical political economy that provides the context in
which law, rights, gender, ethnicity, and other social and cultural identities
develop and change in the Caribbean, which has known mainly capitalism
since colonial settlement. It is misleading to essentialize gender relations by
superimposing them on the political economy of capitalism and causing them
to displace all other components of the social relations. When we devise and
employ anchoring concepts and variables in mapping research designs and
prioritizing research issues, we inevitably immobilize and essentialize con-
cepts and categories (see Callari and Ruccio 1996; see also Persram 1994),
but the problem arises when we fetishize and reify the tendency to essentialize
concepts and categories.

Context for the Globalization of Gender Discourse in the Caribbean

Commonwealth Caribbean intellectual culture has not been on the cutting

edge of the globalization of the discourse on gender. However, areas such as
postmodern feminism, socialist feminism, masculinity, gay and lesbian
theory, and gender, class, ethnicity, and the politics of sexuality are gaining
the attention of certain Caribbean scholars (see Barriteau 1992, 1994, 1995,
1998; Lewis 1998, 2003; Nurse 2000; Lumsden 1996; Kempadoo and Doez-
ema 1998; Green 1994; Bolles 1996; Freeman 2000; Reddock 1994; Mo-
hammed 1988; Yelvington 1995; Byron and Thorburn 1998), among many
others.
There is a tendency in Commonwealth Caribbean gender research to con-
flate gender with women and feminism and to produce an unnecessary ten-
sion between class and gender (see Freeman 2000: 57; Cuales 1988: 120).
There is an underlying assumption in much of that research that men and
masculinity are not central to gender. Research on bisexuality and transgen-
dering is absent from most Caribbean scholarship, and even though such
issues and practices are present in Caribbean life (see Atluri 2001), they are
not located at the center of theoretical consciousness and explication. Lan-
guage barriers still limit explorations across linguistic and cultural bound-
56 / Hilbourne Watson

aries; this has much to do with how colonialism conditioned the development
of the Caribbean and how cultural imperialism continues to shape the aca-
demic training of Caribbean scholars.
The Cold War played an important role in shaping the development of
postwar intellectual culture in the Caribbean. Imperialist constructs of patri-
archy and masculinity shaped Cold War national security precepts, and these
have influenced individual and national identity concepts in Caribbean soci-
eties across the gender, demographic, and cultural spectra. Christianity
linked up with the Cold War to revalidate precepts and dogmas about the
nature and origin of the world, human nature, culture, and the sources of
power and order in state and society. Postwar modernization theory ad-
vanced Cold War interests and constructs that still resonate across the Carib-
bean from civil society to the state.
The shortage of a critical mass of scholarship on gender with an emphasis
on masculinity and femininity in relation to sociolegal theory, public policy,
international relations, psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics, and
theology helps to reinforce and reinvigorate patriarchal themes. Factors such
as the impact of global capitalist restructuring on the labor and production
process and how this affects women and men, the prevalence of misogynist
ideology in political, economic, religious, and other spheres, heightened
rhetoric about men in crisis or at risk, the feminization of certain types of
work, and the tendency to view female-headed households as pathologies, all
have made it much more difficult for many women to negotiate their realities.
Capitalist restructuring also undermines the appeal of the myth of the male
breadwinner in the Caribbean and exposes many of the insecurities that men
have about their gendered identities (see Lewis 1998; Green 2000).
When womens historical experiences and contributions are not taken se-
riously, it is impossible to comprehend mens gendered reactions to their own
circumstances and to womens needs and responses (see Enloe 1993: 21).
Women have played strategic roles in the various struggles for economic,
social, and political change in the Caribbean. More broadly, in spite of
womens active involvement in commodity production, which is indispens-
able to the reproduction of capital, a dominant tendency has been to repro-
duce a distorted view of Caribbean women as consumers rather than produc-
ers, thereby rendering their relationship and contributions to the political
economy parenthetical. The liberal tendency to devalue certain types of
womens labor also informs attempts to treat women as autonomous from
men in capitalist society. Intellectual strategies that treat labor as an ontologi-
cal category and devalue it as a political economy category along with the
attendant class relations of production simultaneously undermine attempts
to construct an effective theory of gender power in the Caribbean.
Political independence in the Commonwealth Caribbean emphasizes ways
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 57

to absorb women into nation building on the basis of deontological rights

and equality and without politicizing gender awareness. The political parties
that dominate Caribbean politics do not make gender one of their key politi-
cal mobilization strategies; rather they stress populist nationalist themes that
strengthen the authority of the national state and mask hegemonic masculin-
ity. While this specific masculinist and populist gender strategy reinforces the
liberal myth of gender blindness to the detriment of femininity, the postwar
development record in the English-speaking Caribbean has shown that it is
possible to produce change that benefits women without stressing feminism.
In fact, most women have fought for economic, political, and broader social
change as integral parts of the social collectivity within the liberal frame-
work, with all of the contradictory consequences liberalism produces for
women.
State sovereignty is a masculinized nationalist signifier that reflects both
the unity and the separation the national state expresses: under the modern
bourgeois state a person had to become a national being as the precondition
for becoming a real individual, which has meant a masculine person in a
fragmented and unequal society and a world set against itself. This has been
central to the project of modernity. Most women continue to be mainly sec-
ondary to men in the state, politics, education, science, technology, religion,
labor, business, production, and other arenas, but not all men are equal in
terms of power and status in relation to masculinity, class, or race. Most
human rights in all capitalist societies are deontological by nature, which
means that those rights lack a material ontological basis through which to
demand or effectuate them. The liberal strategy of making deontological
rights primary for those who do not own the means of production is an
effective way to preempt democratic accountability via the disalienation of
power (see Wood 1998).
Populism is the ideological-cultural sensibility of the nation-building
strategy of the state: populism emphasizes the primacy of people over
classes and genders and mediates contradictory social relations of produc-
tion. States routinely displace gender through nationalist strategies. Not only
do states employ nationalism to silence feminine gender, in the process mak-
ing masculinity seem natural, but states also advance nationalism as a politi-
cal theme for legitimizing the centralization of power in the hands of the
postcolonial ruling power bloc. As the cultural sensibility of the national
state, nationalism also wraps males and females in the symbolism of the
mythic fatherland. It is not difficult to understand how and why so many
women embrace the ideological and cultural paradigm of bourgeois nation-
alism, including its very dangerous projects such as war, racism, ethnic
cleansing, and even genocide.
Masculinity and feminism have been equally complicit in separating na-
58 / Hilbourne Watson

tionalism from class and politics, and class and politics from culture, with the
effect of bundling gender issues with culture and depoliticizing both culture
and gender, while simultaneously folding masculinity into patriarchy as the
universal signifier that subordinates the feminine. Historically, the depoli-
ticization of gender into a cultural theme has made it much easier to separate
culture from politics and to define womens issues in sociocultural terms and
assign them to state agencies that specialize in culture, community develop-
ment, and social welfare matters. This way the imaginary networks (see
Bartra 1992) of patriarchal power can also operate through the medium of
cultural nationalism, a key site for mobilizing masses of men and women
against enemies, real and imagined.
Patriarchy also works through theological and religious dogma to rein-
force cultural and political control over womens lives, their bodies, and their
access to resources. Patriarchal Christian representations of history and
modern social contract theory about the transition from a fictive state of
nature into modern civil society (see Jahn 2000; Eder 1996) routinely as-
signed corruptible tendencies to womens fragile and childlike nature.
Much about patriarchy and gender is hidden deep in the western cultural
fiction of the state of nature that informs the dominant outlook about ori-
gins, nature, culture, history, and space-time (see Watson 2001a). The unsaid
in this context flows in and out of postmodern constructs of gender relations
and gender systems in subtle ways.

Barriteaus Postmodernist Feminist Theorizing and the State-Gender

Problematic in Barbados

Barriteau argues that one key distinguishing factor of Postmodernist Femi-

nist theorizing as opposed to Postmodernism is how the former theorizes
beyond the confines of Postmodernist theories to contest the continued sub-
jugation of women. . . . Postmodernist Feminists extend that analysis to show
that existing social science epistemologies exclude the experience of women
and thus reflect the gendered reality of all social relations (1994: 8491; see
Persram 1994: 27983).2
Gender discourse in the Caribbean is heavily influenced by liberal femi-
nism.3 Barriteau claims to part with liberal feminist empiricism, but her re-
search is informed by methodological individualism, which is informed by
philosophical individualism, a key liberal epistemological tenet. Her schol-
arly work is among the first to apply Postmodernist Feminist theorizing in an
explicit way to the study of Commonwealth Caribbean problems. Barriteau
marshals and analyzes significant amounts of literature that she brings to
bear on the subject of her inquiry.
While Barriteau argues that gender and gender relations are socially con-
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 59

structed, she infuses gender relations with a primacy that places them ahead
of all historicosocial relations and identities (1994: 85).4 In her deconstruc-
tion, state power becomes so pulverized and diffused that it can be exercised
by the Minister of Finance, and by postal workers in rural post offices. The
latter may daily extend the boundaries of state power in areas unknown both
to the public and the ministers who may assume they alone define the scope
of that power (1994: 4647). It is problematic to conflate the exercise of
power by key state officials and by the functionaries who carry out state
policy at rudimentary levels. Here Barriteaus deconstructionist approach
merely reinvigorates the liberal concept of power as the expression of an
interpersonal relationship as distinguished from power as the expression of a
social relation (see Yelvington 1995: 1314; Persram 1994: 302).5 Barriteaus
way of looking at power betrays her own liberal ideological outlook and
speaks to the ways liberalism conditions her views on class relations, the
economy, capitalism, labor, and exploitation.
I argue that the ways Barriteau makes social relations of gender pri-
mary, even pre-civil, condition how she approaches the political economy of
Barbados and all social relations therein. I will examine concepts of power
and nationalism in her work to determine how they shape her analysis of
gender. Barriteaus Postmodernist Feminist theorizing framework does not
free her from certain liberal slippages when it comes to locating the origins of
gender systems and social relations of gender. I view her construct of
social relations of gender as part of a Westocentric cultural construct that
embraces certain notions about nature, culture, history, and time-space. My
interest extends to how gender participates in, affects, and is affected by
culture and nationalism in the state and civil society. I will explore how
Barriteaus treatment of state development planning in Barbados, as seen via
her gender construct in relation to women and female entrepreneurs, col-
ors theoretical knowledge about gender power and the extent to which it
advances an understanding of gender and related problems in Barbados and
the Commonwealth Caribbean.
Barriteau applies Postmodernist Feminist theorizing to evaluate eco-
nomic development planning (1994: 33). The study, which attempts to
expose the conceptual and practical inadequacies of economic development
planning for women . . . analyzes their experiences to show that womens
economic, political and cultural subordination is not peculiar to working
class or rural or traditional women (1994: 7). Barriteau concentrates on
womens relationship to the postcolonial state in Barbados in order to reveal
the operations of gender . . . specifically the relations between women and
the state, and to deconstruct the gendered relations of female entrepre-
neurs who remain invisible and marginalized in areas regarded as out-
side the sphere of the household or informal economic activity (1994: 29).
60 / Hilbourne Watson

Barriteau stresses that even though Barbadian female entrepreneurs operate

in the formal, capitalist sphere of the economy they are marginalized in
the discourses and operations of the state and its institutions (1994: 30,
11314). Where businesswomen are located in the capital relation and how
they may be viewed are two different matters: the former tells us about how
they reproduce themselves by appropriating surplus labor; the latter is more
subjective, and philosophical idealism would assign primacy to the latter.
Barriteau treats women as an undifferentiated group, ignoring important
differences among groups of women, when applying marginalization as a
blanket term. The strategies and ideologies the Barbadian state employs to
mobilize labor resources for foreign capital reveal that female workers are an
important component of the strategy, even when the state privileges patriar-
chal representations of the nuclear family, which does not reflect the lived
reality of most Barbadian families (see Freeman 2000: 25556). Barriteau
sees the economic and social relations of gender as forces within the politics
of the Barbadian state [that] emphasize the states attempt to use womens
bodies to achieve development objectives (1994: 114). Postmodern body
politics misses the point that under capitalism womens labor power is a
political economy category that transcends their bodies as an ontological
factor.
In Marxist political economy, productive labor is a political economy cat-
egory, whereas the category of nonproductive labor is an ontological cat-
egory. The former is crucial to the reproduction of capital, the state and labor
(power itself) (see Gull 2000). Barriteau claims to reject the tradition in
Caribbean scholarship that objectified women by dividing them along
lines of working class versus middle class and rural versus urban and ar-
gues that this division elides gender as a key category and reality.6 Concepts
of rural and urban, working class and middle class, and modern and tra-
ditional are more than ontological constructs; they point to how, when, and
where women are incorporated into the political economy process. Barriteau
confuses the necessity to historicize and distinguish between ontological and
political economy categories with objectification.
Part of the problem, as Freeman points out, is that in Caribbean studies
analyses of gender and class have engaged less in a marriage than, at best,
a visiting relationship (Freeman 2000: 60; see Cuales 1988: 120). It is not
so much that gender is elided as that its conflation with masculinity mar-
ginalizes femininity in different ways. By superimposing the ontological cat-
egory of woman upon the political economy category of class, Barriteau fails
to see the critical distinction between the ontological and political economy
categories of labor. This weakness permeates the conceptual framework in
Barriteau (1995) and surfaces in her failure to understand how Marxism deals
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 61

with productive and nonproductive labor and with wage labor and nonwage
labor in historical political economies.
Barriteau says, In a state system having its economic origins in slavery
and colonialism and presently functioning with capitalist market relations,
the mutually constituting social relations of gender, class and race complicate
the ways women experience the asymmetric relations of gender. There is no
gender neutrality in economic relations. Economic development planning
affects women and men differently (1994: 32, 8788). If gender, class, and
race are mutually constituting social relations, then how do social rela-
tions of gender encompass the other social components? Indicative develop-
ment planning in Barbados was designed to facilitate the reproduction of the
capitalist political economy and reinforce those political and cultural forces
like masculinity through which power relations are mediated. Like capital,
the state is an integral part of the social relations of production. The state in
Barbadian society makes the will of capitalist private property into the high-
est moral and political reality, which means that the state supports the ongo-
ing commodification of the labor power of all Barbadian workers through its
development strategies. Clearly, female capitalists in Barbados benefit from
this role of the state, which protects their property and their right to sur-
plus labor via economic compulsion.
Since World War II Caribbean states like Barbados have approached de-
velopment-planning activity within the constraints imposed by the will of
private property in the means of production and the restructuring of global
capitalism. States engage in development planning with the aim of attracting,
capturing, and retaining a portion of global capital within their borders to
facilitate economic progress defined in relation to capital accumulation.
Barriteau ignores the centrality of global capitalism and of class and class
struggles in Barbados that shape womens access to resources which capital-
ists control and which are influenced by state power through public law and
development policy. Capital is strategic in pointing the way to class and gen-
der in the key areas of economic, political, and cultural relations, and this
makes it important to analyze masculinity to see how certain male capitalists
relate to the different classes and strata of women in the political economy.
Barriteaus functionalist stance can be detected in how she attempts to
derive the states relationship to women from its functions rather than from
its political and social character and interests. In capitalist societies, capital
and the state share a class character that must be stressed, bearing in mind
that the division of labor between the state and capital is mainly technical.
When it comes to discussing the state, Barriteaus liberal frame of reference
reveals the structural connection between liberalism and postmodernism.
Having lopped the state, economy, society, and other phenomena into the
62 / Hilbourne Watson

Procrustean bed of asymmetrical relations of gender, it becomes difficult

for Barriteau to analyze the states class nature. Foreign investment strategies
in Barbados and the wider Caribbean are influenced by certain basic assump-
tions that states and capitalists make about the role of women in the social
and economic division of labor and in the production of commodities, which
is the route to surplus labor and surplus value. Without a doubt, the labor
power of Caribbean women workers has been strategic to the realization of
factor advantage objectives of global capital in the region (see Maurer 1995;
Freeman 2000: 5761).
Barriteau sees Barbados as a racially mobilized, gender stratified coun-
try (1994: 28). In reality, Barbadian society is foremost a capitalist class-
divided society, and class is one of several abodes of gender: gender stratifi-
cation is an empty category when removed from the political economy
process. Barriteau does not even mention the strategic point that all postwar
development planning throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean has had
little concrete relation to any effective economic planning because Caribbean
states and economies have never had effective control over the mechanisms
of effective planningprices, interest rates, currency values, export markets,
trade, investment policy criteria, marketing, and other factors. This lack of
effective control in these key areas speaks to the fact that capitalism is not an
assemblage of sovereign national states presiding over autonomous national
economies that are isolated from the global totality. The fact that sovereignty
is grounded in national territory does not and cannot negate the fact that
sovereignty also presupposes an international system of states, without
which it could have no legitimate basis. Substantively, capital accumulation
is a global process. Unfortunately, Barriteau (1998) does not explore these
strategic issues in her theoretical work on gender systems and social relations
of gender in the Caribbean.
Barriteaus claim that the gendered nature of economic development
policies pursued by the post colonial state creates conditions of economic
subordination for female entrepreneurs (1994: 3637) at once conflates the
state with the anarchy of the capitalist process and elides the anarchy of
capitalist production: anarchy is the characteristic social form of capitalist
modernity (Rosenberg 1994). Her central contention that contrary to the
neoclassical growth oriented intent of the development policies pursued, the
activities of female entrepreneurs are not enhanced and cannot be
(Barriteau 1994: 37) remains a deconstructionist assertion that rests on a
dogmatic premise whose basis lies outside the scope of empirical verification.
Barbadian society has known only capitalism as a socioeconomic system
since its colonial origins.
Barriteau disconnects Barbados from global capitalist social relations and
leaves the impression that gendered entrepreneurial practices can be analyzed
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 63

in Barbados (see Barriteau 1998) outside the broader global context of which
all national states are integral parts. This is a fundamental weakness in her
approach to the global gender discourse. She ignores the transitions in the
techno-paradigm shift in contemporary global capitalism that necessitate
new labor processes and new forms of labor and production technologies
(see Watson 1997; Freeman 2000; Maurer 1995: 1109, 111112). It is mis-
leading to analyze national development policy in Barbados as a purely do-
mestic matter. National states are actively shifting certain key areas of na-
tional decision making to the world level (Holloway 1995), and this has
serious implications for state management in neoliberal times. Neoliberalism
is not a problem-solving strategy for capitalism in the age of electronics;
rather it is a crisis-management strategy that suits the rule of money in the
electronics age. Much about the tension between globalization and state sov-
ereignty hinges on this very point.
Barriteau offers feminist assessments of the theoretical and epistemologi-
cal deficiencies of the neoclassical analytic (economic) structure in relation to
the needs of women in the marketplace. How and where the Barbadian
states developmental project locates women as entrepreneurs must be linked
to the states inability to plan the capitalist economy, especially for the
period that Barriteau studies, namely the period since the crisis of Keyn-
esianism began to intensify. The reality is that development planning is less of
a problem and more of a symptom of the deeper structural contradictions in
the social relations of capitalist production in neocolonial societies like Bar-
bados. Consequently, there is a certain misplaced concreteness in making
development planning the priority concern where female capitalists and
women from other classes are concerned.
The seminal issue of crisis under capitalism does not surface in Barriteaus
analytical schema: capitalist crisis depicts discontinuities of history, . . .
breaks in the path of development, ruptures in a pattern of movement, varia-
tions in the intensity of time (Holloway 1995: 56). A proper understanding
of crisis and its impacts on different male and female capitalists requires an
appreciation that crisis is rooted in the very nature of the capital relation itself
and that the accumulation strategy is where the crisis unfolds. Development
strategies cannot abolish capitalisms predisposition to crisis and how crisis
affects male and female capitalists. Barriteau does not consider how crisis
contradictions in the capitalist process affect the business prospects of Barba-
dian female entrepreneurs. What of the numerous male entrepreneurs who
rise and fall in Barbados on a regular basis? What role does gender play in
their misfortunes?
Barriteau does not appreciate that all forms of gender relations presup-
pose whole sets of relations or structures . . . which constitute the individu-
als in question (Wood 1989: 48; see Castoriadis 1991: 148, 149). Individu-
64 / Hilbourne Watson

alism is alive and well in Barriteaus conceptions. Seeing capitalism as a sec-

ondary complicating factor in the lives of Caribbean women is a constant in
all of Barriteau work, and it influences her call for an autonomous feminist
epistemology through which to effectuate female loyalty to postmodern
feminism (1995: 44, 53). She asserts that the persistence of exploitation out-
side capitalism is proof that capitalist accumulation . . . cannot be blamed
for womens exploitation. Capitalist accumulation in many ways compounds
the adverse conditions affecting womens lives but it cannot be the source of
their marginalization (1995: 52). Barriteau seems to feel an original source
of exploitation and marginalization is to be sought in the fictive state of
nature where gender relations apparently originated as an original cultural
form. There appears to be a rather close philosophical affinity between her
perspective and orthodox political theory about origins (see Watson 2001a).
Barriteau discusses the different ways women and men are incorporated
as citizens, and the unequal, differential experience of citizenship for
women (1994: 14950), but she does not develop this argument through a
gender theory of nationalism in relation to culture and state power.7 The way
the state sees women in relation to nation building and economic production
is influenced by global dynamics: the habits of national identity work
through attributes like state sovereignty, citizenship identity, national cul-
ture, and other symbols. Barriteau does not address these themes in her
Gender Systems in a Postcolonial State, but she establishes the analytic and
social primacy of gender systems via relations of power based on gender, as
expressed through ideological relations of gender and material relations
of gender (1998: 193, 197). Neither gender systems nor gender relations are
sufficient to capture the array of issues that Barriteau addresses. This is
largely why her argument remains in need of a broader situational context of
capitalist social relations of production from which she so often attempts to
extract gender relations, with the effect of impoverishing the capitalist pro-
cesses and the gender phenomena she analyses.
In effect, Barriteau misses an opportunity to explain how women, in their
struggle to become more integral to the nation, embraced the logic and ide-
ology of modernization. Unfortunately, even after Barriteau analyzes how
and why the state locates womens issues under community development
(1994: 13334), she does not clarify what it means in terms of gender power,
nationalism, and culture in development planning as nation building. The
state conveniently wraps culture in social projects because it assigns women
roles as transmitters of national culture and the national imaginary (see van
der Aa 1995: 25).
During the 1980s, and contrary to Barriteaus claims, the Barbadian state
was not interested in erasing womens presence. The state was restructur-
ing the exhausted neo-Keynesian capital accumulation strategy and adjusting
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 65

the political economy to the imperatives of global neoliberalism under the

auspices of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the
impact of the global swarming of supranational finance capital. Keyne-
sianism could no longer accommodate certain class and gender entitlements
in Barbados (see Watson 1997). Barriteau insists that the primary economic
role the state constructs for women is reproduction (1994: 138). The state
is very interested in the reproduction of the population and the labor force,
which produces surplus labor for capital. More substantively, in the 1980s,
the effects of the techno-industrial restructuring were felt in Barbados in
developments like the closure of the Intel electronics plant, the drop in gar-
ment assembly, the deepening crisis of the sugar industry, and declining ac-
cess to preferential arrangements for marketing certain exports. Global capi-
tal was shifting considerable resources from bricks and mortar into new
types of technologies and commodities under the thrust of the scientific and
technological revolution based on computers and the information technol-
ogy associated therewith. The shift reflected the growing power of money in
imperialism in the age of electronics.
Reproduction is but one factor in how the state mediates feminine gender
relations. In the very area of reproduction, social struggles mounted by
women have forced the state to adopt policy measures and laws to make birth
control means available. Womens control over their fertility brings in the
politics of sexuality and carries social, cultural, political, and economic im-
plications (see Freeman 2000: 5362). Reproduction is politicized around
nation building, stability, economic development, and capital accumulation
strategies. Clearly, the state links reproduction to population policy, the labor
process, migration, remittances, and social progress (Massiah 1986a,
1986b).
Much more is at stake than womens economic roles as producers of
labor (Barriteau 1994: 145). Global capitalist restructuring complicates
class and gender at the national level just as much as national factors condi-
tion the global, as the two sets of forces are the co-constituting elements of
the complex and heterogeneous glocalized totality (see Swyngedouw
1997; Brenner 1998). As national states roll back their economic and social
borders, with the effect of reducing the amount of social goods available to
society, they intensify competition between males and females for skills, jobs,
and capital resources for business opportunities. Barriteau says that aca-
demic literature treats female entrepreneurs as undeveloped male ones,
and adds that such an epistemological frame insists on perceiving and inter-
preting womens entrepreneurial activities through androcentric, patriarchal
lens (1994: 244). In fact, businesswomens behavior can never be under-
stood in total isolation from that of businessmen under capitalism, because
female capitalists do not constitute an autonomous political economy. They
66 / Hilbourne Watson

work within the political economy of capitalism: the division of labor by

gender in Barbados is part of the capitalist division of labor.
Capitalism is based on production for profit to secure the private accumu-
lation of capital, and female capitalists must compete and exploit labor
power to accumulate capital under penalty of extinction. The state and mar-
ket do not guarantee success for male capitalists on any simplistic or capri-
cious basis to the detriment of female ones because the economy, which the
Barbadian state upholds as the highest political and moral will of private
capital, is not there at the states disposal to be manipulated at will. The fact
that certain male and female capitalists have advantages over other males
and females, owing to ethnicity, family ties, strategic knowledge, the power
to shape public opinion and political agendas, and other factors, does not
mean the economy is lacking any structural determinants. Male and female
capitalists participate in a single capitalist market, though the two groups
enter the market from different though interconnected social realities and
may therefore work through the market in different ways. These differences
affect how the process works, but they cannot negate the nature of capitalist
social relations. The market must condition gender relations because the
market is the primary site of the social power of capital.
The separation of the economy from direct coercion may give the impres-
sion that the market is a nonpolitical space. Money works through the mar-
ket like a dissolvent on social relations, by causing them to appear as techni-
cal relations between things. While I agree with Barriteau that there is a need
to reevaluate the conventional interpretations of womens economic behav-
ior (1994: 250), getting to this point requires a framework that moves
analysis beyond her gender constructs. The argument that the states concern
with economic activity for women is to facilitate their access to additional
resources necessary for the work involved in maintaining a home and family
(1994: 270, and see 272) does not square with state policy, economic reality,
or womens economic and social consciousness todaynor with the accepted
fact that Caribbean women have always worked (see Massiah 1986a, 1986b;
Green 1994; Safa 1995; Freeman 2000). The state relies on womens eco-
nomic participation in domestic and export production to reproduce capital,
the state itself, and women themselves as well as some families that include
men. Barriteau treats the capitalist economy as a technical relation that is
shaped by the psychological predilections of competition (market) subjects,
thus effectively reaffirming the logic of the neoclassical analytic structure
that she criticizes. The problem is to find the proper tools to clarify womens
involvement in the reproduction of capital. Social relations of gender are
inadequate to satisfy that imperative in any capitalist political economy.
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 67

Gender, Power, Nationalism, and the Capitalist State

In this exploration of how gender connects with nation building, I now turn
to the issue of a theory of gender power and nationalism. Nationalism, as the
ideological-cultural sensibility of the national state, works through populist
themes that mask gender while privileging masculinity. Clearly, if we were to
reduce the nation-building project of the state to a gendered process or char-
acter, we would leave unexplored the way(s) gender conditions and is condi-
tioned by nationalism. Throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean the
dominant political parties have paid homage to women in particular ways,
often mobilizing female supporters to do certain types of work, including
mobilizing other women and men in support of the parties and trade unions,
often but not always necessarily keeping women at arms length from the
levers of power within those organizations. Frankly, the exercise of patriar-
chal power by women does not feminize that power (see Lerner 1986).
Barriteau insists that Postmodernist Feminist theorizing does not pose re-
search questions about women as woman-in-relation-to-man, since
women cannot be reduced to the notion of woman as half of a binary sexual
identity (1994: 92). This statement reflects her individualist quest for an
autonomous feminist epistemology. Barriteaus individualism may seem to
be critical of masculinity and patriarchy, but it has yet to part ways with the
very bourgeois individualism that informs masculinist liberalism: it is typical
for deconstructionists to deny the existence or relevance of any social collec-
tivity, a tendency that reinvigorates cynicism, nihilism, and pragmatism.
Persram, raising issues that have implications for Barriteaus gender per-
spective, asks: Are we as sexed/sexual human beings in hierarchical rela-
tions of power more likely to liberate ourselves through the . . . accumulation
of gendered essence? In other words, when considered inferior as woman, is
my route to empowerment via the retrieval or generation of the value of my
femininity . . . Or, given that our gendered identities are a product of the
essentialization of our respective historic roles in society, is the way to equal-
ity therefore through the contestation of the closure of sex/sexuality[?]
(1994: 277, 281). Males and females are socialized differently into a
gendered culture of danger via nationalism and patriotism (Enloe 1993:
15). McClintocks insistence that all nationalisms are gendered, all are in-
vented and all are dangerous . . . in the sense that they represent relations to
political power and to the technologies of violence (1996: 260) is insightful.
Getting women to think in masculinist ways is an integral aspect of the na-
tionalist strategy of the state, and gendering the state and nation involves
significant investments in nonmaterial projects.
In working through class and other identities, nationalism moves more or
less surreptitiously into the crevices of gender and works there to subvert
68 / Hilbourne Watson

gender by superimposing cultural constructs of womanhood or manhood

upon gender, just as gender conspires with nationalism to conceal itself in the
process of concealing class exploitation. Women are party to this very pro-
cess that is integral to how male and female subjects become national persons
and citizens. Male control of the state, capital, and public policy is critical to
the construction of dominant or hegemonic masculinity. To speak about a
gendered state without simultaneously exploring how nationalism interacts
with capitalism and how culture works in the mediation of contradictory
social relations is to ignore seminal issues about gender-theoretic analysis
(see McClintock 1996: 261; Persram 1994: 28384). A theory of gender
power that deconstructs nationalism is useful for deflecting essentialist
analyses of gender and power. Yelvington explains how the state treats power
as a cultural phenomenon. He stresses that relations of power are not only
signified in certain ways but . . . are internal to symbolization and significa-
tion. . . . People experience the exercise of powerand the exercise of power
against themin cultural terms. That is, if culture is defined by routinized
practices and a system of symbols and meanings, then the exercise of power
is felt by and through its effects on practices, symbols, and meanings
(1995: 19).
Failure to appreciate that a unitary cultural feminist structure will not
transform gender into a prima facie basis for prefiguring all social relations is
likely to lead one into nominalism (see Persram 1994: 28687). In fact, gen-
der solidarity has to be struggled for and developed through political and
social struggles that bring class, race, ethnicity, and other factors to the fore.
In bourgeois civil (class) society there is very little room for any individual to
develop and express subjectivity as a purely autonomous personal particu-
larity outside the purview of the state. The reason is that the state also
guides the autonomous personal particularity into the substantive unity [of
the state] itself and preserves this unity in the principle of the subjectivity
itself (Fine 1995: 88). Ultimately, the form of the state contains within
itself all the contradictions immanent in civil society and . . . cannot resolve
its contradictions. In this critical sense transcendence is also preservation
(Fine 1995: 94).
When Caribbean states compete globally to attract global capital, they
also adopt policies to reduce their share of the social reproduction costs of
labor power under labor-intensive production, and they roll back their own
social and economic borders so as to shift larger portions of the social repro-
duction costs back into households. This also reduces capitals tax obligations.
Females head the majority of households in Barbados, so they are bound to
feel the effects of strategies to reduce their real wages in falling standards of
living as a result of working for the state and male and female capitalists.
Clearly, this situation could not augur well for the feminist solidarity Barri-
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 69

teau imagines under her autonomous feminist epistemology (Barriteau 1994:

290; 1998: 2024): feminist solidarity would have to confront the deepening
of class struggles, considering that the relations of exploitation reproduce
female workers as economically and socially unequal beings. Barriteaus fe-
male entrepreneurial spirit seems to compensate for a fetishistic displace-
ment of difference (McClintock 1996: 274; see Barriteau 1994: 191207).
Barriteau discusses particular ideological relations of gender that are
marked by an inferior subordinate status of women and strong currents
of misogyny (1998: 198), but she does not deal with how bourgeois democ-
racy adjusts political change in ways that preserve the primacy of bourgeois
social relations and the capital-wage labor relation (see section on Cuba for
details). Barriteau defends a gender-based conception of history, society, and
individuals to combat what Persram calls masculinist politico-philosophi-
cal articulations of social relations with feminist understandings of the gen-
der-based nature of these relations. Yet Barriteaus gender systems and so-
cial relations of gender project surfaces as a constriction rather than a
construction for understanding the diverse manifestations of womens lives
(Persram 1994: 296, and see 29798). Gender can have no primordial claim
to any ethicopolitical legitimacy to represent the heterogeneous complex-
ity of the dialectical totality. Barriteaus approach runs the risk of making
gender into a closure for feminist conceptions of agency (Persram 1994:
301).8
No doubt, Barriteau has contributed to the feminist and gender literature
about Barbados and the Commonwealth Caribbean. Still, her argument does
not provide much critical insight for a theory of gender power and a gender
theory of nationalism, both of which are necessary for understanding state
theory and gender theory in the region. Barriteaus preoccupation with ap-
plying Postmodernist Feminist deconstruction to an analysis of the logic of
development planning in Barbados allowed deconstructionist logic to get the
better of the empirical reality she studied.

Yelvington and the Production of Power and Social Identities

I will pursue two basic concerns around Yelvingtons Producing Power, spe-
cifically his analysis of gender, class, and ethnicity as social identities in a
Trinidadian working-class context, and how and where Yelvington situates
Trinidad in the wider global context, when he deals with the relationship
between national and global phenomena. Yelvington stresses that his defi-
nitions of ethnicity, class, and gender . . . are social phenomena that have a
number of attributes, including emotional, conscious, behavioral, and struc-
tural referents (1995: 22) and material aspects. He argues that identity
cannot be seen as divorced from the network of social relations since social
70 / Hilbourne Watson

identities may live vicariously through their refraction in other identities.

Yelvington draws on Joan Scott, who says: identities are historically con-
ferred, . . . this conferral is ambiguous . . . subjects are produced through
multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient for a time
in certain contexts (1992: 19, cited in Yelvington 1995: 23). A key point to
remember is that bourgeois ruling classes seem to withdraw from view, with
the effect that their ruling power slips away, puts itself at a distance, is
already somewhere else (Castoriadis 1991: 150151).9 This is partly how
the disembedding process is reflected in the imaginary networks of culture
and political power in liberal accounts of advanced capitalist societies.
Yelvington points out that the making of cultural identity is strategic in
how capitalism is able to find ways to reproduce itself and appropriate
surplus value. At the same time, this tendency is culturally resisted by the
workers along cultural lines as well (1995: 30; see Freeman 2000).
Yelvington draws on Pierre Bourdieu to disaggregate capital into multiple
forms, and argues that different groups may possess different forms and
quantities of capital (1995: 3133). He is mindful that his social and other
noneconomic forms of capital have more than an economic effect (1995: 36
37) that arises from the social relations of production, though any given type
of capital may create a semblance of being totally disconnected from the
social relations. Money plays a key role in producing this particular sem-
blance of disconnection through which social subjects are reduced to indi-
viduals with individual rights and responsibilities.
The habit of taking at face value the ways the capitalist process relies on
fragmenting reality via the anarchy of production and the economic and
technical division of labor that characterizes the core relationship between
the state and capital produces many ideological distortions. Yelvington ana-
lyzes the historical objectification and commodification of Caribbean labor,
and traces forms of opposition to the commodification of workers labor
power in the communities that evolved. Fragmentation and disembedding
are also features of the class struggle where workers have to fight against
commodification at the hands of capital in conjunction with various state
policies (see Boland 1997: 344). Yelvington understands the social process
that Barriteaus social relations of gender and gender systems concepts inten-
tionally displace, namely that the primacy of capitalist private property
means the fundamental command of labor by capital.
This key observation is laden with implications for gender analysis in the
Caribbean, where populations were created and reproduced as labor sup-
plies for capital from slavery and indenture to the contemporary period.
Different forms of commodification of humans and their labor power have
come with the different moments of historical capitalism. Yelvington notes:
When identities such as ethnicity and gender are symbolized in such a way
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 71

as to make one set of workers different from another, then the owners reap
the benefits because the likelihood is reduced that workers will identify with
each other and collaborate against the owners (1995: 39). Labor produces
its opposite, which is capital, and, depending on how workers understand
this fact of producing the source of their own exploitation, they may or may
not take steps to refuse to produce capital. Different groups of workers have
complex class and nonclass social identities that tend to undermine working-
class solidarity and reinforce ruling-class social control over society.
Yelvington discusses how the state and capital look at gender relations in
the labor process. When capitalists, politicians, or state technocrats rational-
ize a preference for female workers in certain types of assembly production
work by stressing female dexterity, nimble fingers, and ready adjustment to
repetitive motion, they are using feminine gender to differentiate between
male and female workers in order to mask the exploitation of female work-
ers. This strategy, which helps capital to divide workers along gender lines,
also favors the states foreign investment strategy to attract a portion of glo-
bal capital and offer workers as cheap labor in hopes of meeting capital
accumulation imperatives. The state creates export processing zones that
prohibit trade unions and deny workers certain rights and benefits they are
more likely to obtain in unionized production sites. The state and capital
have a direct interest in the exploitation of workers: states and capital never
miss an opportunity to exploit gender and ethnicity in order to obstruct or
fracture worker solidarity. The articulation of cultural norms around wom-
anhood, family, respectability, professionalism, and other factors that condi-
tion the proletarianization process among female workers also conditions the
formation of class consciousness (Freeman 2000).
The gendering of the labor process involves a cultural and political strat-
egy that is also influenced by how technology and the technical division of
labor affect the class struggle. Foreign companies that depend on factor ad-
vantage in the Caribbean routinely stress raw materials, low wages, labor-
intensive techniques, rudimentary skills, and proximity to export markets.
Where dependence on cheap labor is key, female workers also become easy
targets. Clearly, the gendering of the labor and production processes is inte-
gral to the reproduction of capitalist social relations, depending on the state
of the productive forces. From the vantage point of capital and the state, the
gendering of labor is a conscious aspect of the capital accumulation strategy
that the state relies on to reproduce its own social and economic base (see
Yelvington 1995: 87; van der Aa 1995: 3233).
States take deliberate steps to cheapen the price of labor power to induce
or enhance competitiveness. In the process, capital redefines certain areas of
work as womens work, thereby marginalizing certain types of male workers,
with consequences for themselves and their dependents. Yuval-Davis and
72 / Hilbourne Watson

Anthias explain how women become implicated in nationalism through their

role as biological reproducers of the national collectivities; by conditioning,
guarding and reproducing the boundaries of restricted sexual or marital rela-
tions; their role in reproducing the national culture; by signifying notions of
national difference; and through their involvement in the struggles of the
nation (1989: 7; see McClintock 1996: 261). Women also participate in
reproducing societys intellectual culture, politics, ideologies and surplus la-
bor, which is capital. Culture is historical, and womens relationship to cul-
ture is bounded by history. It is the human history of nature that informs the
context for understanding that our culture is our nature.
McClintock argues that a feminist theory of nationalism must pay scru-
pulous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that con-
tinue to bedevil privileged forms of nationalism (1996: 261). With respect
to the concept of power, Yelvington begins, like Foucault, by looking at the
role of power in the construction of certain social and cultural categories,
but he parts with Foucault because the latter doesnt show how the very
categories themselves are contested. He also differs from Foucault by con-
centrating on the basis of power itself, in the process interjecting a Marxist
corrective (see Yelvington 1995: 13, 14; quotes here are from e-mail corre-
spondence with Yelvington, July 30, 2001). Foucaults view of power is not
at variance with the Cartesian method of separating and autonomizing the
components of social forms by reducing them to their existential aspects (see
Foucault 1977: 16; Yelvington 1995: 191). Yelvington stresses, where Fou-
cault does not, the relationships between the control over productive ar-
rangements, which are culturally defined, and the control over cultural cat-
egories that constitute these arrangements and presuppose them (1995: 14).
There is no doubt that ruling-class ideas and conceptions of power permeate
the ideological consciousness and practices of the exploited in society.
Yelvingtons anthropological perspective on power shows how and un-
der what conditions categories of the subject are reproduced and contested,
transformed and held constant, and how this activity is the result of a com-
plex interplay of material conditions and ideational forces (1995: 14; see
Moberg 1998: 52021). He specifies his own concern with the subjections of
social subjects and the material consequences of this placement . . . and the
degrees to which the exercise of powerincluding the power to subject . . .
in the factory is determined by ones labor and ones relation to the means of
production (1995: 14). Yelvingtons analysis indicates the impossibility of
producing thoughtful interpretations of gender power and nationalism, in
relation to the ideological process in capitalist societies, when the social rela-
tions and contradictions of capitalism are externalized or trivialized. Clearly,
his treatment of capitalist production relations suggests an awareness of the
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 73

distinction between the ontological and political economy categories of labor

(see Gull 2000).
McClintock suggests that the contradictoriness of womens subjectivities
is also to be found in these very symbols of the nations own fictive integrity
that simultaneously ground the doubleness of national history and its an-
tithesis (1996: 262). This doubleness of hierarchy and time in the conscious-
ness of the nation displaces the contradiction in the temporal anomaly
within nationalism . . . by figuring the contradiction in the representation of
time as a natural division of gender. . . . Nationalisms anomalous relation to
time is thus managed as a natural relation to gender (McClintock 1996:
263). The question becomes: Is gender a category of social power or does
gender create social power through its own complex of asymmetrical rela-
tions? (McClintock 1996: 267). Yelvingons argument on this score may be
amplified by locating nature and culture within a human history of nature
that gives meaning to social temporalization. In other words, one must un-
derstand culture to give meaning to nature and to represent it within time-
space, which is a dialectical unity (Watson 2001a). On these and other
points, Yelvington has made an important contribution to the scholarship on
gender, class, and ethnicity in Trinidad.
My second concern is how and where Yelvington locates Trinidad in the
global political economy, given his attention to global gender literature and
the fact that Trinidad is an integral part of global capitalism. To grasp this
point it is necessary to think about the global-national nexus as a fragmented
unitary structure, and to see the world not in static terms of national versus
international physical units but with the understanding that the dialectical
unitary structure anticipates mapping class, state, and nation beyond geo-
graphical strictures. Yelvington situates the Caribbean at the origin of the
modern world-system. He explores the nexus of political and economic
power relations on an international scale as they have operated in Trinidad,
as well as the local political and economic context within which the factory
and its workers are located (1995: 41). He understands that the early class,
ethnic, and gender formation processes unfolded around agricultural com-
modities like sugar and slave labor. Yelvington does not essentialize social
identities.
In his chapter Locating the Ethnography in History, Economy, and Soci-
ety Yelvington does not clarify the distinction between the creation of the
capitalist world-system as a particular historical form and the world
economy as a complex totality from which the capitalist system emerged. It
does not mean that Yelvington is unaware of this distinction. The reality is
that it has been only in the modern world, the bourgeois world, that the
economy comes to have a formal and separate existence and where the
74 / Hilbourne Watson

social spaces come to be constructed in the homogeneous terms of a logic of

productionor consumption, of a distribution of homogeneously produced
wealth; substantively, bourgeois rationality relies on a logic of production
(of the division of labor) to project those acts of violence . . . to impose its
order upon the multitude of communities it touches, with reference to both
the homogenizing tendencies of this order and the maneuvers through which
bourgeois rationality seeks to cut through the materiality and difference of
communities (and of the world of nature) and attempts to subject them to the
rational calculus of economic necessity (Callari and Ruccio 1996: 43). This
argument extends to how the capitalist West processes the differences it en-
counters on a global scale.
Yet there are consequences to taking the world-system for granted.
Yelvington does not clarify the process by which capitalism at once inte-
grated and fragmented the integral world economy, even though he appreci-
ates that Trinidad could not be successfully isolated from the wider world.
Historically, national sovereignty evolved as a necessary attribute of territo-
rial states through which the bourgeoisie could nationalize society to en-
hance its class rule. This is how the world economy was transformed into the
world-economy as a world fragmented and divided against itself. While
Yelvington details important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological
issues in national ethnography, he was not very specific about the linkages to
the heterogeneous global unitary stucture. Yelvington addresses how na-
tional states pursue national interests within the global totality to repro-
duce themselves and mediate conflicting and contradictory interests that
form along lines of class, gender, and ethnicity under global capitalist accu-
mulation, but he does this in ways that imply a dichotomy between the na-
tional and the international. This is a structural problem that plagues world-
systems analysis and carries over into Yelvingtons examination of the
industrialization by invitation strategy in the colonial period and the other
ways the Trinidadian state accommodated the world-system.
Yelvington also points to ways in which contradictions were mediated via
anticolonial nationalism, how the state supported and buttressed ethnic pa-
tronage and sought to strengthen a national bourgeoisie via state participa-
tion in a variety of industrial and commercial enterprises in the 1970s. In
addition he draws comparisons with the experiences of other Caribbean
states and other countries like Mexico. The intense competition national
states engage in to attract a share of global capital shows that they play
strategic roles in the intensification of capitalist competition, the restructur-
ing of the global division of labor, and the deepening of the global socializa-
tion of production. Bearing in mind that national states are conditioned by
their ties to territoriality and that capital accumulation is a global process, it
is important to see that how states deploy sovereignty to mediate capital
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 75

accumulation always presents states with an identity problem that tran-

scends their territoriality. In effect, even though social relations of production
may be studied through the medium of the national state for reasons that
include highlighting the national characteristics of the units that comprise the
real global market economy, it is important to see class relations beyond the
national state and to understand that the international system comprises not
just one state system but many different states and systems.
Yelvington mentions important commodities like petroleum and cocoa
and their role in shaping class, gender, and ethnic processes in Trinidad, and
while he understands the character of their international linkages, he does
not pay sufficient attention to them as global market commodities, partly
because he does not theorize what it means to argue that the real economy is
the global market economy: the whole is much greater than the sum of its
territorial components. His discussions of the crisis in the political economy
of Trinidad in the 1970s and 1980s and of the much earlier convergence with
the U.S. economy are not specified at the level of the world-economy, which
informs the national-international dichotomy that dominates social science
theorizing, especially realist and liberal international relations conceptions of
the international system of states. This problem recurs in Yelvingtons na-
tional analysis of the changing gender and economic roles of women and
men in Trinidad. Yelvington would have to specify how national autonomy
features in globalized social relations, since sovereignty also shapes national
identities of class, gender, and ethnicity through politics, culture, and nation-
alism. It is not enough to draw international comparisons with development
and capital accumulation strategies of other countries, which Yelvington
clearly does; rather, to begin with the global market economy as the real
economy is the key way to begin to clarify the degree to which Caribbean
nations and national states are unbound in global capitalism (see Basch,
Schiller, and Blanc 1994).
States adopt the policies that give national space greater exposure within
international processes. Notably, states shift key areas of national decision
making to the world level as part of the strategy to attract capital, in the
process subordinating a variety of national issues to global determination,
consistent with the changing character of capitalism. These same policies
contribute to marketing female bodies for capital accumulation objectives
and help to cheapen female labor power, for example, when states pass laws
that create export processing zones. These and other measures intensify pro-
letarianization and force women workers labor power to undergo more in-
tensive forms of commodification. Postmodernist proponents of body poli-
tics, misunderstanding these critical issues, externalize labor as a political
economy category and retire issues of exploitation to the realm of the etcet-
era. Yelvington does not succumb to this error. Of course, in such circum-
76 / Hilbourne Watson

stances workers are forced to wage anticommodification struggles against

the state and capital, so that what may look like local versus global issues is
more indicative of contradictions within glocalization.
At the center of a theoretic project on gender power is the idea that state
sovereignty is a particular type of property relation that was nationalized in
the consolidation of national states within the internationalization of capital-
ism. Processes of coercion, capital expansion, and the internationalization of
the European states system intensified globalization and nationalization as
a contradictory unity (see Tilly 1990). Sovereignty, citizenship, culture, and
nationalism presuppose a system of economic, social, and political relations
that operate beyond national space. Yelvington inadvertently sets up a na-
tional-global dichotomy in which he equates the intensification of the spread
of global capital with cultural penetration (1995: 7879) from without,
yet there is an enduring need to map class and nation and aspects of culture
beyond the geographical limits of each territorial state.
This way of framing the issue carries implications for gender, class,
ethnicity, and culture, given their structural embeddedness in complex modes
of expression through social relations. Workers sell labor power and acquire
particular personalities as workers. They follow the disciplinary rules of the
capitalist market in relation to consumption and the production of surplus
labor, which is capital, but they also modify those rules in the anticommo-
dification struggles. Their class position and their subjective sense of who
they are and where they fit into the working class and into society also affect
their outlook on politics, nationalism, unionism, proletarianization, and
more, and they experience all of these things not as mere ontological entities
but as alienated agents who are embedded in social relations that require
them to reproduce others as the primary condition of their own social repro-
duction. They do so as female and male, skilled and unskilled, and young and
middle-aged persons. Clearly, the relationship of class to culture also condi-
tions class consciousness (see Freeman 2000: 6465).
It is harder for women at the point of production and in family life to
negotiate the rapids of the capitalist process, for they must contend with
patriarchy, misogyny, masculinity, the mystifying logic of Christianity and
other religions, unequal pay for similar and equal work, the double day of
factory and home or office and home, and much more. These and other
problems make it very difficult for women to see themselves foremost as
workers, though they understand they are of the working class (Freeman
2000: 65). The dialectic of the capitalist process fragments the social to the
point of making it seem to disappear. Fortunately, Yelvington is not seduced
by this phenomenon, even when he becomes preoccupied with certain post-
modern concerns around resistance and nonessentialism (see Lewis 1998:
172).
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 77

Yelvington observes that ethnicity, class, and gender are united and
forged in a labor process particular to a particular kind of capitalism. . . .
Class relations are composed of ethnic and gender relations. That is, class
as a conjunction of the forms of capital achieved through closureis defined
to varying degrees by the way in which ethnicity and gender are used in the
recruitment to it. This means that the imaginary networks of culture can
have no natural origin, inherent qualities, or any closure outside the social-
historical practices of groups of people, because these are constructed with
regard to material processes (1995: 238; see Lewis 1998). This argument,
like so many others in the study, makes a significant contribution to a theory
of gender power, and it also strengthens the relevance of Yelvingtons strate-
gic contribution to gender theory within Caribbean social science intellectual
culture.

The Cuban Revolution and the Gender Discourse

In a speech in March 1980, Fidel Castro declared: I think women should be

promoted more at the state and party level, I honestly do. It is our duty, our
moral obligation, and all the more so when I think that our party is still
largely a party of men, and our state is still largely a state of men (quoted in
Smith and Padula 1996: 45). Castro made an accurate statement about the
highly masculine and patriarchal structure of the state and Communist Party
in Cuba after twenty years of revolution that had brought many progressive
changes to the lives of Cuban women and society as a whole. Neither the
state nor the Communist Party of Cuba (CPC) had made any serious attempt
to demolish patriarchy or hegemonic masculinity in their key institutions.
The persistence of patriarchy and masculinity in the state and party rein-
forced patriarchy in the family, the workplace, and other arenas. Much has
been done in Cuba since 1959 to involve women in the affairs of the country,
but only by inserting women into largely undisturbed patriarchal structures
and institutions. The transition to socialism in Cuba did not abolish the
patriarchal relations that were inherited from capitalism and Catholicism.
This is where my concern turns to Smith and Padula, whose 1996 work
emphasizes sex and revolution with special reference to women in socialist
Cuba. Smith and Padula have made an important contribution to the litera-
ture on this subject, with a focus on the Federacin de Mujeres Cubanas
(FMC) (Federation of Cuban Women). The FMC is a key institution to study
in Cuba for several reasons. Fidel Castro created it in 1960; thereafter all
womens organizations were merged with the FMC to form a single body to
address womens issues and to avoid competition with the key organizations
and institutions of the revolution. The FMC did not seek to promote a spe-
cific or concrete gender or feminist perspective for Cuban women; rather the
78 / Hilbourne Watson

FMC eschewed gender as a bourgeois preoccupation, and many of the female

leaders of the FMC endorsed the very patriarchal strategy of the state and
CPC.
Smith and Padula emphasize sex and revolution in relation to religion,
culture, the state, the Communist Party, the labor movement, health issues,
welfare, education, employment, family, sexuality, workplace matters, inter-
national affairs, and numerous other concerns, with considerable attention
to gender issues. They do an effective job of analyzing gender with reference
to the FMC. They make useful connections in documenting the contributions
of particular women to the Cuban revolution starting in the 1950s, and
showing clearly that the involvement and participation of women made the
difference to the outcome of the armed struggle that brought the revolution
to power. They also discuss the historical antecedents to womens involve-
ment in socialist and communist affairs. Yet, in spite of this significant con-
tribution, the book is lacking in a number of areas that make it necessary to
look elsewhere for ideas to help elucidate issues of sexuality, gender, power,
and nationalism around the Cuban revolution.
Notably, Smith and Padula do not address the globalization of the gender
discourse in any deliberate way even when they discuss the international
linkages and activities of the FMC. They do not specify a theory of gender
power, though they point out some of the serious shortcomings of the FMC
in failing to devise a strategy for building feminist power within the revolu-
tion. Yet they understand how and why womens socialization predisposed
them to internalize patriarchal ideology; this is evident from their discussion
of the impact of Catholic religious and sexual values on everyday conscious-
ness. They are inattentive to the impact of the economic crisis that the Cuban
state calls the Special Period in Peacetime, and they ignore the issue of sex
work and the ways race, class, and gender intersect with tourism and sex
work. In the matter of providing a critique of the Cuban model and the FMC
within it, Smith and Padula fall back on a classic liberalism, even as they
provide balance in their treatment and show sympathy for the major achieve-
ments of the Cuban revolution and the positive ways it has changed womens
lives.
Smith and Padula addressed manifestations of Catholic cultural tradition
in Cuba before and after the revolution and their impact on sexuality (see
also Dealy 1992: 13; Lumsden 1996; Landau 1996). The study of class and
gender in Cuba poses particular problems that are associated with the na-
tional and global dynamics of the Cuban revolution. The Cuban revolution
has had to confront aspects of gender and sexuality that surfaced in the
globalization of the gender discourse, although the revolution resisted em-
bracing feminist discourses on gender (see Molyneux 1996: 1115). The
patriarchal cultural and ideological values of the male leaders routinely asso-
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 79

ciated masculinity with normal power, war, revolution, and control of

politics and defined womens roles in the domestic sphere. Not surprisingly,
Cuban female revolutionaries, who served as combatants, nurses, teachers,
intellectuals, propagandists, fund-raisers, and underground intelligence op-
eratives during the armed struggle, had to challenge the male leadership to
prove they were worthy to engage in armed combat and to assume leadership
positions.
According to Smith and Padula, Cubas sexual panorama was compli-
cated by race and class. The values of Spanish Catholicismits sexual repres-
siveness and Moorish emphasis on containing women in the homereigned
among the middle and upper classes. Among the masses, however, Afro-
Cuban religions had a powerful influence. These religions allowed men and
women more equal status and recognized both male and female sexuality
(1996: 170). But Smith and Padula do not provide much insight into issues
and problems of Afro-Cuban gender and sexuality where the state, class,
race, and ethnicity intersect. The Spanish invented the concept of purity of
blood shortly before the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain
and incorporated racialized concepts and practices of blood and belonging
into their religious and colonial policies in the New World (Maurer 1995:
1105). The attempt to construct a white supremacist ideology in colonial and
postcolonial Cuba, a country with a majority nonwhite population, was defi-
nitely linked to a strategy to marginalize Afro-Cuban contributions to Cuban
national independence struggles and Cuban national identity, citizenship,
and culture.
White supremacists in Cuba carried out violent acts against all of the
social classes and strata of the black Cuban population at strategic points in
the nineteenth century and in 1912 (see Helg 1995). Those acts were part of
a larger plan to create a new state with a new white nationalist ideology and
solidify white minority rule in an independent Cuba. In the 1912 massacre of
Afro-Cubans, the white Cuban bourgeoisie sought to erase any memory of
the revolutionary contributions of Afro-Cubans to the anticolonial struggles.
However, the concentration of capital and the centralization of the sugar
industry in Cuba in the nineteenth century produced a new agricultural pro-
letariat by bringing the different ethnic strains closer and engendering new
forms of ethnic mixing, with the effect of moderating narrow race-based
thinking. Such considerations are important when dealing with issues of
class, race, gender, and sexuality in Cuba.
Smith and Padula stress that sexual reality in Cuban society has been
considerably more complex. . . . The fact that both women and men wield
sexual power is celebrated in Cuba (1996: 171). Until very recently, the
Cuban revolution treated homosexuality and lesbianism as social deviations
from the socialist sexuality the revolution has attempted to forge (see
80 / Hilbourne Watson

Rundle 2001). The FMC reportedly barred known lesbians from its ranks
and provided a forum for neighbors to denounce others. Up until the 1980s,
it was customary for homosexuals and lesbians to be denied jobs like teach-
ing that would bring them in contact with children (Smith and Padula
1996: 173; see Molyneux 1996).10 In the mid-1960s, supposed revolution-
ary zealots placed suspected homosexuals in work camps; in the 1970s, hard-
liners fired gays from cultural jobs. But the gays sued and, less than a decade
later, a Cuban court declared their firings illegal (Landau 1996: 10). By the
close of the 1980s, homosexuality had been decriminalized in Cuba, but
homophobic taboos have lingered, partly as a reflection of how patriarchal
culture conditions subjectivity (see Lewis and James in this volume).
Attempts to fashion an ideology of socialist sexuality proved politically
and culturally problematic; for example, the socialist sexuality theme tended
to compensate for womens marginalization in ways that threatened ma-
chismo and Catholicism, which defined female sexuality as passive and sub-
ordinate to male sexual assertiveness and dominance. The revolution gave
Cuban women control of their bodies partly by providing universal access
to divorce, abortion, and contraception, essential elements in womens ad-
vancement. New visions of womens sexuality emerged as patriarchal control
of womens bodies was challenged (Smith and Padula 1996: 182; see also
Molyneux 1996). Even with this challenge to Catholic orthodoxy, the revo-
lution preserved patriarchal traditions inside nationalist themes about father-
land (state) and motherland (nation): both of these symbolic elements of
national parentage are gender constructs that reinforce nationalism, popu-
lism, and patriarchy with destabilizing effects on feminine gender. This has
been instrumental in how the revolution became a unifying populist symbol
of national unity and national power that projects beyond class, race,
ethnicity, and gender under the leadership of the state and the CPC.
From the outset the revolution saw homosexual males as a challenge to its
own masculinist thrust (Lumsden 1996). Landau argues that cojones is a
trademark of Cubas special brand of machismo, in which the rooster crows
loudly of his prowess. Machismo in Cuba . . . means tough, brave and virile;
. . . the Latin American variant of patriarchal sexism (1996: 10). The
Cuban anti-imperialist struggle has influenced definitions of masculinity,
sexuality, and sexual politics under the banner of socialist democracy. The
Cuban revolution defined democracy in ways that diverge from liberal con-
ceptions that reduce society to an assemblage of sovereign (individual) sub-
jects with individual rights and responsibilities and reduce class relations to
technical relations between individuals and/or things. The idea of exploited
classes struggling against the commodification of their labor power is alien to
the liberal outlook. Liberal assumptions seem to be at work in the ideas of
Smith and Padula (1996), Bengelsdorf (1994), and Molyneux (1996), whose
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 81

starting points are informed by presuppositions about individuals whose

desires seem to mature in the interstices of the universal market economy
and society (Bartra 1992: 12526). The concept of rights in the Cuban revo-
lution revolves around national identity as a unifying principle. The socialist
state engenders centralism rather than the disembedding found in market
societies, and it fuses civil society with itself, as opposed to intensifying the
separation of civil society from the state through fragmentation, market an-
archy, and the alienation of power.
Ellen Wood reminds us that the fundamental liberal ideal assumes and
necessitates the alienation of power as a necessary evil and as a positive
goodfor example, . . . to permit fundamentally individualistic human be-
ings to occupy themselves with private concerns. This is why for liberalism
representation is a solution not a problem. In reality, democracy is about the
struggle for popular power, which means the disalienation of power.
The liberal ideology that Smith and Padula embrace makes it impossible
for them to understand that no form of political rights or citizenship or uni-
versal suffrage or sovereign (subject) autonomy can be set up in bourgeois
societies to negate the constitutive principle of capitalism, the relation be-
tween . . . capital and labour because the limits to capitalist democracy . .
. end where appropriation begins. The capitalist process is set up in such a
way as to seal the power of capital off from any kind of democratic account-
ability that can translate into the disalienation of power (Wood 1991: 176).
In the Cuban revolution, political rule extends to all social relations,
which makes socialist sexuality a politicocultural project inside the revolu-
tion (see Stubbs 1994). In revolutionary Cuban sexuality, lesbianism is
viewed as less of a problem than homosexuality, because lesbianism is linked
with two myths found in Catholic cultural ideology, namely female sexual
passivity and the weak and childlike feminine woman. In contrast, homo-
sexuality symbolizes a violation of the heterosexual ethic and male sexual
vigor, assertiveness, and manliness. It could be that lesbianism also exposes
certain masculine insecurities about manhood and its link to womanhood
and the nation that the FMC, the state, and the CPC were not willing to
acknowledge publicly. Heterosexual males might also see lesbianism and
homosexuality as a rejection of machismo and forms of competition that
contradict the roosters sense of its prowess.
The sexual imperative, as conditioned by the imperiousness of male
sexuality, reinvented the fallen woman, the mistress, the prostitute
(Smith and Padula 1996: 170, 171) as one of the imaginaries of Cuban mas-
culinity (see Dealy 1992: 13). Many Cuban women, including members of
the FMC, have reinforced the patriarchal character of the revolutionary state
in ways that leave gender contradictions unresolved. The crisis that the Cu-
ban State calls the Special Period in Peacetime has also given rise to new
82 / Hilbourne Watson

initiatives on gender in which both domestic events and the global gender
discourse play an important role (Molyneux 1996: 2123, 4548).
Allahar (1995: 6466) offers a number of pointed criticisms of arguments
such as the ones advanced by Smith and Padula and Bengelsdorf, but Allahar
does not account for the ways the Cuban state and the FMC sought to sepa-
rate womens issues from gender, nor does he distinguish between the inclu-
sive goals of socialism for a gender-blind society and the contradictions of
patriarchy in Cuban society. It is also unhelpful for Allahar to insist that the
struggle to free the economic and political institutions from capitalist and
imperialist control had thus . . . to precede the struggle to free women (67),
as these are not two separate struggles. Allahar does not pay careful attention
to how, when, why, and where women entered the revolutionary struggle in
Cuba, and the persistence of patriarchy. Part of the problem with Allahars
formulation is his implication that socialist construction has a favorable dis-
position toward gender blindness; such an argument suggests that patriarchy
is predisposed to dissolve itself in the strategic measures the revolutionary
Cuban state implemented to secure the revolution as the precondition for
transforming the material and social condition of women. In effect, argu-
ments like Allahars differ from Smith and Padulas and Bengeldorfs in de-
gree more than in substance.

Culture, Gender, Sex Work, the State, and Neoliberal Restructuring in Cuba

Smith and Padula leave undisturbed the racialized notions of cultural plural-
ism, without adequately specifying the complexities of gender and feminism
in Cuba that Strout (1995), Davidson (1996), Fusco (1998), Cabezas (1998)
and Rundle (2001) explore in the relationship between gender, sexuality,
power, jineterismo,11 and nationalism and other issues, in relation to the new
strategies of the state and civil society organizations like the FMC.
Cubas antagonistic relationship with the United States has played an in-
strumental role in the radicalization of Cuban women and men along lines of
revolutionary nationalism. This has helped the state to reinforce patriarchal
dominance, by stressing the imperialist threat and the negative economic
consequences of the U.S. economic blockade. Under such conditions, Cuban
revolutionary nationalism not only has remained the sensibility of the patri-
archal state but has also anchored womanhood and the familytwo social
institutions that are close to the hearts of women as mothers and spouses
to the masculinist notion that, according to the FMC, Fidel Castro was not
only the son of all Cuban mothers but also guide to all Cuban women
(Smith and Padula 1996: 54). It is one thing to see women as the markers
of the ethnic group, . . . the custodians of the groups values, virtues, and
culture; it is quite another matter to explore how such cultural projects of
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 83

nationalism routinely mask or subvert gender and how women can be se-
duced into equating their bodies with the registers of social and ideological
symbols while their sexuality becomes important boundary markers
(Yelvington 1995: 17879). Gender, sexuality, and ethnicity intersect at this
crucial cultural juncture to suture the groups ethnie and blur the formal
boundaries between the state and civil society.
Rundle argues: The phenomenon of jineterismo, while being an activity
that many Cubans regardless of race and class position engage in, has been
racialised to the extent that young Afrocubans have come to be seen almost
automatically as jineteros in certain contexts. They are consequently exposed
to intense police harassment, aimed at containing jineterismo. While the state
is complicit in packaging Cuba as a destination of licentious and sensual
Afrocuban women, it simultaneously tries to contain their activities and
projects anxieties over fading legitimacy onto Afrocuban women (2001: 9).
The Cuban revolution has demonstrated fundamental sensitivity to sexual
equality for women and mennotably, women won rights under the revolu-
tion that they did not have beforebut the revolutionary state preserved the
largely patriarchal nuclear family (Molyneux 1996: 27, 1517; Strout 1995:
14) as the dominant form of the socialist family.
The FMC, which was instrumental in mobilizing Cuban women to defend
the revolution, has played a role in bringing women out into the public
realms of work and the state that the revolution reconstructed. It was cus-
tomary for the FMC to contrast womanhood with gender as a compensatory
move that favored patriarchy. The FMC limited the expression of womens
multiple identities and revealed the tension between the philosophical sym-
bolic ontological category of woman and the historicocultural construct of
women and feminine gender.
Dilla (1995) argues that women expect greater opportunities to express
. . . aspirations in an autonomous manner against a patriarchal order weak-
ened, but not destroyed by more than thirty years of revolutionary life (in
Molyneux 1996: 4). According to Dilla, the scope of the changes in Cuba
since the late 1980s do not signal an adjustment to an existing . . . capitalist
mode of operation but a radical restructuring of the political economy, the
form of social regulation and cultural-ideological production (1999: 2).
Dilla connects the key changes to the emergence of a technocratic-entrepre-
neurial bloc and analyzes the implications for the distribution of power and
socialism itself (1999: 3). Old and new issues of class, race, ethnicity, work-
ers rights, and gender have surfaced in Cubas social relations in the Special
Period.
The growth of private sector employment via FTZs (Free Trade Zones)
also reflects changes in the relationship between the state, labor, and capital.
Growing numbers of women and men have turned to sex work to deal with
84 / Hilbourne Watson

la lucha (the struggle) by making money in the street as opposed to

through regular employment (Rundle 2001: 3; see Fusco 1998: 15257).
Pragmatism, cynicism, and individualism are on the rise among workers
(Rundle 2001), in the face of the erosion of socialist property and power
(Dilla 1999: 11). Attempts to treat sex work as a moral issue have the effect
of masking the structural contradictions of production, employment, and
capital accumulation and reducing a political economy issue to an ontologi-
cal problem. Since sex work is not reducible to a matter of pure individual
choice, it does not rise or fall on the moral stigma and burden that patriarchal
ideology assigns to certain women (see Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).
The Cuban state, its functionaries such as the police who monitor sex
workers activities, and some persons in the white minority population in
Cuba have been treating sex work or jineterismo as a moral issue for reasons
that are steeped in old-fashioned racism (see Strout 1995: 56; Cabezas
1998). Rundle mentions that even though two recent Cuban studies . . .
concluded that the majority of jineteras were white or mestiza, the domi-
nant tendency in Cuba has been to associate jineterismo with low cultural
values and low morality among Afro-Cubans, especially women (2001:
2). This tendency gives the state a way to treat sex work as alien to Cuban
socialism, effectively misrepresenting historical economic and social contra-
dictions as problems peculiar to an Afro-Cuban culture (see Fusco 1998:
157, 156). This point keeps in perspective the gender contradictions associ-
ated with marketing a society or segment thereof for tourism, by emphasizing
certain racialized cultural myths about the low morality, licentiousness, and
promiscuity of a segment of the population, namely Afro-Cuban women.
There are growing economic disparities and racialized class and gender
inequalities within Cuba. Dilla wonders whether the refusal of the Cuban
bureaucracy to share its legitimate competence in matters of social control
might be a function of its disposition to present to international capital a
country in good order, incompatible with the existence of combative autono-
mous organizations (1999: 10). Cuba has been adjusting to neoliberalism in
part by cheapening the labor power of its workers in order to capture a share
of global capital through the medium of tourism. This being so, the state is
not sympathetic to allowing the working class to make any waves that might
drive away investors and tourists and put foreign exchange and capital accu-
mulation at risk.
It would be very difficult for the Cuban state to put the lid on sex work
without undermining its ability to raise foreign exchange, create new jobs,
service the expensive tourism plant, expand the ranks of the new elite, pay the
external debt, make a profit, and satisfy neoliberal criteria of fiscal and mon-
etary responsibility. Jineterismo is symptomatic of Cubas shift to the model
of national states as particular forms of global capitalist relations (Holloway
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 85

1995; Dilla 1999: 5). Part of the price of relying on foreign investment to
expand tourism and protect socialist gains like free education, health care,
and other social goods is that it depresses the standard of living of all catego-
ries of workers, from the most proficient professional and technical workers
to kindred workers.
Jineterismo provides subsistence for many family members and depen-
dents, male and female. In rationalizing their behavior as a form of freedom
to get out, enjoy life, go to concerts or resorts, get dollars with which to
obtain many goods that most Cubans lack, jineteras and jineteros also high-
light the contrast of enclaves of luxury coexisting with a sea of deprivation
that is compounded by the social problems associated with the crisis of the
Cuban currency and trading markets. Race, sexuality, and gender issues con-
verge around this harsh reality (Strout 1995: 911; Davidson 1996: 4246).
Jineteras/-os pay a heavy price for such freedom, as many of them expose
themselves to racial abuse, child abuse, violence, drugs, HIV infection, and
other forms of demoralization, though these types of abuse are not necessar-
ily limited to sex workers (see Davidson 1996: 4042).
Afro-Cubans feature heavily in jineterismo partly because they were re-
markably absent from the large-scale emigration of the 1960s, so they do not
have relatives in Miami or in other foreign places to send them money and
gifts as many of their white and mestizo counterparts do. Afro-Cubans feel
the impact of the restructuring crisis with greater intensity.12 Jineterismo also
dramatizes the racialization and denigration of Afro-Cuban social and sexual
identities. For example, Afro-Cubans face police harassment when they ap-
pear in public with white tourists, while white Cubans interact with tourists
without ever being accused by the police of transgressing any norms. Cubas
adjustment to the market, which requires rolling back the economic and
social borders of the state, also narrows the distance between economics and
politics and between exploitation and coercion.
Global monetarist austerity has dealt severe blows to Cuban socialism,
which continues to adjust to the norms of class power and the rule of global
money (Marazzi 1995: 88, 87). Under capitalism money abides as the most
abstract form of capitalist property and the supreme social power through
which social reproduction is subordinated to capitalist reproduction
(Clarke 1988: 1314). Cuban socialism has moved into an orbit of credit
where the stability of credit depends on the capacity of capital to exploit
labour effectively; capital must exploit labour effectively because capital
has not only to generate surplus value sufficiently to allow accumulation but
also to satisfy its creditors (Bonefeld 1995: 204; see Holloway 1995: 134
35). Neoliberalism compounds the contradictions of Cuban socialism with
profound implications for class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and the revolu-
tionary project as a whole.
86 / Hilbourne Watson

Conclusion

Class, race, and gender relationships are not autonomous realms of social life
but rather differentiated and inextricably connected parts of sociohistorical
reality. Capitalism rests on labor having to produce surplus labor, which is
capital; in effect, the racial, ethnic, and gender configurations of class are
critical to how capital pursues its accumulation projects. The studies by
Barriteau, Yelvington, and Smith and Padula converge at a number of levels
and diverge at others; gender, class, the state, power, race, sexuality, ethnicity,
and nationalism feature in their works in varying degrees. Yelvington is the
most explicit on themes of globalization, ethnicity, and neoliberalism that do
not really concern Barriteau or Smith and Padula. Liberalism frames Smith
and Padulas argument. Barriteau asserts the primacy of a postmodern femi-
nist outlook with liberalism well covered in its tracks. Barriteau also situates
gender within the traditional postwar modernization paradigm with empha-
sis on development planning in Barbados. Contrary to what she might as-
sume, Barriteaus Postmodernist Feminist theorizing project has deep roots in
orthodox political theory.
Yelvingtons approach locates theories within the social relations of pro-
duction; Barriteaus and Smith and Padulas do not. The route to emancipa-
tion for Smith and Padula is back to the future of liberalism; for Barriteau
emancipation is not a priority, given her postmodernist outlook. Yelvington
is sensitive to the role of labor in producing capital, hence his concern with
how exploitation is linked to the production of power. Gender, sexuality, and
nationalism intersect in the three studies, though each society brings its own
characteristics. Sex tourism has a specific articulation in Cuba, but it reso-
nates across the Caribbean and, regionally, it resonates with the feminization
of certain areas of production and employment, though not all sex workers
in Caribbean countries are females. Sex tourism in Cuba is altering the mate-
rial and imaginary networks of sexual politics in that country.
It is only when we make the critical distinction between labor as an onto-
logical category and labor as a political economy category that we can begin
to make sense of how women and men relate as workers in the political
economy of capitalism. Yelvington makes a key contribution in this respect.
There are fundamental differences between Barriteaus entrepreneurial
women in Barbados and how they have to fight for visibility in the economy
and Cuban jineteras who have to navigate the rapids of la lucha. One won-
ders how women from such different social classes might find effective femi-
nist solidarity under concrete conditions of neoliberalism in any Caribbean
country. Issues ranging widelyfrom state development planning in Barba-
dos to class, gender, and ethnicity in the production of power in Trinidad to
sexual politics in Cubamediate and are mediated through the states strat-
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 87

egies to attract and immobilize portions of global capital for economic and
social reproduction and through the ways these states go about adjusting
society to that imperative.
Barriteaus autonomous feminist epistemology on behalf of postmod-
ern feminist loyalties is nestled within the fundamental capitalist process,
where some womens surplus labor sustains other women. Global capitalism
reproduces the conditions that complicate womens realities, but the conse-
quences are not the same for female capitalists, office workers, and/or rural
farm laborers. The restructuring of gender relations across the Caribbean is
inseparable from capitalist restructuring. Deconstructionists are not im-
pressed by the idea of the collective determination of society as a whole;
Barriteau seems to prefer equity with individualism but seems unmindful that
the idea of realizing individual rights independently of collective social life
(Fox-Genovese 1991: 244), even under liberalism, is utopian.
In sum, Barriteau offers a rather traditional and conservative way of look-
ing at gender relations. Like the fictive state of nature where it originates, this
disembedded cultural conception of gender has little to do with historical
gender relations. In fact, it reveals the affinity between postmodernism and
certain cultural constants in liberal Western political thought.
In contrast Yelvington steers clear of the particular postmodernist slip-
pages that collapse history and culture into nature. Understanding that labor
produces capital keeps Yelvingtons argument in earshot of emancipatory
strategies. For their part, even though Smith and Padula may see liberalism as
the route to Cubas future, they do not necessarily anticipate that women can
do it by themselves without men, as there is still a sense of the social collec-
tivity in their liberal frame of reference.
Each painful step in the historical struggles against bitter cane in the Car-
ibbean found Caribbean working-class men and women fighting against
commodification of their bodies and their labor power. Today the struggle is
against the debilitating effects of a host of neoliberal components that in-
clude tourism. One of the distinguishing features of the neoliberal project is
that it openly subordinates what is left of national determination to the glo-
bal movement of capital regardless of the country.
The studies by the three authors show that gender relations can have no
autonomy from the process of economic restructuring, which is intended to
rationalize exploitation on a global scale with glocalized consequences. The
authors look toward the future: Smith and Padula think liberalism is the
redeeming hope; Yelvington understands that so long as labor has to repro-
duce capital, class must remain central; Barriteau settles for deconstructing
the social collectivity and leaves it to an autonomous feminist epistemology
to liberate women, while the merely complicating nuisance of capital speaks
power to truth!
88 / Hilbourne Watson

Notes

I would like to thank Linden Lewis and Kevin Yelvington for very useful comments
and suggestions on a previous draft of this essay.
1. See Overview of the worlds women in 1995" from The Worlds Women 1995:
Trends and Statistics (extract) ST/ESA/STA/SER/.K/12, 1995, Document 119, in The
United Nations and the Advancement of Women 19451996, p. 584.
2. Therborn in Science, Class, and Society argues compellingly that Marxism
emerged in frontal opposition with bourgeois sociology and classical political
economy within the Enlightenment. This fact is lost on Barriteau (see Barriteau 1994:
86).
3. Barriteau (1994: 5557) conflates Marxist and neoclassical views of develop-
ment in an inaccurate and misleading manner. Space does not permit an ample
response to Barriteaus misrepresentations and distortions of Marxist theory relative
to wage labor and nonwage labor and productive and nonproductive labor and
Marxisms relationship to socialist feminist thought.
4. For a discussion of the various approaches and frameworks in the multivocal
and multitheoretic feminist discourse on gender in international relations, see Syl-
vester 1994; see also Persram 1994.
5. See Baudrillard (1987: 40) for his critique of Foucaults concept of power.
6. Barriteau (1995) has provided an extensive interpretation and critique of the
range of academic and policy perspectives that span the realm of feminist scholarship
in the Caribbean. There is no reason to retrace that argument here.
7. Barriteau labors under the impression that the modern and the postmodern can
be separated at the technical divide between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment
discourses. For studies that address many aspects of the problems of modernity and
the postmodern condition, see, for example, Harvey 1989 and ONeill 1994.
8. R. T. Smith (1992) argues that the biologizing of social relations . . . is perhaps
an intrinsic part of the structure of egalitarian individualistic social orders (cited in
Maurer 1995, p. 1102, 1105, notes 43 and 55).
9. See Castoriadis (1991: 14849) for a discussion of what he calls the social
side of the social fabrication of the individual in relation to the whole complex
of institutions in which the human being is steeped as soon as it is born. Castoriadis
argues that the newborn infant can only become an individual if it internalizes the
institutions of society.
10. Enloe (1993: 19) argues that the representation of the Cold War as a rivalry
between two superpowers and as a conflict between good and evil allowed the
gendering of processes around that conflict to be seen outside gender relations. There
is no doubt that Cubas own relationship to the Cold War also influenced how the
Cuban state and organizations like the FMC treated gender, feminism, and sexuality.
11. Jineterismovariously rendered as gold digging, horseback riding, and
breaking in a horse (i.e., sex workers riding tourists)refers to the new form of
commercial sex tourism in Cuba. Jineterismo is found across the gender spectrum and
is affecting sex and gender relations in Cuba, owing largely to the economic crisis and
the explosion of tourism since the late 1980s.
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 89

12. Strout (1995) and Davidson (1996) discuss at some length the dimensions of
racism in sex tourism in Cuba, and they explain the dynamics at play in how sex
tourists rationalize their own behavior in dealing with Afro-Cuban jineteras (or
jineteros). White sex tourists carry a vast amount of racist baggage, which they draw
on to rationalize how and why they have sexual intercourse with Afro-Cuban
jineteras/-os.

Bibliography

Allahar, Anton. Women, Feminism, and Socialism in Cuba. Inter-American Review

of Bibliography 45, nos. 12 (1995): 5372.
Atluri, Tara. When the Closet Is a Region: Homophobia, Heterosexism and Nation-
alism in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Working paper no. 5. Centre for Gender
and Development Studies, UWI, Cave Hill, March 2001.
Barriteau, Violet Eudine [Eudine Barriteau-Foster]. The Construct of a Postmod-
ernist Feminist Theory for Caribbean Social Science Research. Social and Eco-
nomic Studies 41, no. 2 (1992): 143.
. Gender and Development Planning in the Postcolonial Caribbean: Female
Entrepreneurs and the Barbadian State. Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1994.
. Socialist Feminist Theory and Caribbean Women: Transcending Dualisms.
Social and Economic Studies 44, nos. 23 (1995): 2563.
. Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-
Century Caribbean. Feminist Review, no. 59 (summer 1998): 186210.
Barrow, Christine, and J. E. Greene. Small Business in Barbados: A Case of Survival.
Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute of Social and Economic Research, UWI, 1979.
Bartra, Roger. The Imaginary Networks of Political Power. Translated by Claire
Joysmith. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, eds. Nations Un-
bound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-States. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Translated by Nicole Dufresne. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1987.
Bengelsdorf, Carollee. The Problem of Democracy in Cuba. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1994.
Bolles, A. Lynn. Sister Jamaica: A Study of Women, Work, and Households in
Kingston. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996.
Bonefeld, Werner. Money, Equality and Exploitation: An Interpretation of Marxs
Treatment of Money. In Global Capital, National State and the Politics of
Money, edited by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, 178209. New York: St.
Martins Press, 1995.
Brenner, Neil. Global Cities, Glocal States: Global City Formation and State Terri-
torial Restructuring in Contemporary Europe. Review of International Political
Economy 5, no. 1 (1998): 137.
Byron, Jessica. Gender and Human Rights in the Caribbean. Paper delivered at the
90 / Hilbourne Watson

twenty-fifth annual Caribbean Studies Association conference, Castries, St. Lucia,

May 2000.
Byron, Jessica, and Diana Thorburn. Gender and International Relations: A Global
Perspective and Issues for the Caribbean. Feminist Review, no. 59 (summer
1998): 21132.
Cabezas, Amalia Luca. Discourses of Prostitution: The Case of Cuba. In Global
Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, edited by Kamala Kempadoo
and Jo Doezema. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Callari, Antonio, and David F. Ruccio, eds. Postmodern Materialism and the Future
of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition. Hanover, N.H.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philoso-
phy. Edited by David Ames Curtis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Clarke, Simon. Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State. Aldershot:
Edward Elgar; Brookfield, Vt.: Gower, 1988.
Cuales, Sonia. Theoretical Considerations on Class and Gender Consciousness. In
Gender in Caribbean Development, edited by Patricia Mohammed and Catherine
Shepherd. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, Women and Develop-
ment Studies Project, 1988.
Davidson, Julia OConnell. Sex Tourism in Cuba. Race & Class 38, no. 1 (1996):
3948.
Dealy, Glen Caudill. The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos. Boulder: Westview Press,
1992.
Dilla, Haraldo, ed. La democracia en Cuba y el diferendo con los Estados Unidos.
Havana: Centro de Estudios sobre Amrica, 1995.
. Comrades and Investors: The Uncertain Transition in Cuba. In The Social-
ist Register 1999, edited by Leo Panitch. London: Merlin Press, 1999.
Ebert, Teresa. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late
Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Eder, Klaus. The Social Construction of Nature. Translated by Mark Ritter. Beverly
Hills: Sage, 1996.
Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Becoming National: A Reader. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Enloe, Cynthia. The Morning After: Sexual Politics and the End of the Cold War.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Fine, Robert. Hegels Philosophy of Right and Marxs Critique: A Reassessment. In
Emancipating Marx, vol. 3 of Open Marxism, edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard
Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis. London: Pluto Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Freeman, Carla. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work
and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2000.
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 91

Fusco, Coco. Hustling for Dollars: Jineterismo in Cuba. In Global Sex Workers:
Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Jo
Doezema. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Green, Cecilia. Historical and Contemporary Restructuring and Women in Produc-
tion in the Caribbean. In The Caribbean in the Global Political Economy, edited
by Hilbourne A. Watson. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994.
. Afro-Caribbean Women Workers and the Conundrum of Respectability: A
Historical Analysis. Paper delivered at the twenty-fifth annual Caribbean Studies
Association conference, Castries, St. Lucia, May 2000.
Gull, Bruno. On Productive Labor: An Ontological Critique. Paper delivered at
Marxism 2000, fourth international Rethinking Marxism conference, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, September 2124, 2000.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989.
. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1996.
Helg, Aline. Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 18861912.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Holloway, John. Global Capital and the National State. In Global Capital, Na-
tional State and the Politics of Money, edited by Werner Bonefeld and John
Holloway. New York: St. Martins Press, 1995.
Jahn, Beate. The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of
the State of Nature. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Karch, C. The Growth of the Corporate Economy in Barbados: Class and Race
Factors, 18901977. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute of Social and Economic Re-
search, UWI, 1979.
Kempadoo, Kamala, and Jo Doezema, eds. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance,
and Redefinition. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Landau, Saul. Sexual Politics and the Cuban Revolution. Washington Post Book
World, June 9, 1996, p. 10.
Lazarus-Black, Mindie. Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in
Antigua and Barbuda. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Lewis, Linden. Review of Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Carib-
bean Workplace, by Kevin A. Yelvington. New West Indian Guide 72, nos. 12
(1998): 17072.
. Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative. In this volume, 2003.
Lumsden, Ian. Machos, Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Marazzi, Christian. Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power.
In Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, edited by Werner
Bonefeld and John Holloway, 6991. New York: St. Martins Press, 1995.
Massiah, Joycelin. Work in the Lives of Caribbean Women Social and Economic
Studies 35, no. 2 (1986a): 129.
92 / Hilbourne Watson

. Women in the Caribbean (part 1), Social and Economic Studies 35, no. 3
(September 1986b): 15781.
Maurer, Bill. From Caliban to Caricom: Encountering Legality in the Caribbean.
Law and Social Inquiry 20, no. 4 (1995): 10891113.
McClintock, Anne. No Longer in a Future Heaven: Nationalism, Gender, and
Race. In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor
Suny, 26084. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Moberg, Mark. Culture and Resistance at Work. American Anthropologist 100,
no. 2 (1998): 52022.
Molyneux, Maxine. State, Gender and Institutional Change in Cubas Special Pe-
riod: The Federacin de Mujeres Cubanas. London: Institute of Latin American
Studies, University of London, 1996.
Nurse, Keith. Masculinism: Geoculture and Cultural Violence. Paper delivered at
the Caribbean Studies Association Conference, Castries, St. Lucia, May 28June
2, 2000.
ONeill, John. The Poverty of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1994.
Persram, Nalini. Politicizing the Feminine, Globalizing the Feminist. Alternatives
19 (1994): 275313.
Reddock, Rhoda E. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History.
London: Zed Books, 1994.
Rundle, Mette Louise B. Tourism, Social Change and Jineterismo in Contemporary
Cuba. In The Society for Caribbean Studies (UK) Annual Conference Papers,
edited by Sandra Courtman, vol. 2, 2001 <www.scsonline.freeserve.co.uk/
carib.htm>.
Safa, Helen. The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the
Caribbean. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.
Scott, Joan W. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity. October 61 (1992):
1219.
Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991.
Smith, Lois M., and Alfred Padula. Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Smith, R. T. Race, Class, and Gender in the Transition to Freedom. In The Meaning
of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery, edited by Frank
McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, 25790. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1992.
Strout, Jan. Women, the Politics of Sexuality, and Cubas Economic Crisis. Socialist
Review 25, no. 1 (1995): 515.
Stubbs, Jean. Cuba: Revolutionizing Women, Family and Power. In Women and
Politics Worldwide, edited by Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury, 189
207. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Swyngedouw, Erik. Neither Global nor Local: Globalization and the Politics of
Scale. In Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, edited by
Kevin R. Cox. New York: Guilford Press.
Sylvester, Christine. Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern
Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
 The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender / 93

Therborn, Gran. Science, Class, and Society: On the Formation of Sociology and
Historical Materialism. London: New Left Books, 1975.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 9901990. Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1990.
United Nations. The United Nations and the Advancement of Women, 19451996.
Rev. ed. Introduction by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. New York:
Department of Public Information, United Nations, 1996.
van der Aa, Pauline. Changing Power and Autonomy of Caribbean Women.
Santiago, Chile: Women and Development Unit, Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 1995.
Watson, Hilbourne A. Liberalism, the Market and Globalization: Issues Affecting
Human Rights in the Caribbean. In Globalization, Integration and Human
Rights in the Caribbean, edited by A. Hammatt, M. Bird, and Luis Carlos Arenas.
Bogota: Instituto Latinoamericano de Servicios Legales Alternativos (ILSA), 1995.
. Global Change: Restructuring the Enterprise Culture and Power in Contem-
porary Barbados. Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies 22, no. 3 (1997): 147.
. Global Neoliberalism, the Third Technological Revolution and Global
2000: A Perspective on Issues Affecting the Caribbean on the Eve of the 21st
Century. In Contending with Destiny: The Caribbean in the 21st Century, edited
by Kenneth Hall and Denis Benn, 382446. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000.
. The Human History of Nature versus the State of Nature: Interrogating the
Impact of Orthodox Theorizing on Conceptions of Culture in the Caribbean.
Paper delivered at the Humanities Conference on Rethinking Caribbean Culture,
Cave Hill (Barbados) campus, University of the West Indies, June 58, 2001a.
. Errol Barrow (19201987): The Social Construction of Colonial and Post-
colonial Charismatic Leadership in Barbados. In Caribbean Charisma: Reflec-
tions on Leadership, Legitimacy and Populist Politics, edited by Anton Allahar,
3271. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001b.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Candle Worth the Game?
New Left Review, no. 100 (September-October 1989): 4188.
. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and
Modern States. London: Verso, 1991.
. The Retreat from Class: A New True Socialism. Rev. ed. London: Verso,
1998.
Yelvington, Kevin A. Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean
Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Floya Anthias. Woman, Nation, State. London: Macmillan,
1989.
94 / Linden Lewis

Caribbean Masculinity
Unpacking the Narrative

Linden Lewis

As we begin the twenty-first century, it has become increasing clear to many,

if not yet all of us who operate in the realm of ideas, that the issue of gender
is inescapable and indispensable to any attempt at understanding social real-
ity and the general reproduction of society. This realization has come as a
direct result of the struggles of women who have in many ways contested
unjust and unequal patriarchal systems which have historically denied them
access to power, privilege and resources. These struggles not only have served
to challenge the status quo but have forced men, or at least some of us, to
begin to confront the level of oppression and subordination necessary, under
the present configuration of gender relations, to realize certain types of male
privilege.
Recipients of privilege, irrespective of whether such privilege is based on
gender or race or class, so fully internalize its benefits that they often regard
it as normative or view it as something they have somehow earned. They
seldom interrogate the basis of their privilege, or how it is made possible at
the expense of others. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, The strength of the
masculine order is seen in the fact that it dispenses with justification: the
androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and has no need to spell itself out
in discourses aimed at legitimating it (2001:9). To begin to interrogate the
issue of male privilege is to situate the phenomenon of gender in the context
of power, at the level of the social structure, and in relation to social repro-
duction of society.
The purpose of this chapter therefore is to begin to envision the types of
issues that need to be addressed with respect to gender, which essentially
involve and engage men in this ongoing discourse. It is an attempt to under-
stand how Caribbean men construct their masculinity in oppositional and
relational ways to femininity. The chapter begins to investigate how men in
the Caribbean negotiate their roles, how they embrace the roles society con-
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 95

structs for them and how they reject some of these roles, and the social cost
of such rejection. Other areas it assesses are stereotypes of Caribbean men,
the extent to which the social relations of production affect the social rela-
tions between men and women, issues of power and the social reproduction
of relations of domination and subordination. We should therefore clearly
identify how the term masculinity is being used in this chapter.
Masculinity is both a set of practices or behaviors and an ideological po-
sition within gender relations. As a set of practices, masculinity refers to the
many ways in which society interpellates male subjects as men. Using biology
as a point of departure, men come to understand themselvespolitically,
sociologically and within a system of gender relationsas ideologically dif-
ferent from women. Masculinity is not reducible to some distilled essence.
Masculinity is not necessarily defined exclusively by the gait of some males,
for example, or by the type of car they drive or their capacity to imbibe huge
quantities of alcoholic beverages. It is, rather, a whole constellation of prac-
tices and behaviors. It is a phenomenon that is not fixed but is always in the
process of being negotiated, contested, even destabilized. Masculinity has
multiple layers of meaning, which are mediated by acceptance or rejection of
societal expectations of behavior, age, culture, race, religion, class and sexual
orientation. Ultimately, men seek the approval of other men in the perfor-
mance of their masculinity. They engage in certain gender conventions in an
attempt to impose some homogeneity on the categorya homogeneity that
is decidedly illusive.
Inasmuch as masculinity has to do with how men come to view themselves
culturally, it is not merely limited to behaviors designed for the approval of
other men. Masculinity also has much to do with mens relationships to
women. There is a sense in which men in society collectively define masculin-
ity for themselves, but they are always cognizant of the influence of women
in their definition. In short, women help to shape the general terrain of mas-
culinity. At the level of performativity, masculinity has to do with seeking the
approval of men just as much as the approval of women. The same can be
argued about femininity, in the final analysis. Few acts are more threatening
to men than a public interrogation or ridicule of their masculinity by a
woman. Men generally react with a mixture of anger and incredulity to a
contestation of their masculinity.
One can glean a sense of the expectations some women have of men from
the conversation between the two female characters, Eva and Veronica, in
Lammings Season of Adventure:

My man got to be sure o himself, she said, sort o stable, and solid
and responsible. Not rich, cause that dont excite me, but when we go
out he mustnt have to count an calculate what prices say. Is what I
96 / Linden Lewis

cant stand in these little force-ripe men, the way they stand up outside
Castle Grant restaurant studyin the menu, an misreading it like how
children skip some words they cant spell, an all the time they translat-
ing the food prices, one hand like a thief in their pocket rubbing the
edge o every coin to make sure if it is a penny or a two-shilling piece.
(1960: 159)

Both the performative and the role expectations are central to this female
characters discussion of masculinity.
Another sense of the role expectations of masculinity can be drawn from
another dimension of the popular culture, the calypso, of which more will be
said in this chapter. In his recent calypso Yuh Looking for Horn,1 the
inimitable Mighty Shadow tells of a young man seeking his advice about a
young woman he is desirous of marrying. Shadow, the older and wiser advi-
sor, puts some pertinent questions to the young man, all of which center
around masculine identity and its performativity. He asks in the familiar call-
and-response format:
Yuh workin? No.
Yuh jokin? No.
Yuh stealin? No.
Yuh dealin? No.

Having posed these questions about living up to the role of provider, Shadow
concludes:
Yuh lookin for horn,
Plenty, plenty horn, boy.
Yuh lookin for horn,
You going to get horn, boy.
Why you wan to marry?
You dont have no money.
You aint workin no way.
You dont have a payday.
You think is so
The thing does work?
You think is so?
I wish you luck.

Shadow warns the young man that without money to buy honey he would
be heading for misery. At this point the older man repeats his admonition,
with the additional caution to the young man, that he could end up bearing
the pain of deception. In short, masculinity and femininity are dialectically
related to each other.
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 97

So intertwined are notions of masculinity and femininity that Elisabeth

Badinter reasons: Far from being conceived of as an absolute, masculinity,
the quality of a man, is at once relative and reactive. So that when femininity
changesgenerally when women try to redefine their identitymasculinity
is destabilized (1995: 9).
Though one may concur with Badinter that men react to changes in femi-
ninity, one may not agree that such changes necessarily lead to a destabiliza-
tion of masculinity. This is not to say that masculinity cannot be destabilized.
Indeed, homosexuality, unemployment, sexual dysfunction or incarceration
may all have profoundly destabilizing effects on masculinity. What may be a
more reasonable argument, however, is that changes in either masculinity or
femininity produce some level of adjustment to each other. To claim that
masculinity is destabilized by changes in femininity is to ignore the remark-
able resilience of the former despite all the pronouncements of crisis and
apocalyptic prognostication leveled at men, particularly those in the contem-
porary Caribbean.
Men in the Caribbean define their masculinity in much the same way as
men in any other part of the world. Cultural peculiarities may result in em-
phasis on different dimensions of masculinity. Men define themselves in
terms of biological difference and specificity, in behavioral terms and in terms
that objectify their masculinitythat is, cars, boats, houses, dogs, guns may
become extensions of ones masculinity. Men define themselves in ways that
underscore their autonomy, their ability to define situations in terms compat-
ible with their interests. To be a man is to decide where you want to be, what
you want to do, how you want to dress and how you want to look in the eyes
of women but also in relation to other men. To be a man is to be strong on the
outside and tough on the insidewhich in part explains mens preoccupation
with weight lifting, although some of this activity is manufactured as much
by capitals encouragement of healthy bodies, for securing surplus value, as
by an explosion of market-driven fitness venues.
What is of central importance to the concept of masculinity, however,
remains the exercise of power and the issue of control. Masculinity is predi-
cated on the presumption of power, whether real or imagined. Though not all
men exercise power, all nevertheless view it as an entitlement. Masculinity
therefore is often associated with access to and control over resources, privi-
lege and status. Where such factors as race, class or sexual orientation im-
pinge on male power in any given context, they tend to provide persuasive
explanations for why a particular category of men failed to attain this norma-
tive expectation.
If at one level masculinity is about acquiring, maintaining or reproducing
power, then it invariably comes into conflict with femininity, which is forced
into struggling politically to claim a spacea right to coexistin this social
98 / Linden Lewis

matrix. This struggle to claim a space within the social matrix of power is at
the core of some of the most contentious issues in the discourse on gender.
Arthur Brittans summary comment is apropos: Gender is never simply an
arrangement in which the roles of men and women are decided in a contin-
gent and haphazard way. At any given moment, gender will reflect the mate-
rial interests of those who have power and those who do not (1989: 3).

Gender and the Politics of Discourse

Given this origin, it is not surprising that women would be the first to raise
the issue. Few men who have benefited from the status quo have any imme-
diate investment in challenging the gender order. Contesting the nature of
gender construction is an act of subversion. Indeed, gender and identity poli-
tics have been the bases upon which women have mobilized different con-
stituencies of support for their own liberation. The history of gender rela-
tions in the Caribbean has been marked by an asymmetry of power, privilege
and resources in favor of men. To raise the issue of masculinity in the context
of gender relations, then, is essentially to problematize this discourse. How-
ever, problematizing these social relationships is a prerequisite for incorpo-
rating men into the discourse of gender in the Caribbean.
The phenomenon of gender is so closely associated with womens issues
and concerns in the English-speaking Caribbean that the discourse has rarely
involved consideration of the extent to which masculinity forms an integral
part of the dynamics of gender relations. The literature on gender devotes
even less attention to the way the construction of masculinity reproduces
patterns and relations of domination and subordination. The ideological
process of constructing meaning and identifying ones subject position can-
not be formulated without due regard to ones material conditions of exist-
ence and to the historical and cultural context of a given society.
The failure to theorize these issues in many ways precludes possibilities for
creating appropriate spaces for cooperation that transcend the gender divide.
It moreover constructs gender relations in a manner suggesting that such
social connections are unalterable or otherwise frozen in time. Furthermore,
the virtual absence of serious analysis of masculinity in the Caribbean has
tended to truncate the discourse on gender in ways that impede understand-
ing between men and women and among men themselves. Hence masculinity
tends to be conceived in largely negative terms, in which Caribbean men are
homogenized and identified as part of a reactionary backlash against femi-
nist intervention in the region. The discussion of men and masculinity in the
Caribbean has tended to be used merely for negative reinforcement.
In such a context, attempts to insert masculinity into the discourse on
gender become a highly charged and polemical act of insurgency. My point
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 99

here is very simple: discourse itself can become a contested terrain of struggle.
The insertion of masculinity into the discourse on gender is the reverse prob-
lematic of whether or not the subaltern could speak. Men who for so long
have had the power to silence the voices of others, both women and subordi-
nate men, must now find ways of joining the discourse on gender without
disrespecting the contribution of feminist struggles in the region, and without
trivializing the ways men benefit from the patriarchal structures of the cur-
rent system. Failure to be sensitive to these issues could lead to a closing of the
spaces for dialogue between men and women, and the creation of distrust
across gender. If the Caribbean is to move forward in the direction of greater
equality, then the discourse on gender has to take place in a dialogical con-
text, in which the public sphere is seized from those social forces that cur-
rently control and monopolize this space, while the private domain is interro-
gated and radically transformed. In short, the artificial dichotomy between
public and private domains must be discredited once and for all, and dignity,
respect and equality should govern the operations of both spheres.

Gender and the Acquisition of Power

Perhaps an appropriate question to investigate at this point is exactly how

men come to dominate the social relations in society and the social relations
of production. Patriarchy is the concept that captures this act of male domi-
nation in society. According to Gerda Lerner, Patriarchy is a historic cre-
ation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500 years
to its completion. Organizationally, patriarchy was institutionalized
through the family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rule
and values (1986: 212).
The work of Maurice Godelier and that of Michle Barrett is also quite
insightful on this point. Advancing the argument that men seem to dominate
almost everywhere in social life, Godelier goes back in time to the stage of
hunters and gatherers. At this stage mobility was paramount, and men pos-
sessed more of it than women, who by virtue of their reproductive roles were
rendered less mobile during pregnancy, and after delivery were constrained
by breast-feeding and child-rearing functions. In support of his assertion he
writes: Thus it seems likely that a division of tasks forced itself upon the
societies of hunters: men hunted big game and waged war; women hunted
small game, gathered natural supplies, and cooked the daily food. It appears
that a differential value system attached to those tasks, setting a higher value
on mens activity insofar as it involved greater risks of losing ones life and
greater glory in taking life (1981: 12).
Godelier merely implies what remains to be elaborated, namely that the
development of weapons and other implements used in hunting enhanced the
100 / Linden Lewis

power of men over their game and by extension over nature and over women.
The quest to gain control over nature was later extended to control over
social life. Godeliers argument is not a simple biologically deterministic one;
it is rooted in the limited and underdeveloped forces of production and in the
dispersal and scarcity of resources at the time. He is careful to point out that
the most critical factor in the economic organization of society is not the
division of labor but rather the forms of social control over resources and
labor product, that is to say, the social relations of production (1981: 12). It
is therefore within the context of the control over the social relations of
production that we may begin to situate mens control over women and their
control of the latters reproduction of life and labor.
Lerners work is quite perceptive here. She notes:
In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were
first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had
learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as
strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and,
later, subordinates from within their own societies. (1986: 213)

Lerner takes this argument further into a recognition and politicization of

early differences. She argues:
The gender-defined role of warrior led men to acquire power over men
and women of conquered tribes. Such war-induced conquest usually
occurred over people already differentiated from the victors by race,
ethnicity, or simple tribal difference. In its ultimate origin, difference
as a distinguishing mark between the conquered and the conquerors
was based on the first clearly observable difference, that between the
sexes. Men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people
slightly different from themselves in the primary exchange of women.
In so doing, men acquired the knowledge necessary to elevate differ-
ence of whatever kind into a criterion for dominance. (1986: 214)
Barrett in her 1988 work emphasizes the separation of home and work-
place, in the process of large-scale production under capitalism, as critical to
understanding the devaluing of female labor and of women in general. In this
regard, Godelier goes one step further when he states that the womans
status was generally devalued through the processes that led to the slow or
rapid formation of stable social hierarchies, classes and a state power
(1981: 15). Whatever divisions existed between men and women in pre-
capitalist society were consolidated and reproduced within capitalist rela-
tions of production. Barrett sums up the essence of the division of labor and
the domination of men in this way: The consequences of the separation of
home and workplace for the family, and for gender relations, have been very
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 101

marked. This is because the situation raises the problem of caring for children
and other members of the working class not in a position to undertake wage
labour (the disabled and old for instance) (1980: 179). She further argues
that in the process women became dependent on the male wage, and this
dependency in turn opened a number of other dependencies of women on
men.
What is important here is that, having seized whatever advantage there
was in the early division of tasks, men proceeded to institutionalize these
advantages. Mens domination of social life was clearly institutionalized in
the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the state; it was inscribed in the
culture and permitted the political space to reproduce itself. This in large
measure accounts both for mens influence in the private sphere and for their
domination of the public sphere. As Connell notes, Capitalism was partly
constituted out of the opportunities for power and profit created by gender
relations. It continues to be (1987: 104).
The arguments above should not lead one to conclude that all men domi-
nate over the social relations within society, or that all men participate
equally in sharing power and resources in any given social context. The issues
of power and of domination and control over resources are always subject to
contestation and are always mediated by the politics of race, class, sexual
orientation, national origin or ethnicity or some combination thereof.
From a more rigorously materialist perspective, Teresa Ebert (1996) ar-
gues that patriarchy is a feature of class societies. Like Lerner, Ebert sees
patriarchy as an historical and ongoing system of gender differences which
is necessary to the very existence of class societies, including contemporary
global capitalism (1996: 45). Ebert sees patriarchy as naturalizing these
social divisions within class society for economic and other advantages.
Patriarchy is, in other words, a material practice through which eco-
nomic access is controlled, and this control, in turn, maintains profit at
the highest rate that is historically possible. Patriarchy, through its
material operation, makes the superexploitation of women a natural
act: it is a historical mode of organizing labor in such a way that the
labor of women is always seen as naturally less desirable than the labor
of men. (1996: 91)
There is a tendency, evident even in Eberts comment, to treat patriarchy as
a form of domination of men over women, but one should be cognizant that
patriarchy also refers to the domination of subordinate men by more power-
ful or hegemonic men. In contemporary society, men are engaged in exercis-
ing hegemonic power and control over other men of lower classes, different
sexual orientations, different races, religions, ethnicities and national origins,
102 / Linden Lewis

inter alia. Though women are usually the victims of patriarchal power, sub-
ordinate or marginalized men are also negatively affected by patriarchal rule.
Of equal importance to note here is that, though patriarchy is a powerful
force organizing societys social relations, it is not absolute. Women and sub-
ordinated or marginalized men do not simply accept patriarchal rule without
resistance. Patriarchy is contested every day, whether in the struggle for inclu-
sion or representation, pay equity or reproductive freedom for women, or the
struggle for the repeal of sodomy laws, freedom from public harassment or
the removal of glass ceilings imposed on the mobility of men or women of
different races, ethnic backgrounds or class origins. It is this resistance to
patriarchy that holds the keys to its eventual transformation. Feminism,
whether in the Caribbean or in other parts of the world, has been, and must
continue to be, a major bulwark against patriarchal domination and prac-
tice.
In a seldom cited passage from her classic work on patriarchy, Lerner
captures the dynamics of the interrelationship between masculinity and femi-
ninity when she surmises:
The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of
women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender in-
doctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowl-
edge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by
defining respectability and deviance according to womens sexual
activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in ac-
cess to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class
privileges to conforming women. (1986: 217)
In the case of the Caribbean, though there is clearly some resonance with
this view, there are important differences as well. The scholarship of the
social relations of men and women in Caribbean society before the advent of
the Europeans is still underdeveloped. There are in many instances, however,
indications that gender roles were clearly demarcated along traditional lines,
with men enjoying patriarchal privilege and control over women as well as
engaging in activities, such as trading and war, that were more highly valued
by society (see Cooper 1997; Keegan 1997). Women tended to be responsible
for weaving hammocks, cooking and baking cassava bread (see Moya Pons
1984). In any case, the decimation of this population of indigenous people by
the Europeans was so complete that, whatever the nature of the gender rela-
tions that existed, new social relations would have had to be forged by the
newcomers to the region, given the power of European and colonial domina-
tion. Moreover, men who came from Africa as slaves and from India as in-
dentured workers did not come to the Caribbean tabula rasa. Many of them
came with fully formed gendered identities, some of which were fashioned in
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 103

precolonial patriarchal societies and cultures. Cultural resistance notwith-

standing, many of the attendant conceptualizations of gendered identities of
slaves and indentured workers succumbed under the weight and power of
European hegemonic masculinity. Conceptualizations of manhood in the six-
teenth-century Caribbean could not be left to chance. Slave men and later
Indian indentured workers were not allowed to enjoy the same benefits of
masculinity as did their European masters. Such a uniformity of gender iden-
tity would have presented too many complications for issues of power and
control in the administration of the slave system and the system of inden-
tureship.
Given the asymmetry of power relationships within slavery, indentureship
and colonialism, it is not difficult to understand how colonialism would have
imposed its patriarchal rule on Caribbean society and economies. Based on a
developed and sophisticated European system of patriarchy, colonial rule in
the Caribbean inscribed male domination into the culture and political
economy of the region. It should be pointed out that this hegemonic mascu-
linity affected European men as well as African and later Indian men. All
European men were not equal, either; some were clearly of different educa-
tional and class backgrounds. Nevertheless, the type of adjustment necessary
for nonhegemonic European men was quite different from that experienced
by African and Indian men. It is not surprising, therefore, that these African
and Indian men who were infantilized by a system of slavery and inden-
tureship were unable to exercise autonomy in any sphere of life, particularly
with respect to the type or form of family they were allowed to establish. This
European male domination of the social relations within Caribbean society
laid the foundation for the institutionalization of gender inequality in the
region. Though excluded from control over resources and from participating
in the exercise of power with their European counterparts, African men, and
later Indian and Chinese and Portuguese men, were all socialized by, and all
ultimately internalized, these patriarchal standards.
Having been socialized in such a context, it is also not surprising that,
when these men engaged in the struggle for decolonization, the essence of the
struggle revolved around the issues of political empowerment, a liberal
democratic notion of sovereignty and autonomy, and self-determination.
What was notably missing from the struggle for national liberation in the
Caribbean was any sense of materially rewarding the contributions of
women who contributed significantly to that struggle. Moreover, there was
no effort made to broaden the scope of female participation. In short, Carib-
bean nationalists did not interrogate the patriarchal system that had been
bequeathed to them. Rather than treat gender inequality as a form of domi-
nation no less reprehensible than the European domination they all recog-
nized and opposed, they essentially consolidated and reproduced it. Some
104 / Linden Lewis

may even argue that, given their intimate knowledge of such a system, they
expanded it.

Miller on Patriarchy

Not many scholars in the Caribbean have devoted as much time to analyzing
the concept of patriarchy in a specific and sustained way as Errol Miller.
Partly because he is one of the few men writing about masculinity in the
English-speaking Caribbean, his work has become very influential. While
others have discussed the topic of patriarchy in passing, Miller has spent
almost a third of his book Men at Risk evaluating the topic and ultimately
suggesting an alternative concept, to be discussed below. Though Miller
agrees with some general features of the concept of patriarchy, he has funda-
mental disagreements with other scholars, such as Lerner (1986), who have
analyzed this phenomenon. Chief among his objections is what he describes
as a strong contention that patriarchy is not a gender phenomenon (1991:
117). Indeed, though Miller asserts this claim, much of his argument revolves
around the social relations between men and women and essentially contra-
dicts his initial assertion. Miller sees patriarchy as providing the basis on
which human society was first organized (117). His main claim about the
origin of patriarchy, unlike that of Godelier and Barrett, lies in the exercise of
power in life-taking, while for him matriarchy is the exercise of power in life-
preserving (115). He argues that early human groups had to deal with the
issue of life-taking in the context of ritual sacrifice, particularly of children,
in the hope of continued survival and the appeasement of the gods. In addi-
tion, life-taking was a calculated decision that had to be made in the context
of limited food supplies. Womens ability to give birth meant that they were
organically linked to life- preserving functions. The onerous task of life-tak-
ing therefore fell upon men, who could presumably make these decisions
more dispassionately. In this very mechanical division of tasks, Miller seems
unaware of his participation in the whole project of Enlightenment think-
ingaligning women with nature, nurture and the preservation of life, while
men become rational decision makers. He writes:
Patriarchy as it emerged from antiquity was not concerned with domi-
nating women. It was, rather, the outcome of the adaptive responses of
early humans to ensure their survival. Womens subordination was an
unintended and unforeseen consequence. Life-giving powers of women
proved less equal than life-taking powers of men in the discharge of
collective obligations. Men held the life-taking powers by default, be-
ing incapable of giving birth. (116)
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 105

Miller completely ignores the arguments of Godelier, Barrett and Lerner

about the relationship between patriarchy, domination and control, even
though there is evidence to suggest that he has at least read Lerner. To see the
subordination of women as an unintended and unforeseen consequence of
patriarchy is to misread its ideological intent and to deemphasize the political
and power bases of the concept. Subordination of women and what he de-
scribes as alien or captured men was not an accidental affair; it was a
calculated strategy of preserving power and the status quo. Patriarchy has
continued to be such a strategy, except that in contemporary society it is
manifested in more subtle and sophisticated ways. Admittedly, there are
times when Miller seems utterly confused about the reach of patriarchy. He
asserts that patriarchy is obsolete and has outlived its usefulness (276, 277,
289) yet feels compelled to observe: Obsolete or not, patriarchy continues
to legitimize power in society (276). Part of the problem here might be the
narrowness of Millers initial understanding of patriarchy as a primordial
feature that organizes society.
In his book Miller also argues that the Third Millennium belongs to
women. In this period women will experience considerable progress, presum-
ably in terms of status. More important, they will go on to assert themselves
and seize power from men in some societies (282). Miller is not clear about
how this transformation is to be realized, but he does predict that it will lead
to the marginalization of men. The scenario is slavishly Cartesian: If mens
rule has outlived its usefulness, then it must be the turn of women, who
should take over.
It will be good for humanity to have men languish in the margins for a
while. Having dominated society for so long, men are basically morally
bankrupt and spiritually tired. The male mentality has taken humanity
to the brink of cataclysmic disaster. It has ruined the environment. In
the quest for power and position it has disregarded the humanity of too
many children, who have been consigned to the garbage dumps of pov-
erty and disease. It has sacrificed too many for the pleasure, comfort
and vanity of a few. Men need to re-create themselves socially, morally
and mentally. Time in the marginal is indispensable to that process.
(283)
This represents a remarkable volte-face for Miller, despite his protesta-
tions here to the contrary. In his earlier monograph (1986) he lamented the
marginalization of men as a consequence of the mobility of women in the
Caribbean, particularly within the teaching profession. Above, he seems to
be embracing the idea of marginalization as potentially having a positive
outcome. Another of Millers problems is that he steadfastly refuses to recog-
106 / Linden Lewis

nize the link between capitalism and patriarchy. It is most certainly true that
patriarchy predated capitalism, but capitalism has unquestionably under-
stood and exploited patriarchal divisions and differences in the interest of
greater accumulation. What Miller describes as male mentality is not re-
ducible to men. Instead he was actually describing a lot of the negative fea-
tures of an economic system based on capitalism. In short, I believe that
Millers emphasis on mens thinking is misdirected, while the structural fea-
tures of the problems he identifies remain untheorized.
Miller also ignores the structural underpinnings of his arguments when he
offers an alternative to patriarchy. The alternative social arrangement to pa-
triarchy for Miller is a concept he calls personarchy (1991: 287). Personarchy
is a rugged humanism that celebrates the person without regard to gender, or
for that matter race, age, nationality. Personarchy asserts the equality of all,
as human beings, as the primary basis of social organization (288). Here
again Miller offers no suggestions as to how personarchy would transcend
the limitations of what he earlier called male mentality. One has to assume
that men who live under a regime of personarchy would have somehow been
purged of their male mentality. The issue, however, remains the same.
Since Miller has not made the connection between structure and symptom,
he proceeds to offer a solution that underscores his misunderstanding of the
issue. Personarchy is simply a trope of erasure of all identities of real indi-
viduals reproducing their lives in real material circumstances. At best this is
a politically naive strategy that fails to get at the causes of some of the genu-
inely serious structural problems in contemporary society. In the end Miller
seems to underestimate the remarkable resilience of patriarchy, which has to
be viewed as dynamically linked to the wider social structure in which it
operates.
Indeed, Millers thesis notwithstanding, the disparities of power between
men and women in the Caribbean are such that the West Indian Commission
concluded that the region had a far way to go in correcting fundamental
disadvantages that have too long characterized the situation of women in the
Region (1992: 342). It also called for greater involvement of women in
regional planning, among other things. The reality of the situation in the
Caribbean is that the public sphere remains largely the domain of men. The
study of men as gendered subjects is only now emerging as an important facet
of gender analysis. In a paradoxical way, Millers intervention in the dis-
course on gender has served as a catalyst for the emergence of a more sus-
tained and systematic reflection on the practice of masculinity in the region.
If at times his work has generated hostility from feminists and progressive
men in the region, it has begun a very important kind of dialogue around
issues of gender in the broadest possible sense. This emerging conversation
about men and masculinity affords us an opportunity to move beyond the
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 107

vulgar reductionist claims about all Caribbean men. In short, we could avoid
the pitfall of essentialism.

The End of the Essentialized Caribbean Male Subject

Even though the work on masculinity in the Caribbean is underdeveloped,

there is a sense in which one can identify a core of assumptions about men
and masculinity from that literature, as well as from the literature on the
family. What emerges from the literature is a characterization of men and
masculinity that views the Caribbean male as powerful, exceedingly promis-
cuous, derelict in his parental duties, often absent from the household and, if
present, unwilling to undertake his share of domestic responsibilities. The
Caribbean male also comes across in this literature as possessing a propensity
for female battering, and a demonstrated valorization of alcohol consump-
tion (see, for example, Dann 1987; Barrow 1986; Senior 1991). While this is
certainly true for some Caribbean men, it is clearly not true of all men in the
region.
It has by now surely become evident that we cannot continue to treat the
category of masculinity and men as some homogeneous and undifferentiated
bloc. Men in the Caribbean possess a variety of dispositions. For every un-
productive man idling on the street corner in St. Georges, Port-of-Spain or
Castries, there are many others who are hard-working, law-abiding, respon-
sible fathers and husbands and sons. For every rum-drinking, philandering
big spender, there are many others who are establishing businesses, educating
themselves and the younger ones around them or hard at work trying to
survive in increasingly difficult economic circumstances. Mens lives are far
too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to some of the caricatures that
pass as analyses of Caribbean masculinity. Stuart Halls injunction against
essentializing is quite appropriate in this regard. Hall argues: The essen-
stializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes differ-
ence, mistaking what is historical for what is natural, biological, and genetic
(1992: 29). Moreover, examining Caribbean masculinities in their complex
totality allows one to transcend familiar constraining paradigms that place
mens behavior in one or the other category of respectability or reputa-
tion (see Wilson 1969). Such an examination could also move ones analysis
beyond trite dichotomiesmacho man versus wimp, one-woman-man ver-
sus Village Ram (promiscuous man). The argument against such formula-
tions could also be made even when these perspectives are revised and more
creatively deployed to understand how men in the region construct their
gendered identities (see Yelvington 1995; Gordon 1997).
Indeed, as Carrigan, Connell and Lee have shown, the fissuring of the
categories of men and women is one of the central facts about patriarchal
108 / Linden Lewis

power and the way it works (1985: 590). The way in which masculinity is
constructed and practiced in the Caribbean is always, in one sense or another,
mediated by the modalities of race, ethnicity, age, class, sexual orientation
and religion, and by the way in which these social forces coalesce within a
given cultural context. A fruitful way of proceeding with analyses of mascu-
linity in the Caribbean might be to try to ascertain empirically the underlying
structural, institutional, symbolic, historical and psychological causes and
consequences of mens behavior in contemporary society.
Though at some level most men benefit from patriarchy, we do not all
practice patriarchal domination. An analysis of the Caribbean political
economy would reveal that only a certain class of men exercises political
power in society. In some islands men of a particular racial group (white men
in Barbados; whites, Syrians, Lebanese and Indians in Trinidad; Jews, whites
and Chinese in Jamaica) mostly dominate the economic landscape of their
societies. Though black men generally dominate the political apparatuses of
the state in the English-speaking Caribbean, this fact alone does not necessar-
ily reflect the amount of power they exercise in society. Many of the black
middle and upper classes in the region have gained their mobility through
educational attainment; for the most part, they have no solid material foun-
dation in wealth. They are therefore ultimately beholden to those who con-
trol the economic resources of the society, who are largely nonblack. In short,
it is important to distinguish those men who exercise controlof the execu-
tive arm of the state, the upper echelons of the civil service, the corporate and
industrial sectors, the arts, the academyfrom those who own no resources
and are forced to sell their labor power for minimum wages, those who are
unemployed, those who operate on the margins of society, those who occupy
positions within oppressed racial or ethnic groups, religions or sexual orien-
tations. In other words, ones analysis of the Caribbean male should be able
to distinguish between hegemonic masculinity and other subordinated forms
of masculinity.
Hegemonic masculinity refers to practices of cultural domination of a
particular representation of men and manliness. It refers to an orientation
that is heterosexual and decidedly homophobic. It prides itself on its capacity
for sexual conquest and ridicules men who define their sexuality in different
terms. Hegemonic masculinity often embraces certain misogynist tendencies
in which women are considered inferior. Departure from this form of mascu-
linity could result in a questioning of ones manhood.
This feeling is captured by the calypsonian Mighty Sparrows hit tune of
some years ago, No Kind of Man. In this calypso Sparrow advises women
who notice that, when they are sexually aroused, their men complain of being
tiredor, as he puts it, they refuse to eat de foodto leave these men and
come enjoy yuhself with me.
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 109

Another example of the popular consciousness around the idea of hege-

monic masculinity can be found in that calypsos binary opposite, Soft
Man. The soft man is one who is not very self-assured. He is unable to make
decisions independently or quickly. The soft mans main problem is that he
has become feminized and is too dependent on the ideas, directions and
advice of his lady or wife. The soft man makes real men look bad. Though
women may be attracted to the sensitivity of the soft man, they ultimately
reject him because they cannot respect him. Such ideas about the soft man are
captured in Penguins calypso of the same name. The title resonates of impo-
tence and diminished capacity to perform a crucial masculine role. In Soft
Man the calypsonian Penguin instructs a friend on how to get and keep a
wife. The friend is admonished not to defy the core of hegemonic masculinity.
He is told not to behave namby-pamby, staying at home and doing domes-
tic chores that are the preserve of women. He should instead go out and
spend time with his friends because, in the long run, women would become
disrespectful of men who fail to perform hegemonic practices of masculin-
ityor, as Penguin announces in song, For women does always treat wid
scorn a man they emasculate.
As Connell astutely warns us, hegemonic masculinity is not the only form,
and indeed may not even be the most common form of masculinity. Hege-
mony is a question of relations of cultural domination, not of head-counts
(1993: 610). Attempts to understand the behavior of men in the Caribbean
should not be confined to this practice, which seeks to articulate itself as
representative of the interests and aims of all men.

Masculinity and Homosexuality in the Caribbean

Homosexuality in the Caribbean is a fairly complex phenomenon. There is a

tacit understanding of the existence of homosexuality and homosexuals in
each and every island, yet few men dare to be openly gay. These islands are,
for the most part, intolerant of homosexual lifestyles. Within this broad
Caribbean homophobia, tolerance levels vary, with places such as St. Tho-
mas in the Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Barbados at the higher end of the
continuum of tolerance, while Jamaica, St. Vincent and St. Lucia occupy the
lower levels. In Puerto Rico, despite its own intolerance of homosexuality,
gay groups still manage to have a political presencea possibility no doubt
overdetermined by struggles for gay rights in the mainland United States.
Reasons for these variations are complex.
Freedom of expression, availability of opportunity and tolerance of cer-
tain forms of dissent and transgression appear more historically and cultur-
ally rooted in the social construction of public discourse in some islands. In
some parts of the Caribbean, even where public disapproval of social prac-
110 / Linden Lewis

tices is vociferous and passionate, it is expressed without the hostility and

violence that characterize the public debates of other islands. One could cer-
tainly argue here about the impact of the character and legacy of colonialism
and slavery on these social responses. However, one could also argue more
provocatively that intolerance of homosexuality masks problems of insecu-
rity about sexual identity and ambivalence about heterosexuality and man-
hood that may be more serious than they appear on the surface. One could
reasonably question the level of sexual maturity and sexual security of those
who find it necessary to defend heterosexuality so vigorously, and are so
threatened by homosexuality as to lash out violently at any sign of its exist-
ence in society. Furthermore, one may argue that even though religious pro-
hibitions against homosexuality greatly influence attitudes toward it, certain
levels of accommodation are met (despite public protestations to the con-
trary) within Anglicanism/Episcopalianism and Catholicism, in ways that are
highly incongruent with fundamentalist sects such as Pentecostalism, Reviv-
alism, Pocomania2 and even an alternative religious culture such as Rastafari.
The concentration of these latter religious expressions in one island more
than another may serve in part to explain some of the variation in tolerance
levels of homophobia in the region.
In the case of Jamaica, in trying to understand the level of hostility toward
homosexuality and homosexuals, one has to take into consideration the
wider scope of violence in the society. Jamaica has the highest crime rate in
the Caribbean and is reported to be second only to Colombia in this hemi-
sphere in crime and violence. Not only does the society have a history of
physical abuse and attacks on gay men but there have been known cases of
homicide and dismemberment of homosexuals in Jamaica. These acts of bru-
tality make Jamaica perhaps the least tolerant Caribbean society of people
with different sexual orientations.
The Cuban situation with respect to homosexuality is sociologically in-
triguing. Homosexuality has a long and complex history in Cuban society,
moving from a position of relative visibility in previous political regimes,
particularly in the Batista era, to suppression under the rule of Fidel Castro.
The dawn of the revolution signaled the construction of the New Man, who
was decidedly heterosexual, macho, militaristic and focused on nation-for-
mation and on consolidating the revolution. In this construction of masculin-
ity there was no room for effeminacy. As Samuel Feijoo, one of Cubas most
prominent intellectuals at the outset of the revolution, said with unparalleled
bluntness, no homosexual [can represent] the revolution, which is a matter
for men, of fists and not feathers, of courage and not trembling (Lumsden
1996: 5354). Feijoo makes no allowance here for homosexual forms of
machismo and is thus trapped in a one-dimensional understanding of male
performance. This conceptualization of the New Man continued for some
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 111

time, marginalizing people in the process and essentially regulating member-

ship in the nation. As the Cuban actor Jorge Perugorra put it:
There were stages in the history of our society when the phenomenon
was more complex, when intolerance was stronger, as in the early 60s,
or the time of the UMAP [Military Units to Aid Production], when gays
were persecuted, or people with long hair, people who listened to the
Beatles. In that sense society has matured. But there still are manifesta-
tions of intolerance within society, which is why the movie [Fresa y
Chocolate] is so important for us and why it has the success it has inside
Cuba.
I think that in this connection we still have a lot of work to do. Maybe
now we dont persecute homosexuals, but we still do not have the po-
litical maturity to give equal opportunity to everybody regardless of
political, ideological, or any other kind of difference. (quoted in
Birringer 1996: 67)
When race is added to the mix of homophobia and marginalization, the
phenomenon is exacerbated, as Ian Lumsden writes:
Demeaning sexual stereotypes of blacks became integral to the racial
hierarchy that arose from the plantation economy. The contemporary
Cuban put-down of black homosexuals reflects the double prejudice
they have had to endure: Negro y maricn, an insult that says that
someone is not only black but has the effrontery to be unmasculine
(homosexual) as well. (1996: 51).
The situation has been slowly changing, as Perugorra intimated. This
change is evident at one level, in the production of the 1993 film Fresa y
Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), written by Senel Paz and directed by
Toms Gutirrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabo. The film is an engaging story
of a militant young heterosexual communist (played by Vladimir Cruz) who
ultimately befriends a openly gay intellectual artist (played by the Jorge Peru-
gorra referred to earlier) whose commitment to the nation and the revolu-
tion is vitiated by his sexual orientation. The film centers around the struggle
of the young militant to transcend the notion of the incompatibility of revo-
lutionary fervor and homosexual identification. It also focuses on the gay
artists internal conflict between his own desire to identify with the goals of
the revolution and the public and private censure of his sexual preference. In
the end, though the young militant comes around to accepting the artist
without prejudice as a friend, the latters frustrations lead him to pursue life
in another country where the political climate is presumably more conducive
to the expression of his sexuality. What is really remarkable about this film
about gay rights, given the history of suppression of homosexuality under the
112 / Linden Lewis

revolution, is the mere fact that it was made and released in Cuba. The film
was an unqualified success at home as well, winning Cubas Critics and
Peoples Choice Awards, in addition to the Catholic Churchs award
(Organizacin Catlica International del Cine).3
Despite its machismo, Lumsden notes, queer-baiting or queer-bashing is
not really a feature of Cuban society, even if the police are more inclined to
question men on the streets whom they suspect of being gay, or ask to see
their identity cards. The situation may change if and when gays become
more assertive, but for the moment at least they do not have to be constantly
on guard against being assaulted in public (1996: 137).
If homosexuals are somewhat safe in Cuba, this is not necessarily the case
in much of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given the machismo inherent in
hegemonic masculinity, the level of hostility directed toward homosexuality
in the Caribbean is not surprising. It is not surprising precisely because ho-
mosexuality undermines and fundamentally contradicts hegemonic mascu-
linity. Note the derision and hostility in some comments from Barbadian men
in Graham Danns study:
I feel them kinda people want killing, man.
That type of person aint have no right living under this sun.
If I had my way I would burn all homosexuals in the place.
I feel them sort of men want putting off the earth.
They should burn all.
Those people want putting on an island by themselves. (1987: 62)

These comments reveal a rather contradictory, but common, misconception:

that one is capable of beating or eliminating homosexuality out of exist-
ence or, at best, out of the life of an individual, through a violent intervention.
Regrettably, such sentiments are not peculiar to Barbadian males. Popular
reggae artist Shabba Ranks, no stranger to controversy over issues of homo-
sexuality, is quoted in the Village Voice as having said: If a man is thinking
of homosexuality, hes thinking of disease and wrongdoings, so God Al-
mighty himself hates homosexuals. In Jamaica, if a homosexual is being
found in the community, then we stone him to death (Noel 1993: 29). It was
also Shabba Ranks who proclaimed to the music world in his Wicked in
Bed the punishment that should be meted out to homosexuals: Me nah
promote mamma man.4 All mamma man fe dead. To remove any doubt
about their fate, Shabba declares: Pam, Pam. Lick a shot in a mamma man
head.
If Shabba angered some folks, mostly outside the Caribbean, with that
song, Buju Bantan outraged many with his 1992 reggae song Boom Bye
Bye.5 Like Shabba, Buju suggested that homosexuals be eliminated at the
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 113

barrel of the gunSend for an automatic and de Uzi instead. / Shoot dem
now come let me shoot dem.
Boom! Bye, Bye, in a batty bwoy head
Rude bwoy nah promote no batty boy6
Dem hafi dead.

Condemnation of Buju came swiftly. He incurred the wrath of lesbian and

gay groups in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Caribbean,
however, the reaction to Boom Bye Bye was quite different. There were
some who condemned the sentiments conveyed in the lyrics of the song, but
for the most part it was a very popular reggae number in the region. Pushed
to explain and defend himself, Buju, like Shabba, fell back on appeals to
religious authority to justify his hatred and contempt for people whose
sexual orientation differed from his own. He also rationalized that Boom
Bye Bye was not intended to incite violence against homosexuals but was
basically a warning to them. According to Buju, everything was blown out of
proportion (see the film The Darker Side of Black). In fairness to Buju, one
should note that since the release of this song, he has become a profoundly
righteous Rastafarian, who has moved away entirely from smutty, misogy-
nist and homophobic lyrics.
Shabba and Buju are not the only reggae artists to have given voice to
homophobic lyrics. Many othersPapa San, Capelton and even progressive
and politically conscious performers such as Anthony B. and Sizzlahave
expressed similar views about homosexuals and homosexuality. An updated
version of the sentiments contained in Boom Bye Bye can be obtained from
the enormously popular song Chi Chi Man,7 in which the artists, TOK,
conclude: Fiya [fire] mek we bun [burn] them, / For them a drink in a Chi
Chi man bar. The idea here is to have fire visited upon homosexuals as
punishment for their sexual orientation. TOK are also more expansive on
this issue, simulating the sound of gunfire directed at gay people with their
Rat tat tat / Every Chi Chi man hafi get flatthe execution of those who
transgress the heterosexual norm.
Indeed, the possibility of serious physical harm to open or suspected ho-
mosexuals is real in many Caribbean islands. Note the religious injunction in
the comment of Whiskey Bop Johnnie Walker, a Jamaican deejay: Batty
bwoy in Babylon haffi ded cause dem ah eat di bread from Sodom an
Gomorrah (Noel 1993: 31). One man summed up his feelings about homo-
sexuals more bluntly when he mused that batty bwoys vex with punani.8
Unfortunately, the intolerance is not merely expressed verbally or in song but
manifests itself from time to time with devastating results. In August 1997
the Corrections Commissioner in Jamaica, John Prescod, suggested that both
114 / Linden Lewis

guards and inmates of the jail be issued condoms for obvious health reasons.
Neither guards nor inmates read this suggestion in terms of health consider-
ations but rather as an affront to their masculinity. Moreover, it raised the
specter of homosexual activity taking place in the prison, which did not
resonate well with those who apparently stood accused of participating in
such forbidden pleasures. One must bear in mind, as we said earlier, that the
level of homophobia is perhaps at its most intense in Jamaica. This sugges-
tion of the commissioner therefore led to prison guards walking off the job in
protest of the implication that they were having sexual intercourse with in-
mates, and it also set off four days of violence within the prison itself. Inmates
went on a rampage targeting other prisoners whom they knew or believed to
be homosexuals. When the dust had settled, sixteen inmates had been killed.
This event is a sad testimony to the violence that hegemonic masculinity
sometimes demonstrates in an effort to assert itself. It also shows the lengths
to which hegemonic masculinity would go to author and normalize hetero-
sexuality. The death of these sixteen inmates in the Jamaican prison serves as
a reminder to all of us of the possible consequences of destabilizing certain
notions of masculinity. Indeed, it is a chilling admonition of the real and
concrete consequences of phenomena that some so glibly describe as being
socially constructed, for one can too easily become preoccupied with the
rhetoric of constructionism without being sufficiently sensitive to its material
content.
Even at higher levels of tolerance of homosexuality, as is the case in, say,
Barbados or Trinidad, abuse and public ridicule and acts of hostility toward
gay men are still acceptable practices. A caller to a popular radio call-in
program in Barbados relayed to the host what had happened to him on Bay
Street, which is on the outskirts of the capital city of Bridgetown. The caller,
who indicated he was gay, was walking home one night when a group of men,
on seeing him, began pelting him with eggs. The caller inquired if this humili-
ation was, in the hosts opinion, fair, as his only crime appeared to have been
his display of effeminacy.
The symbolism in this case is interesting. In Barbados, one of the many
slurs used to describe a homosexual male is hen, as distinct from the femi-
nine cock (a lesbian). The pelting with eggs of this gay man was no coin-
cidence: his assailants were signifying his effeminacy or hen-ness by
throwing at him a symbolically significant object, the egg, calculated to con-
vey deprecation and cause shame. Hens after all, lay eggs. This man was
considered a hen, so that semiotically the egg resonates with his sexual
orientation.
What is more disturbing here is the intent. People in the Caribbean do not
normally walk around with eggs seeking targets on which to practice.
Chances are that his assailants knew his sexual orientation and specifically
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 115

targeted him for public opprobrium. In short, this act of cruelty was meant
not merely to signal disapproval of the mans homosexuality but to let him
know that he was behaving in ways that were considered feminine.
The point herethat homosexuality in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, is a
subordinated form of masculinityshould not be overlooked when attempt-
ing to understand men and gender relations in the region. It also forces us to
consider which cultural forces constrain or permit certain forms of expres-
sion of masculinity. A lot of work still needs to be done at this level in the
Caribbean. At any rate, the presence of homosexuality in the region validates
the argument raised in the previous section of the chapter against essen-
tializing the Caribbean male.
Lest one infer from the foregoing that masculinity in the Caribbean is
constructed in two varietieshegemonic or homosexualone should be
cognizant of other forms which inhabit spaces between the two addressed so
far. The discussion of the gevedoche of the Dominican Republic is worth
remembering. The complexity of the nuances around masculinity cannot be
adequately addressed here; suffice it to note that there are men in the Carib-
bean who embrace neither homosexuality nor hegemonic masculinity. Some
men chart an alternative course of gender relations. Such men do not sub-
scribe to the belief that masculinity should be predicated on the domination
of women. They work in solidarity with women and some womens organi-
zations in the interests of eliminating gender inequality in the region.
While some men seek out new paradigms of masculinity, others settle for
the comfort of more traditional understandings of the same. At the level of
popular consciousness, culture plays a crucial role in linking sport to mascu-
linity. As will be seen in the discussion below, sport has long become a cul-
tural signifier of masculinity in the region.

Metaphors of Masculinity in the Caribbean

Some understandings of masculinity in the Caribbean are made possible

through the use of metaphors. As in other cultures, sport is a popular meta-
phor of masculinity. It stands to reason that sport would play such a role,
given its simulation of one of the more enduring metaphors of masculinity,
war. Like war, sport allows men to express aggression and violence without
facing the normal penalties for such behavior. In war as in sport there are
always winners and losers locked into a system overdetermined by competi-
tion, aggression and conquest. Sport, insofar as it embodies manly ideals of
physical prowess, endurance, strength, courage, heart, guts and will, has
come to symbolize hegemonic masculinity. It is little wonder, then, that men
in the Caribbean measure each other in terms of their ability to play certain
sports, or to display great devotion to them, indeed to be the guardians of
116 / Linden Lewis

their history and the collective conscience of their minutiae. There are many
sports in the region that symbolize these masculine ideals and have become
metaphors for certain types of masculinity. Stick fighting and dogfighting
immediately come to mind, as do soccer and baseball, particularly in the
Hispanic Caribbean. This section, however, examines the sport of cockfight-
ing in the Dominican Republic and in Puerto Rico, and cricket in the English-
speaking Caribbean.

Cockfighting
Cockfighting is a colonial sport that was introduced to the island of Hispan-
iola by Christopher Columbus on his second visit in 1493. The sport is also
fairly popular in neighboring Puerto Rico, where it has a similar history, and
throughout the French Caribbean. It has an underground following in other
Caribbean countries as well; it is outlawed but practiced enthusiastically in
such places as Trinidad and St. Lucia. Many Dominican and Puerto Rican
men passionately embrace cockfighting. For many of them the cockerel is a
quintessential symbol of valor. One of the Dominican men interviewed by
Stuart Hall in the 1992 documentary Portrait of the Caribbean, Julio Du-
rlez, admiringly noted: A top fighting cock wont give in until its killed.
Another man in the same documentary elaborated that the cock may receive
terrible injuries, mortal blows, but it will never show any signs of cowardice.
So a man takes the cock that hes reared to the cockpit as a surrogate for
himself. He himself also fears nothing. As Clifford Geertz notes in his work
on Bali, it is not only cocks that are fighting, it is actually men (1973: 417).
Gregory Bates and Margaret Mead, cited in Geertz, note that cocks are
viewed as detachable, self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of
their own (Geertz 1973: 417).
The cockfighting arena, or gayelle, as it is called in the English and French
Caribbean, is the real theater of war. Here the rooster embodies a symbol
of masculinity validated through battle in which he or his opponent often
must pay the ultimate price in blood. The gayelle itself becomes a metaphor
for society in which the trope of masculinity as spectacle is performed, con-
tested, negotiated, demoralized or rescued. It is noteworthy that the word
gallo, which means rooster or cockerel, is used to refer to a man who is
capable of destroying his enemies and who possesses considerable power
over womenhence the Dominican expression un hombre gallo and the
Puerto Rican bien gallo. Wucker observes that three types of men go to the
cockfight: breeders, players, and gamblers.
The breeders, the true cockers, get involved in every aspect of the lives
of their roosters. They decide which hen will be matched with which
cock, what mix of feed the birds will get, at what age a young rooster is
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 117

ready to fight. Breeders supervise every aspect of the traba,9 the home of
the roosters, as if it were their own home and the roosters their chil-
dren. At the fights a real breeder puts himself in the ring with his bird.
For him the cockfight is not a game. (1999: 141)
According to Wucker, the player is a fight enthusiast who is knowledgeable
about the sport; they enjoy the passion of the fight, the heat of battle
(1999: 141). The gambler, on the other hand, is the lifeblood of the sport. He
has a financial stake in the game and is satisfied with nothing short of a profit
on his investment. Despite their differing orientations to the sport, however,
these three categories of participant are conscious of the metaphor of mascu-
linity that personifies the cockfight. All this prompted Stuart Hall in Portrait
of the Caribbean to conclude about the sport of cockfighting: Different it
certainly is, a mere sport it is not. These men have too much of themselves
invested here for it to be a simple pastime. For them, it is a metaphor of
conquest.
It is, however, not merely about conquest, it is about perceptions of deter-
mination and ideals of strength and virility. The cockfight is a symbolic uni-
verse in which meaning is constructed and reconstructed. It is a hermeneutic
space of masculine discourses.
If ever one wanted reassurance on the importance of cockfighting as a
national pastime, one need look no further than at the significance the sport
holds for Puerto Rican men. When the recent Puerto Rican plebiscite to de-
termine the future status of the island was conducted and debated, the issue
of cockfighting became an important part of the popular discourse around
the topic. If Puerto Rico were to opt for statehood, this would most surely
mean the banning of cockfighting, which is illegal in most U.S. states. It did
appear that the practice was permitted in Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, New
Mexico and Oklahoma (see Bilger 1999: 48).10 Of course, anyone who is
interested in cockfighting in the United States knows where to find the pits in
New York and Florida. Indeed, the current attitude toward cockfighting in
the United States masks a period of fond embrace of the sport. George Wash-
ington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were all cockfighting aficio-
nados, using the presidential mansion as the site of the duel, while Abraham
Lincoln, a cockfighting referee no less, is reported to have said: As long as
the Almighty permits intelligent man created in His image and likeness to
fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it is
not for me to deprive the chicken of the same privilege (Bilger 1999: 56).
As for Puerto Rico, the sport was banned once before, early in the cen-
tury when the island was under an American governor; the ban was lifted in
1933 when an outraged Puerto Rican legislature forced the governor to
reinstate the sport by threatening to block his governments budget
118 / Linden Lewis

(McGuire 1998: 8). Some in Puerto Rico see the possibility of a ban on
cockfighting on the island as an affront to their national heritage. Though
cockfighting came to Puerto Rico in the context of Spanish colonialism, it has
been around for so long that it has been appropriated as part of the national
culture and imbued with local cultural meaning. So there is understandable
outrage at the idea of an imperialist power and culture intending to impose its
will in determining the appropriateness of the national pastime. Herein lies
an important subtext of the narrative of masculinity, for even to raise the
issue of eliminating this sportone of the most important rituals and sym-
bols of masculinity embedded in the island cultureis tantamount to launch-
ing an attack on Puerto Rican manhood itself. In sum, cockfighting in both
the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico is a culturally significant intersec-
tion of nationalism and masculinity and hence important in explaining the
meaning of the latter in the context of the Caribbean.

Cricket
In the English-speaking Caribbean, cricket is still the most popular sport,
despite serious competition from such a relative newcomer as basketball.
Cricket is played and watched intently by both men and women. As a na-
tional pastime, invested with cultural significance, cricket is very much a
mans sport. Like cockfighting, it has a colonial history; indeed, some would
argue that it is the most colonial of sports. Over the years, however, the
cultural meaning of cricket in the Caribbean has been redefined away from
its colonial foundations as a gentlemans game into a proud signifier of
colonial hybridity and resistance. For a long time the West Indies cricket team
dominated the world of cricket, though their more recent fortunes have been
less impressive.
Few features of the game of cricket are gender-neutral. The way the sport
is referred to in some quarters as bat and ball says much about the subtext
of male anatomy. The pitch, on which the game is played, is usually analo-
gized to the body of the woman. The bat has long been a phallic symbol and
is often referred to in other contexts as a measure of physical endowment and
sexual performance of men. In several colloquial expressions the bat is con-
sidered an extension of the penis. To bat long may have nothing to do with
ones proficiency as a cricketer but rather to do with the length of time one is
able to occupy the crease, which in turn is a vernacular code for the va-
ginahence to engage in extended sexual intercourse. The new ball that
opens each innings is called the cherry, and a bowler can perform the task
of bowling a maiden, that is, to have no runs scored off the six deliveries
that constitute an over in cricket. Alternatively, the batsman can deny the
bowler such an honor by breaking his maiden, that is, by scoring a run
or runs. To hit the ball, as the calypsonian Mighty Gabby says in his song
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 119

Hit It, often means more than merely to make the bat and ball connect. To
be able to swing the ball or the batthat is, to be able to bowl or bat with
great skillwould be a highly appreciated sexual compliment. Lastly, to
abandon play because of rain (a regular occurrence in cricket) sometimes
refers in the Caribbean vernacular to orgasm and ejaculation. This other,
subversive reading of cricket is understood by most if not all Caribbean per-
sons, and does not normally require public explanation, but in the cultural
context of the calypso meaning is expanded for purposes of humor or politi-
cal satire. The calypsonian, as griot, has long deconstructed the masculine
subtext of the game of cricket for popular consumption. Canarys Wicked
Cricket Match is a classic calypso that plays on the sexual innuendo of the
game. Gabbys Hit It is of the same genre. There are several other calypsos
about cricket, addressing a variety of themes from national pride and schisms
within the West Indies team to regional unity. As long as the game is played
in the region, there will always be a calypsonian to analyze its intricacies for
the public.
Recent developments in the sport call attention to the conflation of cricket
and masculinity, as is evident in this Barbadian newspaper item:

Caribbean men love cricket and when their Windies surrendered the Sir
Frank Worrell Trophy to Australia, it was another blow to regional
male pride.
The masculine male seems under threat as men struggle, like the West
Indies team, to hold on to past glories while fighting hard to find new
form. (Blenman 1997: 29)

The author went on to report the complaints of an assemblage of Barbadian

men who were lamenting the direction the game was taking. The men ex-
pressed concerns about the sissying of cricket, that is, the increasing use of
protective gear such as helmets, visors, chest and arm pads, groin protectors
and shin pads. In short, these men were making a connection between hyper-
masculine fearlessness and cricket, and by extension they were associating
loss or defeat with what they considered to be the feminization of the sport.
Cricket for many Caribbean people, both men and women, is a source of
national and regional pride. For a long time it was one of few avenues of
social mobilityalong with educationfor working-class young men in the
Caribbean. The sociological significance of the game in the Caribbean is itself
a remarkable story of working-class struggle, in concert with colonial and
racial resistance at the popular level (see James 1963 for details). C.L.R.
James describes the sport as an art form, no less so than the forms usually
called the fine arts (1963: 30). In Season of Adventure, Lamming describes
the style of bowling of one of his characters:
120 / Linden Lewis

Crim bowled at such speed and with such savage intensity, that it
seemed, sometimes, he was using cricket as the only arena in which he
could wage his war against people who were more fortunate than him-
self. Dr. Speigel the Oxford graduate who taught history at the college
once remarked that Crim reminded him of similar situations in En-
gland. The finest and most dangerous English fast bowlers, he was
suggesting, had always come from the countrys working-class. Speed
was their weapon. (1960: 345)

Part of the appeal of cricket for working-class men was that it required
very little capital outlay, at least to get started. It is a glorious game of strategy
and skill. It is also an engaging and wonderful sport to watch. However, as
Stuart Hall noted of cockfighting above, men have a lot of themselves in-
vested in this sport. For many men cricket is also a metaphor of masculinity.
It is the site where men seek approval, honor, respect and courage from each
other and from the fans. It is a site where men do gender, where they perform
their masculinity. That so much of the game can be read as discursive sexual
practice, rich in sexual double entendre, is a clear indication that cricket is
more than just making sport.

Masculinity and the Changing Dynamics of Gender in the Caribbean

The Caribbean is witnessing a gendered interest in men. By virtue of our

control of resources in the region, our access to the apparatuses of power in
government and in business, our ability to shape and direct the culture of our
societies, our capacity to author certain types of change, men have at one
level always been the focus of attention. However, men have not always been
considered in gendered terms, except insofar as women have identified us as
privileged with respect to a number of criteria. There is nothing particularly
remarkable about this situation. Masculinity is ultimately a privileged ideol-
ogy and, like other privileged ideologies such as whiteness and heterosexual-
ity, has not seen a need to define itself or to articulate its position. Why should
masculinity be concerned with its own articulation when it perceives itself to
be normative?
The feminist discourse on gender and equality in the Caribbean, the asser-
tion of women and the progress of some women, have combined to create
this new awareness in and about men. Given the complementarities of mas-
culinity and femininity, this response was inevitablechanges in one gender
result in changes in the other. The reaction of men in the region to the chang-
ing relations of gender has not always been positive. Some men have ex-
pressed fear and hostility and a perception of a loss of status, if not of power.
The fact of the matter is that both men and women are in the process of
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 121

making adjustments not merely to the newly emerging gender relations but to
global, regional and national changes brought about by the restructuring of
the global political economy, by a changing cultural landscape and by the
profound impact of the global discourse on gender. (See Watson in chapter 2
on this impact.)
The net effect of all these changes is that men in the Caribbean are being
forced to negotiate new relations of power. There are new roles requiring
different orientations of men and involving new forms of socialization.
Taken-for-granted roles such as fatherhood are being reconfigured to involve
greater participation by men and more emotional investment. In this regard,
organizations such as Parent Education for Development in Barbados
(PAREDOS), the Family Planning Association of Trinidad and Tobago and
the Family Planning Association of St. Lucia have all established programs
that focus on providing parenting skills, particularly for young men. These
organizations also provide counseling to men on issues of family planning
and reproductive health.
In a rather ironic way, therefore, the study of masculinity is coming of age
in the Caribbean. In March of 1993 the United Nations Economic Commis-
sion on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based in Trinidad and
Tobago, sponsored the conference Men and Women in Changing Caribbean
Social Structuresperhaps the first serious attempt to understand men as
gendered subjects. Mens studies programs are being established at the Cen-
tre for Gender and Development Studies on all three campuses of the Univer-
sity of the West Indies. In January 1996 the Trinidad unit of the Centre held
a symposium called The Construction of Caribbean Masculinity: Towards a
Research Agenda. This symposium represented a significant departure for
this unit, which had hitherto concentrated most of its effort on the study of
issues concerning women. More recently, the International Planned Parent-
hood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region organized yet another confer-
ence focused on men. That conferenceGender, Families and Sexual Health:
A Spotlight on Menwas held in Barbados in September 1997.
Much of this interest in men and masculinity is being translated into schol-
arship which is beginning to emerge in the region. It has also generated a
flood of letters and editorials in newspapers across the Caribbean. There
have also begun to emerge mens groups such as the one attempting to stage
a small-scale Mens March in Trinidad. In addition, Barbados now has a set
of Promise Keepers. This group possesses most of the conservative and Chris-
tian qualities of its North American counterpart. Its members advocate
reinscribing men as the head of the household and the family and promote
very traditional roles for men and women, using biblical precept as the basis
of their claim of authority. There are several other mens organizations that
are gaining visibility, such as Men Against Violence Against Women, a com-
122 / Linden Lewis

munity-based group grappling with the growing problem of domestic and

other forms of abuse perpetrated by men in society. The Association for the
Reorientation and Transformation of Masculinity and the Male Support
Committeethe latter a more progressive type of mens group comprising
predominantly younger men who are active in placing the issue of masculin-
ity on the agenda not only at the level of the community but with respect to
the artshave conducted workshops with calypsonians about the misogyny
in their lyrics, and they have written and performed plays that address issues
of gender. Men Against Violence Against Women, The Association for the
Reorientation and Transformation of Masculinity and the Male Support
Committee are all based in Trinidad and Tobago. There is also a very active
group in Jamaica known as Fathers Incorporated, dedicated to improving the
quality of fathering and impressing upon young men in particular the impor-
tance of responsible parenthood.
As can be expected, not all the responses by men to changing gender rela-
tions have been positive or progressive. There is clearly a feminist backlash
taking place in some parts of the region. However, at least the reaction of
many men and the formation of groups such as those identified above create
the foundation for an important and necessary dialogue among men and
between men and women in the Caribbean about the importance of gender
both structurally and sociopolitically. In summary, the issue of masculinity
has been firmly placed on the agenda of Caribbean gender relations. We must
all be hopeful that this focus on men will provide more understanding, create
more dialogue between genders, expand the terrain of the discourse and lead
to greater respect and equality between men and women.

Conclusion

How men construct their masculinity in the Caribbean, as indeed in other

parts of the world, is contingent on the confluence of a number of factors: the
cultural milieu within which they operate; the ideological role of the state,
that is, the ways in which the state contributes to the formation of social
identities; the specific political, economic and historical conditions; the
myriad ways in which race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and religion
mediate these various practices. The construction of masculinity is a multi-
layered phenomenon. No longer can we settle for a one-dimensional view
suggesting that men define themselves exclusively through, for example, their
work. The process of masculine construction is much more nuanced. In any
event, given the high rates of unemployment in the Caribbean at this time,
work can hardly serve as an exclusive signifier of masculinity.
Moreover, as de Lauretis warned, we need to concentrate, in the construc-
tion of masculinity or femininity, not only on the ideological apparatuses of
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 123

the state but on the less obvious sites; in the Caribbean, these sites include the
folk culture and most definitely the popular culture, the arts, the academy,
the intellectual community, the streets, and the hierarchical arrangements of
society where the power to shape social meaning and to promote representa-
tions of gender reside (1987: 18). Understanding masculinity in the context
of the Caribbean is not simply about creating a new or expanded academic
agenda. An important political foundation is necessary for the realization of
gender equality. It is therefore incumbent upon those of us whose scholarly
focus is the Caribbean to unpack the narrative of masculinity carefully if we
are to do justice to any prospect for reconstruction.

Notes

This is a significantly revised version of a paper presented to the nineteenth annual

Caribbean Studies Conference, held in Mrida, Mexico, May 2328, 1994. The chap-
ter has also benefited from a lecture delivered at Alana Cultural Center, Colgate
University, April 13, 1998. The author would like to thank Lawrence Berg for his
comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
1. The infinitive to horn is a Caribbean colloquialism that means to be cuck-
olded or deceived by a lover. In this calypso, the woman is seen as being able to exact
punishment from the man for his failure to fulfill the role of provider or breadwin-
ner. For the young man in this song, in effect, the stakes for nonperformance of manly
duties are raised. There is also the presumption that, by taking a lover, the woman has
the power to embarrass the man and, by extension, challenge his masculinity and hold
it up to public ridicule. Such actions on the part of women are often not at all empow-
ering. Behavior like horning can precipitate a violent reaction on the part of the
cuckold. In addition, given societys double standard, it is unlikely that a woman
could engage in such behavior without damage to her own reputation. In short,
Shadow presents the scenario in song in a rather unproblematic way, using the male
gaze to frame the issue of the nonperformance of masculinity. Read differently, how-
ever, there are clearly certain social costs associated with the action of the woman in
the context of the calypso. (My thanks to Herbie Brewer and Erica Rapier-Brewer for
helping me to think through the implications of this song.)
2. Pocomania is a largely Afro-Caribbean religion practiced mostly in the urban
areas of Jamaica. It is similar in cosmology to voodoo and Santera. Pocomania is
essentially a combination of African and Christian beliefs.
3. Emilio Bejel suggests that perhaps the Catholic Churchs award recognizes reli-
gious freedom in Cuba, which is a subtext of part of the film, rather than its explicit
defense of the rights of the homosexual (1996: 65).
4. Jamaican creole word meaning mothers boy but more commonly used to
refer to a homosexual man, and sometimes more specifically to an effeminate male.
5. Jamaican creole word for a gay man.
6. Jamaican onomatopoeic expression of gunshots.
7. This is a relatively new Jamaican slur for a homosexual man. My thanks to
124 / Linden Lewis

Jacqueline McLeod for bringing this song to my attention. One well-known politician
is reported to have quipped recently that government business was too important to
be left in the hands of a Chi Chi man. This was an indirect but well-understood barb
aimed at his political opponent.
8. Jamaican vernacular word for the vagina.
9. Farm where roosters are bred, raised and trained (see glossary in Wucker 1999:
260).
10. Since Bilgers publication, Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma have banned the
sport.

Bibliography

Films
The Darker Side of Black. Written and directed by Isaac Julien, narrated by Paul
Gilroy. Black Audio Film Collective in association with Normal Film, for BBC
Television and the Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1993.
Portrait of the Caribbean. Documentary series written and narrated by Stuart Hall.
Produced by Barraclough Carey. Ambrose Video Publication, for BBC and Turner
Broadcasting, 1992.

Printed Sources
Badinter, Elisabeth. XY: On Masculine Identity. Translated by Lydia Davis. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Barrett, Michle. Womens Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter. Rev.
ed. London: New Left Books, 1988.
Barrow, Christine. Male Images of Women in Barbados. Social and Economic
Studies 35, no. 3 (1986): 5164.
Bejel, Emilio. Strawberry and Chocolate: Coming Out of the Cuban Closet? South
Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 1 (1996): 6582.
Bilger, Burkhard. Enter the Chicken: On the Bayou, Cockfighting Remains Unde-
feated. Harpers 298, no. 1786 (1999): 4857.
Birringer, Johannes. Homosexuality and the Nation: An Interview with Jorge Peru-
gorra. Drama Review 40, no. 1 (1996): 6176.
Blenman, Rose. Move to Maintain the Macho Myth. Weekend Nation, February
14, 1997, p. 29.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2001.
Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell,
1989.
Carrigan, Tim, Bob Connell, and John Lee. Toward a New Sociology of Masculin-
ity. Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (1985): 551604.
Connell, R. W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford,
Calif.: Standford University Press, 1987.
. The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History. Theory and Soci-
ety 22, no. 5 (1993): 597623.
 Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative / 125

Cooper, Vincent O. Language and Gender among the Kalinago of Fifteenth-Century

St. Croix. In The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, edited by Samuel M.
Wilson, 18696. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Dann, Graham. The Barbadian Male: Sexual Attitudes and Practice. London:
Macmillan, 1987.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Donaldson, Mike. What is Hegemonic Masculinity? Theory and Society 22, no. 5
(1993): 64357.
Ebert, Teresa L. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in
Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic
Books, 1973.
Godelier, Maurice. The Origins of Male Domination. New Left Review, no. 127
(1981): 317.
Gordon, Edmund T. Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity. Transforming Anthro-
pology 6, nos. 12 (1997): 3653.
Hall, Stuart. What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture? In Black Popular
Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 2132. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.
James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul, 1963.
Lamming, George. Season of Adventure. 1960. London: Michael Joseph, 1979.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986.
Lumsden, Ian. Machos, Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1996.
McGuire, Michael. Puerto Ricans Weighing Political Identity, Destiny: Many Fear
Closer Ties with the US Would Step on Traditions. Chicago Tribune, April 14,
1998, p. 8.
Miller, Errol. Marginalization of the Black Male: Insights from the Development of
the Teaching Profession. Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research,
UWI, 1986.
. Men at Risk. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House, 1991.
Moya Pons, Frank. The Tainos of Hispaniola: The Islands First Inhabitants. Car-
ibbean Review 12, no. 4 (1984): 2023, 47.
Noel, Peter. Batty Boys in Babylon: Can Gay West Indians Survive the Boom Bye
Bye Posses? Village Voice, January 12, 1993, pp. 2936.
Senior, Olive. Working Miracles: Womens Lives in the English- Speaking Caribbean.
London: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
West Indian Commission. Time for Action. Black Rock, Barbados: West Indian Com-
mission, 1992.
Wilson, Peter. Reputation and Respectability: A Suggestion for Caribbean Ethnol-
ogy. Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 7084.
Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for
Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
Yelvington, Kevin A. Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean
Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
 The Political Terrain
of Gender and Sexuality
 4

A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad

Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos
of the 1920s and 1930s

Patricia Mohammed

Introduction: The Calypso as Creole Aesthetic

The calypso is a product of the creole society that emerged in the Caribbean
as a result of Spanish, French and British occupation from the fifteenth cen-
tury onwards, in a colonization sustained by African slavery and the inden-
tured labor of other ethnic groups. The calypso form is constantly undergo-
ing change. There are vast differences between its more obscure early origins
and the calypso of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To fully
appreciate the emergence of calypso in Trinidad during the nineteenth cen-
tury, Gordon Rohlehr suggests, one would need to consider the complex
blends of music and dances of French creole slave society before emancipa-
tion, the various African influences on the evolution of French creole society,
the music and dances of the Anglophone West Indian migrants between 1840
and 1900, the music and dances of the groups of liberated Africans during the
postemancipation period, the small Hispanic element in Trinidad which per-
sisted through contact with Venezuela and Curaao, and the ritual celebra-
tion of all these things in the annual Carnival as well as their simplification
into a few predominant forms by 1900.1 Maureen Warner-Lewis confirms
that the expressions of African culture were primary in the development of
the calypso form, lending themselves readily to adaptation and mixture with
the various elements that generated creole society in the West Indies.2
I pinpoint the calypso as a major channel through which a creole aesthetic
was being forged in Trinidad society from the late nineteenth, and certainly
in the twentieth century. Song writers and singers were beginning to config-
ure a value system denoting good and bad, admissible or unacceptable be-
havior, concepts of beauty and ugliness, the device of the song presenting a
130 / Patricia Mohammed

sure medium by which these values would and could be collectively negoti-
ated by the population. My use of aesthetic here refers largely to notional
concepts of beauty, taste and other attributes that become archetypal of a
specific culture. The processes by which these evolve in any society are not
easy to capture in textual analyses. Generally, they are referred to as the
superstructure in materialist analyses or amorphously embodied as the com-
ponents of culture in anthropological examinations.3 In this essay I attempt
an unwrapping of this complex process by which identitiesnational, cul-
tural, ethnic, class and particularly genderare cumulatively being fash-
ioned, by theoretically extracting and examining one expression of a culture.
The emergence of any popular art form in a society is, in part, determined
by the material conditions to which the creative instinct responds and to the
imperatives of the marketplace, the one vying with the other in a dialectic
struggle. For instance, the evolution of the DJ and dancehall culture in Ja-
maica, with its parallel forms in the United States and Britain as a rap culture
and extending into India as bhangra in the last few decades of the twenti-
eth century, is the response of groups in society who feel they have been
shortchanged in the process of development. They have generated not only
an alternative musical and lyrical style but, inadvertently or deliberately, cre-
ated another language and mode of struggle. Incidentally, entertainment is a
key and, for some, rewarding source of self-employment. The calypso in
Trinidad society also represented the verbal outrage and declarations of a
group that was virtually powerless in the scheme of things; it emerged ini-
tially out of slavery and colonialism as entertainment combined with social
protest. Through double entendre, the singer conveyed ideas of rebellion and
resistance to the indignities of slavery and postslavery society, disguising his
or her outspokenness behind laughter and innuendo. As an art form the
calypso continued to offer the singers, generally men in the earlier days of the
twentieth century, the space from which they could articulate the grievances
of the individual or the class or community to which the singer belonged. The
success of the calypso depended on the extent to which the singer or song-
writer had tapped into the shared sentiments or popular ideas of people in the
society.
The 1920s and 1930s in Trinidad were fraught with economic hardship
and a profound dissatisfaction with colonial rule. A spate of workers riots
during this period led by 1937 to the Crown Colony Moyne Commission
enquiry into conditions in the various West Indian territories and resulted in
the establishment of trade unions, among other directives, for the first time in
the region. The angry and debilitating tenor of working-class life at the time
is captured in Arthur Lewiss Labour in the West Indies (1938). Music was
not yet recognized as a legitimate form of protest, so that Susan Craigs as-
sessment in her afterword to the 1977 edition of this book is an insightful
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 131

one. Lewis, an economist, could not have appreciated the social roots of
popular music in the New World. Popular music is in part produced by the
changes in social structure, wrote Craig. The growth of the unemployed to
between 20% and 30% of all Caribbean workers, their struggle for survival
and recognition and against repressive organs of the State, this is what is
mirrored in the development of the steelband movement (and its struggle for
survival), and in the musical explosion of West Kingston in particular.4 This
reading of both the calypso and the steelband in Trinidad is after the fact of
their evolution.
The calypsos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated
on glorifying physical prowess and were primarily concerned with the cour-
age and skill of men in a situation of physical encounter. Gordon Rohlehr
analyzed the calypsos of the 1930s in relation to the sociology of food
acquisition in a context of survivalism. He suggested that the lyrical content
of the calypsos of the 1930s accurately demonstrates the extent to which the
calypsonian literally sang for his supper. The calypso form is to social com-
mentary as butterflies are to pollen, and the themes and lyrical content
change to suit the occasion and the particular grievance of the moment. The
actual shifts that may occur in the form of the calypso result from the events
of different historical times and from the changes in economic conditions. As
one would expect in a creative musical form, it is also continuously influ-
enced by changes in musical ideas and instrumentation. The calypso as an art
form is versatile and resilient within the culture, particularly because it is also
in continuous dialogue with itself. Not surprisingly, some general themes
such as economic survival, social exclusion, and the ubiquitous man-woman
story are persistent and recurring, if not favorite, themes of the calypsonian
and cannot be time bound.
To examine the calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s in Trinidad, one needs to
envisage the moment in its economic, political and social context. The period
was characterized by growing unemployment, increasing urbanization, inter-
nal migration and sudden occupational shifts owing to the discovery of sig-
nificant oil reserves in south Trinidad from 1910. The distinctive features in
the migrant groups that comprised the society were also becoming more
visible, and perhaps beginning to create the mosaic that comprised a Trini-
dadian culture. Indian indentureship, the last organized labor importation
system into the island, which ended in 1917, had brought thousands of
Hindi-speaking Indian migrants each year since 1845 onto a space where
first Amerindian languages, then Spanish, English and French had been
blended and mixed into a French creole patois. That English was by then
appreciated as a language of the masses, including the last group of non-
English-speaking migrants, could be seen in the emergence of the first Indian
journalist, Seepersad Naipaul, who had begun in 1926 a twice-weekly col-
132 / Patricia Mohammed

umn entitled Indian News and Views for the English-owned and -managed
Guardian newspaper. Here the news from Indian villages was reported; reli-
gious celebrations such as Ramleela and Eid ul Fitr and Indian marriage
ceremonies were being photographed and published in the newspapers,
along with news items that concerned the other segments of the population
slowly growing in English literacy. A survey of the newspapers and writers of
this period demonstrates that people were not only absorbed with the pov-
erty and survival that affected the man in the street. They were equally con-
cerned with understanding and debating the different ethnic beliefs and prac-
tices contained within this relatively small island, a quarter the size of
Jamaica.5 Calypsos were being used at this time to confront and make sense
of the varied messages of masculinity and femininity that the different groups
and social classes introduced, at times uncharitably: calypso relies on rheto-
ric, humor and clever wit to bring the message home.

Language as an Instrument of the Masses

To acknowledge the importance of the English language in the development

of calypso into the twentieth century, Raymond Quevedo (18921962), so-
briquet Atilla the Hun, who would later become a political figure in the
society, observed that from 1903 until about 1921 the oratorical skill of the
calypsonian was celebrated, especially the calypsonian who could extempo-
rize and thus impress his audience with his command of language. According
to Quevedo, it is possible in this period that the calypso was influenced by
the great public speakers of the time, including Sir Henry Alcazar, MZumbo
Lazare, Maresse Smith and Bishop Hayes.6 The performance being rendered
more and more in English from the beginning of the twentieth century, the
calypso and calypsonian could only now begin to appeal to a much wider
public sensibility. The importance of the growth of English to calypso, as
the latter developed a greater mass appeal from 1920s onwards, cannot be
underestimated in a cultural art form that relies on the word to carry the
message. Bridget Brereton supports an argument that a shared language in-
creased the impact of calypso as mythmaker from the early twentieth cen-
tury: She writes:
At the end of the [nineteenth] century, the majority of lower-class Cre-
oles spoke creole habitually among themselves and as their native
tongue. Most peons spoke Spanish among themselves. A large number
of blacks who had come from the other islands spoke English mainly,
though many learned patois in order to communicate with Creoles. The
older Creoles and peons, those over forty or fifty by 1900, usually
spoke little or no English, though they often understood it. Their chil-
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 133

dren under the age of about forty usually had been exposed to English-
Language elementary education, and so both spoke and understood
English, though they might not use it in their homes. English was
spreading fast; but patois remained the language of the Creole masses
at the end of the century. (1979: 166)

It would take another generation born into this island, roughly two de-
cades in the twentieth century, before English was more widespread in the
society. Language has always been a major instrument of control, a fact well
appreciated by the various European colonizers who wrested control of the
various landmasses from each other.7 By the end of the nineteenth century,
the English language had predominated, replacing patoisa dialect influ-
enced by Spanish, African, French and English. As the language of British
colonial rule and of government, English also became the language of the
elite and the well educated, offering the speaker of English a pathway to
social mobility in a society unfolding and requiring new talents. Eloquence
and verbal skill became as powerful as the physical weaponry of the erstwhile
stick fighter, a means by which power could be wielded against another. Since
this power was usually traded between men, the calypso singer began to use
the word as power, adding this to working-class mens signifying attributes
of masculinity in the society.
From the twentieth century, calypsonians in Trinidad were increasingly
perceived as echoing the vox populi. The ruling class and the educated were
perceived as being removed from the day-to-day experiences of the man in
the street, whom the calypsonian appeared to represent. But this perception
must be accepted advisedly. The calypsonian largely expressed the views of
the class and ethnic group from which he originated and the sentiments of his
sex. For the most part from the working class, calypsonians were men who,
according to Ray Lucas, were supposed to be outcasts of society, and so was
anyone who dared to sing the calypso in public.8 Up to the last decade of the
twentieth century, if a young woman from the middle class fell in love with a
singer in this category, she still had trouble persuading her parents to accept
the legitimacy of the occupation or the status of the profession of her young
man. While there has been some change in attitudes towards calypsonians,
who have certainly gained more respectability of late, some element of their
dclass status still exists as the new century begins. There are still class
barriers erected, and until the eighties it was difficult for women and persons
of certain classes or ethnic groups to enter the calypso milieu. The idea that
popular culture is fomented from the masses and reflects a widely shared
aesthetic is nonetheless indisputable, and the messages carried over in the
most popular, witty and clever calypsos, those that captured the imagination
and appealed to the collective consciousness, attained classic proportions
134 / Patricia Mohammed

within the society. In some cases, where a calypsos popularity spread

throughout the region, its message appeared to extend to the Caribbean as a
whole.9
In the development of Trinidad society in the twentieth century, there is an
inseparable relationship between calypso and music (both local and exter-
nally influenced), linguistic idiom, and ethnic and gender relations. Such in-
fluences on the continuing evolution of calypso are numerous and complex.
I make no pretense here of examining these systematically or exhaustively.
Much of this is done in the pathbreaking 1990 book of Gordon Rohlehr and
in his many other publications and public addresses dealing with this theme.
My concern in this essay is a specific one. Among the various forms of popu-
lar culture, song is perhaps, in most societies, the most potent one through
which ideas pertaining to gender and sexuality are transmitted and debated.
The emphasis that calypso of the early twentieth century placed on lyrical
skill, humor and picongwhich derived from the French piquant (sting-
ing, insulting) and referred originally to the stinging insults that were traded
during the exchanges by rival chantwelles (Warner 1982: 11)has made it
a persuasive and convincing vehicle for transmitting ideas and ideology, par-
ticularly with regard to gender. The chantwelles were groups of women and
men, boys and girls from the stick fighter bands of the diamtre class who
moved around all year in the yards of Port of Spain. The role of the chantwell
was to insult the rival yards, to egg on the stick fight and the stick fighters.
Needless to say, everything became fodder for the wit and provocation of
each yard, and undoubtedly, as always, gender and sexuality provided some
of the sauciest material for the lyricism of a singer.
Humor in calypso is a crucial component of its makeup and undeniably
part of its entertainment appeal to a mass audience and its arousal of popular
consciousness. The relevance of humor, as it is employed by calypso, may be
interpreted through the insights of Sigmund Freud: humor allows the unpal-
atable to be evoked and easily digested and, more, dislodges repressed
thoughts and images that influence conscious interaction. In the performance
of the calypso, the cleverness of the lyrics impresses and amuses the listener
even while it may address something contentious, distasteful, perhaps taboo
in the society. At the same time, by bringing these images or ideas to the
surface, neither the singer nor the audience has allowed them to be conve-
niently forgotten. They are repeated for their insights and cleverness, easily
recalled again in company away from the calypso tents, lending themselves to
discussion whether on the street corner or around the dinner table. The mu-
sic, though important to the calypso, is the sauce that whets the appetite for
the calypso dish and makes it palatable despite the controversy it evokes.
This mixture of humor and license allowed to the calypso has made this
popular art form a primary one through which ideas of gender and sexuality
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 135

are conveyed and debated (very often in heated exchanges between men and
women) and eventually accepted in this society.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the singers of calypso in
Trinidad were primarily drawn from the majority ethnic group, those of
African descent. The remainder of the population were Indians, Chinese,
Europeans, Lebanese, and other Caribbean islanders. Despite variations of
ethnicity in the total population, there persists a collective idea of regional
and racial stereotypesconstructions of masculinity and femininity and
male and female sexuality that not only typify Trinidad but are often ex-
tended to the wider Caribbean. How do we marry real differences that people
may have within their homes, as demarcated by religious beliefs and kinship
norms, with the emergence of stereotypes? Racial stereotypes are not reduc-
ible to simply psychological traumas of one or the other group. Amina
Mamas approach to the study of racialized identities of the postcolonial
black subject is a useful one to draw on here. In her work Mama employs the
concept of subjectivity instead of the psychological terms identity and
self. She rejects the dualistic notion of psychological and social spheres as
essentially separate territories: one internal and one external to the person.10
She analyzes the psychological and social spheres as mutually connected,
each advancing in a recursive relationship with the other. While her analysis
deals primarily with the production of subjectivities of contemporary black
women in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, this approach of deconstructing
the psychologically weighted terms identity and self into subjectivity
allows a more nuanced interpretation of the role that the calypso and calyp-
sonians play in the creolization process in Trinidad at least.
The idea of subjectivity admits the emotional integrity of the subjects own
experience, the class from which he or she emerges. To accept subjectivity as
a valid process in the construction of our reality respects the expression of
gender or ethnic identity portrayed by the singer, as well as those of the
listeners. The calypsonian and the audience are simultaneously engaged in
the production of racial, gender and class identities, each actor or participant
in the production is positioned in a shared subjectivity, supporting or perhaps
denying the dominant models produced by bourgeois society. The fact that a
particular set of cultural values is selected and transformed in the colonial
process by a people is not accidental. Perceived differences among people in
any community are constantly being reinforced to accommodate the de-
mands of the society, as for example the caste/occupational divisions in India,
the class/status hierarchy of Britain, or the color/ethnic hierarchy of the
United States. At the same time, one must recall that this is being shaped
alongside the ideological struggle of the ruling class to project the notion of
a dominant cultural elite system, thus guaranteeing the economic and politi-
cal interests of that class. This process of changing class and status has often
136 / Patricia Mohammed

involved radical, violent and revolutionary struggles. The problems of class,

ethnicity and gender that the calypsonian draws attention to in his songs
allow combative positions to enter into a dialogue, and thereby airing griev-
ances and settling some differences without unsavory physical encounters.11

Gender as a Theme in Calypso

By the 1920s the main language of the calypso was English. Its schematic
form allowed and included witticisms and a relative freedom of speech.
There was also an audience receptive to this kind of performance. We need to
consider the role of the calypso song in creating mythologies related to gen-
der and sexuality, in Trinidad in particular and in the Caribbean in general.
Messages of gender in a society are transmitted in oblique ways such as
scripture, proverbs and the like, lending them an air of timeless truths. In that
sense the meanings of calypsos past are immortalized as truth. Between the
dominant ideas embodied in cultural aesthetics and the pragmatic day-to-day
lives of a people, we know there is a distance. Yet popular culture inscribes,
through its very popularity, a mythology that is continuously reproduced in
the semiotics of each art form. How do symbols of maleness and femaleness,
ideas of gender and difference, of separate male and female spheres, distinct
male and female sexualities, concepts of masculinity and femininity surface
as representative of any societys population? Are these accepted or rejected
by the society? Does acceptance reflect the condition and sensibility of the
majority of men and women in the society at the time, and should it reflect
the sentiments of the majority? In other words, how and why are ideas of
gendermasculinity and femininity, and male and female sexuality in a soci-
etybecoming mythologized through popular culture itself? What is the
logic of this particular myth within this society?
To analyze both the how and why in the mythologies of identity created by
the subjects themselves, I examine a selection of the calypsos written and
performed during the decades of the twenties and thirties. Apart from my
argument that by the turn of the century the English language had become the
shared tongue of the society, I have chosen to focus on the calypsos until 1939
for three other reasons. First, by 1900 the oral and scribal evidence made the
task of the ethnomusicologist a simpler one, and the research by Rohlehr,
Quevedo, Warner, and others, who record in excellent detail the calypsos
from the 1920s onwards, has made the systematic analysis of gender con-
struction through calypso a possible and easier task. The calypsos recorded
and recalled from the 1920s appear to be the most critical ones in constitut-
ing contemporary mythologies. My experience of the calypso goes back to
somewhere around 1927, but vivid memories start only in the early 1930s
when 44 Nelson Street was the hub of the calypso, and where the late Atilla,
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 137

Douglas and later Lion all appeared, writes Ray Lucas. The centre of Car-
nival and of course Calypso was at that time Henry to Duncan Streets, and
Duke and Marine Square, with Frederick Street as the borderline. . . . And
since calypso tents were put up in backyards, under roofs of bamboo and
coconut branches, one can see at once why this uptown area was the centre
of activity.12 The working class of urban Port of Spain were at the heart of
this construction of the art form and aesthetic of calypso and Carnival in this
period.13
The second reason has to do with the emergence in Trinidad society in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of an articulated ideology about
class and gender.14 In his book Atillas Kaiso, Raymond Quevedo/Atilla the
Hun observed, as others have done, that the calypsonian was inseparably
bound up with the ritual of stick fighting or kalenda and thereby with work-
ing-class male culture. These bands of men were often accompanied by a
retinue of women,15 some of the chantwelles referred to before, of working-
class background. Quevedo writes that the participation of the upper strata
of society, including lawyers, in the covert practice of kaiso and kalenda is in
a large measure attributable to the attraction that the women of easy virtue
wielded. The men from the upper strata were referred to as Jacketmen
literally, men who wore jackets. One nineteenth-century singer, Lord Hanni-
bal, had a famous song, a Road March and kalenda stick fighting song dur-
ing the era 18701890. The subject was Piti Belle Lily, a notorious woman of
great beauty. The rivalry between men for Piti Belle Lily entered into song.
Congo Jack, a gravedigger and famous police spy, was ostracized by the
diamtre or jamette world but aspired to win her affections. Andrew Pearse
(1988: 15758) writes: Hannibal was jealous and angry that she had fallen
so low, and attacked her in this song:
Piti Belle Lily Piti Belle Lily
Piti Belle Lily Piti Belle Lily
Lom Kamisol Jacket man
Lom sa Kamisol Man without jacket
Tut mun kase bambirol Are all making free with her

Piti Belle Lily jen fi du Piti Belle Lily sweet young girl
Piti Belle lily se yo fu Piti Belle Lily shes crazy
Piti Belle Lily maliwe Piti Belle Lily shes unfortunate
Su la jam-li mete dife They put fire to her legs
In the last line of the song Hannibal refers to an incident in which Congo Jack
assaults Piti Belle Lily by attempting to set her dress afire with some inflam-
mable liquid.
Though the double standard of Victorian morality forbade the active par-
138 / Patricia Mohammed

ticipation of their women in Carnival before the 1930s,16 it allowed middle-

and upper-class men the opportunity to indulge in illicit liaisons with work-
ing-class women. The lingering legacy of gender relationsthe sexual rela-
tionships of white master and female slave that had existed during slavery
persisted into the twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, however,
the calypso provided one means by which the black working-class men could
legitimately respond to what they viewed as the trespass of the upper classes
on their territory and their women. One calypso of this period goes:
Point pour point
Moen si miex point youn jacketman
Jacketman pas ka ba moen bois en la rue-la

Point for point

I prefer a jacketman
Jacketman dont beat me with the stick in the street

The author is unknown, but the patois in which the calypso is written dates
it to the first decade of the twentieth century. What is interesting is that it
immediately situates working-class masculinity in opposition to that of the
middle and upper classes, and in relation to an explicit idea of femininity. The
persona of the song is female, but while the song addresses the desire of
women, it actually stirs up the resentment those working-class men felt about
more privileged men invading their space and having greater access to their
women. Nonetheless, the female voice speaks not on the presumed mon-
etary benefits that the working-class woman will get from a liaison with a
jacketman but on the idea that she will not be battered and humiliated in
public.
Kim Johnson has observed that there are great lacunae in our knowledge
of the sexual mores of the black urban working class during the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, but from what is known, the relation-
ships between the sexes have been coloured . . . by a mutual suspiciousness.
He comments that black working-class culture was less sexually inhibited
than that of the upper and middle classes, but at the same time there was a
tradition of aggressive masculinity, a tradition that in his view represented a
social change from the previous period, in which women were not on the
margins of creating song and dance.17 Rohlehr and J. D. Elder agree that the
stick fighters, the chanterelles or chantwells, and the jamettes of the late
nineteenth century, the precursors to twentieth-century Carnival and calypso
culture, included women. The women who were an inseparable element in
all stick fighting bands did contribute to the singing, and during the intervals
between stick fights would sing their carisos: lewdly erotic songs accompa-
nied by exotic dancing.18
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 139

We need to examine the nature of female participation in Carnival and

calypso and its impact on gender relations, and female gender identity in
particular. Bridget Brereton comments that carnival as a whole was purged
after the 1880s but this purging affected men and women, but maybe men
more as Canboulay was always a male domain. She disagrees that there was
a decline in female participation in calypso and Carnival from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century or that there was a major shift in gender identities
where women become the onlookers and property of men, as there is insuf-
ficient evidence as yet to make such claims. Brereton notes that while jam-
mettes became less conspicuous in Carnival, they were always an integral
part of the Port of Spain world in the first half of the twentieth century. In
the slums of Port of Spain the subculture that emerged based on the barrack
yards was dominated by the jamets or diametres, the singers, drummers,
dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps and badjohns in general. The term
jamets was the creole evolution of the diamtre, similar to the Parisian
demi-monde, referring to those who lived on the diameter or margin of re-
spectabilitythe outcasts, as it were, of society. The jamets, writes Brere-
ton, boasted their skill in fighting, their bravery, their wit and ability at
picong, their talent in song and dance, their indifference to the law, their
sexual prowess, even their contempt for the church. In short they reversed the
canons of respectability.19 Women emerged more visibly again in the steel-
band movement of the 1930s and 1940s as the flag women, the Jean and
Dinahs of that era. One of the interesting things about urban working class
Afro-Trinidadian culture, as Brereton agrees, is that it always tolerated, at
times celebrated, open female sexualitya countervailing value to the hege-
monic gender identities of the time.20
Between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, however,
while women were avid participants in the world of Carnival and calypso, at
the same time they were becoming the butt of male conversation through
calypso. The early calypso cited above, Jacketmen, begins to lay down a
blueprint for notions of gender and sexuality between different classes of
men in the society, and hints at a brooding antagonism and violence in the
relations between working-class black men and women.
This brings me to the third reason for choosing calypsos from the 1920s
and 1930s. In this period the calypsonians were possibly increasing in num-
bers, coming from different classes and ethnic groups in the society. For in-
stance, Raymond Quevedo or Atilla, whose father was Venezuelan, had a
secondary-school education and would have emerged from the then middle
class. The calypsonians themselves were known and differentiated by person-
ality and style, their calypsos had begun to be recorded, and the rest of the
society, especially the ruling class, had begun the process of censorship and
control over the voice of the calypsonian. Between 1929 and 1939, the num-
140 / Patricia Mohammed

ber of calypsos available for analysis is adequate to provide us with a clear

blueprint for gender drawn up for the most part by the male performer. By
1940, the politics of the Second World War had led Winston Churchill to sign
an agreement for the establishment of U.S. naval and air bases in Trinidad in
exchange for fifty old U.S. destroyers. The consequent influx of American
soldiers and sailors added another layer of masculinity to the struggle for
patriarchal control and racial identities in the society. While this essay limits
itself to the period prior to 1939, before another rupture to the gender system
occurred, the period after 1939 requires close and careful analysis.

Setting the Boundaries for Masculinity and Femininity

in the Twentieth Century

Point for point

I prefer a jacketman
Jacketman dont beat me with the stick in the street
The jacketmen having some claim to their women, Quevedo constructs the
successive notion that must then arise among black working-class men to let
them reclaim their masculine pride. He suggests that, possibly as a result of
this class rivalry, the ordinary manthe negue jardin (field slave), as he was
called on Carnival dayrenewed his interest in his personal appearance . . .
and . . . took to being dandily attired (1983: 23). The press, directed by the
upper echelons, began to complain about a labor shortage on the estates, and
the calypsonians retorted:21
Ah wouldnt work, Ah rather lahay
Ah wouldnt work, Ah rather lahay
For when ah dont work ah get no pay
So ah rather walk about every day

Ah eh working no way
But knocking bout in me serge and me flannel
Ah eh working no way
People want to know how ah living
The serge and flannel of the calypso clearly parodies the dress of the lei-
sured upper-class man. The impunity of the working-class man to announce
that he was not working is itself a slap in the face of the capitalist system,
which forced the labor of the slave at one time, but could no longer coerce
free labor through violent means.
When the calypsonian engages with the crowd, either by mirroring its
idiosyncrasies or depicting recognized sexual personae, this success encour-
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 141

ages subsequent performances. The public performance of the calypso and

the affirmation through the response of the audience resonates with one of
the origins of this form of song, the call-and-response of slave work songs.
Inasmuch as gender and sexuality were topics ripe for ribaldry and social
observation, and very popular with the crowd, they emerged as two of the
major and ongoing themes selected by the calypsonian for commentary and
performance. By playing and replaying the ideas that were popular with the
crowd, the calypsonian helps to sustain the aesthetic and the mythologies
regarding gender.
A spate of calypsos dealing with gender themes began in the late twenties
and proliferated in the decade of the thirties. The calypsonians who were
more or less engaged in this dialogue were: Atilla (Raymond Quevedo), the
Roaring Lion (Hubert Raphael Charles), Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore),
Lord Ziegfield (Eric Belasco), the Growling Tiger (Neville Marcarno), King
Radio (Norman Span), the Young Pretender (Aldric Farrell), the Growling
Growler (Errol Duke), Lord Invader (Rupert Grant), Lord Executor (Phillip
Garcia), Houdini (Wilmoth Hendricks a.k.a. Edgar Leon Sinclair), and Lord
Caresser (Rufus Callender). The sobriquets chosen by the calypsonians are
themselves indicative of the masculinity they identify with. There were very
few women calypsonians. Rohlehr cites three women involved in calypso
performance: Lady Beginner (Mrs. Egbert Moore), Lady Iere and Lady Trini-
dad (Thelma Lane).
The verbal skill of calypso by the 1920s was by no means only directed
against another class of men. Calypsonians attacked each other equally.
Rohlehr notes that there was no personal enmity in this give-and-take be-
tween calypsonians; rather, masculine reputation was at stake. Calypso hu-
mour existed not so much to annihilate identity as to remind the overreacher
that his identity lay within the group, and that however high he might ascend,
he could be levelled (Rohlehr 1990: 74). This leveling was symptomatic of
the newness of the society, a struggle between individual men representing
various ethnic groups and the working class to assert their social space while
setting up psychological defenses against other groups of men more privi-
leged within the society. It must be recalled that the society was relatively
small, that there were a handful of calypsonians, and that they were becom-
ing the eyes, ears and voice of their sex, their race and their class. While
calypso lyrics projected ideas about femininity, the contest was essentially
between man and man vying to outdo and outrank each other. This is a
critical idea to be retained in a consideration of calypso as it frames gender
mythology in its continued development in Trinidad.
In Rohlehrs comprehensive treatment of the calypsos of the thirties that
deal with gender, Images of Men and Women in the Calypsoes of the 1930s:
or the Sociology of Food Acquisition in a Context of Survivalism,22 male
142 / Patricia Mohammed

ego retrieval in the face of the adverse economic conditions, if not outright
poverty, of the 1930s was carried out at the expense of women. Women were
depicted as malicious and promiscuous, yet also virtuous and strong; they
were to be feared while being idolized. The calypsonians, almost uncritically,
reproduced the stereotype of femininity espoused by Christianity and other
western and eastern ideologiesin other words, the contradictory depictions
of femininity: woman was either virgin or whore, either mother to be largely
trusted and glorified or wife to be mistrusted, brutalized and kept in place.
In the 1920s calypso, Atilla, Executor, Lion and Caresser waged war
against calypsonian Houdini. Houdini appears to be a very slippery charac-
ter, from the biographical entries found on his life history. HoudiniEdgar
Leon Sinclairclaimed two birth dates, 1895 and 1902, and established that
he had a reputation both at home and abroad, with thousands of songs to his
name. While he was no doubt prolific, fewer than 250 songs had actually
been attributed to him by 1945, and he did not author some of those. Two
calypsos written and sung by Houdini constructed ideas of femininity and
masculinity that were popularly accepted in the island: Sweet like a Honey
Bee (1928) and Woman Sweeter than Man (1929). In Sweet like a
Honey Bee Houdini sings, The blacker the woman the sweeter she be,
predating the genre of calypsos that began to extol the virtues of one race of
women in contrast to another. Not only did this begin a commentary on
physical attributes, but also it set up the opposition between black and the
Other whereby the Other could be white or later Indian and Chinese.
King Radio or Norman Span in 1929 is described by Quevedo as the
slim, darling figure who in the tradition of the art, . . . sent bouquets to
himself, extolling his sexual prowess, handsomeness and ability to surmount
(questionable though it appears) the economic rigour of the time, all of
these themes pursued by the various calypsonians as the signature of mascu-
linity. A calypso that King Radio sang in 1933 entitled Country Club Scan-
dal used a womans honor to dishonor the husband and establish the ca-
lypso form as the airing ground for sexual grievances of one man against the
other, while it also permitted the space for the victim to publicly gain revenge.
In one version of the story, the taste for revenge was stimulated by the double
standards of sexuality of bourgeois society. Working-class men were sup-
posed to practice what was preached to them, not what they observed, and
they resented the privileges and double standards set by men of property or
those in positions of power. Radios calypso was transparent in challenging
this double standard:
From the swimming pool
To the servants room
That is where Mrs. X met her doom
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 143

The Country Club scandal

Was a hideous bacchanal

This began the travails of calypso censorship in Trinidad. Quevedo/Atilla

in a speech to the Legislative Council in 1951 (by which time he had entered
politics and won a seat on the Port of Spain city council) revealed the details
behind this calypso which led to state censorship debates, a debate that per-
sists to this day. It was alleged that a certain high placed lady, the wife of
distinguished officialdom, made the unforgivable mistake of allowing herself
to be caught in flagrante delicto. The corespondent was the then Inspector
General of Constabulary, a highly placed government officer. Another ver-
sion of the story, an account by Albert Hicks reported in Rohlehr (1990), has
the affair taking place between the Inspector General of the Constabulary
and another mans sweetheart. The aggrieved partner complained to a calyp-
sonian in order to revenge the insult to his masculine pride. The calypsonians
(Radios) many performances of this story led to the eventual seclusion and
banishment of the inspector and the offending wife from the colony.
In 1933 Radio was billed to sing this calypso at the Silky Millionaires tent.
The scandalous subject attracted huge crowds with a prurient interest in the
personal lives of the white and upper-class population. Quevedo writes that
a message was brought onstage by a policeman to say that the calypso must
not be sung. At this point the calypsonians appealed to Captain A. A. Ci-
priani, a member of the Legislative and Executive Council and leader of the
largest political party in the country, whose response was Put a chair for me
on the stage and sing your song. Let the police do their damnedest. I am by
your side (Quevedo 1983: 281). Censorship continued to be a concern of
the state, however, and Rohlehr notes that in 1944, eleven years after he had
permitted the stage performance of this song, Cipriani himself stopped the
performance of a calypso drama being staged at the Victory Tent by Atilla
and Lion (1990: 294).
Ciprianis initial support of this washing of high societys and eminent
professionals dirty linen in public set the stage for two features that were
built into this creole aesthetic. First it safeguarded a certain degree of freedom
of speech and therefore the way in which the calypsonian as the vox populi
ensured that no scandal, by rich or poor, politician or priest, would be sup-
pressed from public gaze and commentary.23 One result of this freedom of
speech was the license it gave to the male calypsonian to comment unfavor-
ably if he so desired on subjects such as femininity. With women absent from
the field, it was an open stage for calypsonians to air their grievances about
bad experiences they may have had with individual women, or to play on the
fantasies of masculinity in a colonial setting where different ethnic groups of
men were competing for prestige, jobs and women. The corollary, of course,
144 / Patricia Mohammed

was that femininity was being shaped and controlled by men in their own
interests, in an uneven forum.
For the year 1933 I did not locate a large number of calypsos that featured
gender relations, but an interesting duet between Atilla and the Roaring Lion
confirms some of the theoretical ideas I have been raising about the contin-
ued evolution of calypso, language, humor, stage performance and subjective
involvement of men in creating mythology. Atilla and the Roaring Lion re-
corded two calypsos in 1933, one entitled Grenadian Girl and the other
Doggie Doggie Look a Bone. There are no lyrics for the former in any of
the texts consulted, but the lyrics I found for the latter, together with the
coincidence of the year and the form of presentation, suggest that these two
were perhaps the same, or the second calypso an extension of the first. In
Doggie Doggie Look a Bone, Lion first sang:
Once I met with a Grenadian
In whom I had all my affection
But for all I do and for all I try
I couldnt win her heart, friends, I dont know why
For every time I go to her home
De woman tell me, doggie doggie look a bone
Lion and Atilla were performing this calypso for a small party in a city
restaurant, a shift from performing primarily at the calypso tent, where the
competition was becoming acute.24 One of the patrons commented on the
lack of that usual gay abandon they had in the tents, which he felt could be
helped by extemporizing. Thus began a duet/duel between the two calypson-
ians, and he who was paying the piper called the tune. Atillas extempore
response to Lion was immediate; such was their skill at wordplay:
Why dont you get mosquito heart and lye?
Jumbie bird liver and roucou dye
Crapaud mild, bat-face and salt fish wing
A young keskidee that never sing
Guinea pepper, salt, blue and a matchbox
Mix them together and wear in your socks
And whenever you go to her home
She never tell you doggie doggie look a bone
(Quevedo 1983: 46)

The extempore performance was done to elicit satisfaction from the

guests. Extemporizing in calypso is also more successful if it relates to the
familiar or collectively shared notions. The idea in the Caribbean that spells
can be cast on the unwilling victim is based on popular belief in obeah or the
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 145

ritual magic of African religion and also resonates with the age-old idea of
witchcraft in the western tradition, as for instance the three witches in Shake-
speares Macbeth. What is interesting in this calypso is that the male figure is
the undesirable, the female desired. Tiger in Marjorie, undated but likely
to be sung before the fifties, reverses this gender equation with Yes sir, a girl
named Marjorie, Giving me things in me food for matrimony and by 1966,
in one of his best-known calypsos, Obeah Wedding, the Mighty Sparrow
continues this mythology. Melda, his protagonist, is castigated for using
obeah to catch and marry the unwilling man, who states that All you do,
you cant get through, Ah still eh go marry to you. Doggie Doggie Look
a Bone at the same time draws another line in the blueprint for gender
relations as laid down by calypso: the calypsonians propensity to locate
characteristics of femininity according to society or country, in this case the
Grenadian woman, and later on according to race or profession. Analyses of
calypso from the 1920s to the present reveal numerous songs that stereotype
women by race and/or society. These stereotypes have amazingly long-lasting
appeal in the public sensibility.
By 1934 we see a calypso dialogue between Lion and Beginner that de-
bates the virtues of the Ugly Woman versus the Pretty Woman. This was one
of the first instances where the calypsonians Lion and Atilla travelled to the
U.S. to record Trinidads own national song and music. Quevedo writes
that Lion simply took New York by storm with his Ugly Woman, a calypso
message still invoked humorously today:

If you want to be happy and live a kings life

Never make a pretty woman your wife
All youve got to do is just what I say
And youll be always happy and gay
From a logical point of view
Always marry a woman uglier than you
An ugly woman gives you your meals on time
And will always try to console your mind
At night when you lie in your cosy bed
She will coax, caress you and scratch your head
And she will never shame her husband at all
By exhibiting herself with Peter and Paul
So from a logical point of view
Always marry a woman uglier than you

Bill Rogers a.k.a. Augustus Hinds in this same year 1934 contributed to
the dialogue by composing and recording Ugly or Pretty Woman Paseo:25
146 / Patricia Mohammed

It matters not your friends may say this and that

Tit for tat and butter for fat
The nice woman face might be soft as silk
And the ugly woman own like sour milk
But ugly or nice you all men should know
Is woman aready and you must get blow
So it quite plain to understand
A nice woman pass off an ugly man

Rogers is suggesting that the entire debate is meaningless because, ugly or

pretty, the woman would be unfaithful to her husband. A remarkably fixed
set of ideas and a syllogistic equation on femininity emerges from this ex-
change between the calypsonians. Pretty women are not be trusted, ugly
women are not to be trusted, therefore all women are not to be trusted.
Subtly proposed is the possibility that perhaps ugly women are to be trusted
more than pretty women, who are more attractive to other men. The yard-
stick for measuring beauty is not clear as yet from the calypsos in question,
but we can assume, based on the ideas built into creole society, that the
lighter-colored, more sought-after women would be deemed the pretty ones,
and the dark-skinned women with the broader noses and curly hair, the ug-
lier. In this parry between calypsonians on the virtues of the ugly versus the
pretty woman, the concept of prettiness is subjective and relative, yet its
appeal suggests a taken-for-granted meaning of the terms pretty and
ugly shared not only by the calypsonians engaged in the dialogue but by
the larger audience who respond positively to this message.
Whether real or imagined in the milieu in which these calypsonians lived,
womanhood is painted with the brush strokes of the biblical Eve in the gar-
den of Eden, capable of great deception of men. Men portray themselves, by
contrast, as the unwilling victims of a female culture premised on duplicity
and cunning, or alternatively as capable of guile by using women to satisfy
their sexual needs and desire for security.
Duets led to trios, and another construction of femininity was born in
Marian leggo me man, sung by Atilla, Roaring Lion and the Growling
Tiger in 1935. This situates another dimension of the feminine personality, in
which women are constantly in competition for men. In 1935 as well, Lord
Beginner introduced the persona of the Hispanic woman in the form of the
Spanish prostitute Anacaona, possibly an allegorical play on the anaconda, a
very large nonvenomous snake of South America that kills its prey by con-
striction. The snake as metaphor for woman is clichd in both religion and
literature and therefore not unlikely to be incorporated into the calypso blue-
print for gender. Certainly the lyrics Beginner sings about the Hispanic
dancer describe the snake: How she slip and she slide up / And she dip and
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 147

she glide up. Hispanic prostitutes and Hispanic dancers were part of
Trinidads diamtre in this period, and no doubt the contradictory relation-
ship between woman as dancer and prostitute, disreputable yet desired, and
the thinly veiled ideas of exploitation of the man by such immoral women,
were all evoked by the name Anacaona ascribed to the woman and the ca-
lypso. Such calypsos usually contained a package of sexual innuendo and
double entendre combined with humor, and allowed the calypsonian to be
fairly explicit without being censored. This obliqueness of speech has not
augured well for the construction of femininity and female sexuality.
Atilla more prosaically outlined a persistent yet underlying male fear of
women in 1935 when he sang a calypso entitled Women Will Rule the
World. This calypso appears remarkably prescient for its time, more suited
to the late-twentieth-century progress of women in Trinidad. It was a par-
ticularly interesting calypso regarding women since, both in Trinidad and
globally, women then were still largely perceived as the weaker sex and in
many societies were underprivileged and unexposed. Despite the efforts of
the suffragettes in Britain at the turn of the century and the strident voices of
female comrades in the dawning of Soviet Russia, by 1935 very few countries
had given women the right to vote. In Britain and the United States two
women, Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, had begun not more than a
decade before to champion the virtues of contraception for women, which at
the time was promoted to ensure planned motherhood and racial hygiene.26
The Second World War had not yet demanded the employment of women in
the United States and Europe in factories and shipyards. Yet in Trinidad,
Atilla wrote and sang:

How different the ladies of long ago

To the modern woman that we all know
If youve observed, you are bound to see
That sex has changed entirely
Long ago their one ambition in life
Was to be a mother and a wife
But now they go out and imitate the males
By smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails

Girls used to like to be schoolteachers

Gradually becoming stenographers
We next hear of them as lecturers
Authors and engineers
There is no limit to their ambition
Theyve even gone in for aviation
148 / Patricia Mohammed

And if you men dont assert control

Your women will rule the world

If women ever get ascendancy

They will show us no sympathy
They will make us do strange things, goodness knows
Scrub floors and even wash clothes
If these tyrants become our masters
Well have to push perambulators
And in the nights when they go out to roam
Well have to mind the baby at home

Rohlehr comments on this calypso: Politically aware, conscious of every

current in his society, Atilla retained a blind spot on the subject of womans
role, and jealously warned men about womens trespassing on male preserves
of power and prerogative. In the 1930s the apex of womens achievements
in the eyes of society was marriage and motherhood, with a small minority
becoming educated to achieve much more than these careers in Trinidad.
Between 1930 and 1940 the largest proportion of women who had furthered
their education, some even migrating to do so, were in areas such as nursing
and teaching. The only known progressive organization of women in Trini-
dad at this time was the Coterie of Social Workers led by Audrey Jeffers
(Reddock 1994).
Atilla sang at least twenty calypsos between 1911 and 1955, of which I
have identified ten probably written and sung between 1930 and 1940 that
dealt with the theme of feminine dangers to the male. Atilla was born Ray-
mond Quevedo to a Venezuelan father and a Trinidadian mother in 1892 and
died in Trinidad in 1962. He attended St. Marys College, the prestigious
Roman Catholic secondary school in Port of Spain, where he won a scholar-
ship. This schooling prepared him for either higher studies abroad or at least
a professional white-collar occupation in business or in government service.
Instead, Quevedo decided to become a calypsonian, a choice that was very
unusual for a man of his class, color and ethnic mixture at this time in Trini-
dad. The subjects of the majority of his calypsos signal a shrewd interest in
the political government of Trinidad society, and he established himself over
the years as a social reformist with empathy for the poor and downtrodden.27
Despite this progressive outlook, he became the mouthpiece for some of the
most reactionary anti-feminist ideology, and the spokesman for a rigid patri-
archy that was incapable of transcending the narrow sexism of the age.28
One undated calypso that emerged possibly in the 1930s and is attributed to
Atilla has become legendary in inscribing a model for female sexuality and
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 149

a prescription for male behavior in gender relations. Entitled Treat em

Rough or Turn em Down, the calypso suggests:
Ive discovered a new philosophy
How to live with women happily
What Socrates and Zeno and Plato didnt know
Ill explain to you in calypso

Chorus:
Every now and then turn them down
Theyll love you long and theyll love you strong
You must be robust, you must be tough
Dont throw no punches but treat them rough
I had a pretty little mopsy and
She left me for a robust man
I followed her and said, darling I care a lot
What this fellow has that I havent got
Then she said, Atilla confidentially
He does things you never did to me

Chorus:
Every now and then he turn me down
So I love him long and I love him strong
When he kiss or squeeze he does it brutally
Thats why I love him eternally

Look around any place and you will see

Faces radiating virginal purity
But, boys, please dont misunderstand
Dont play the fool and act like no gentleman
Dont let the aura of their sweet passivity
Paralyse your judgement or evoke your sympathy

Chorus:
Every now and then push them round
Theyll love you long and theyll love you strong
You must be robust, you must be tough
Dont throw no punches but treat em rough.

Even in the bridal chamber

Teach them, yes, who is the master
Dont be swayed by sentimentality
150 / Patricia Mohammed

Or theyll tell their friends that you are a sissy

These are the things you must never forget
I mean the ethics of your boudoir etiquette

Chorus:
Every now and then turn them down
Theyll love you long and theyll love you strong
You must be robust, you must be tough
Dont throw no punches but treat em rough

A variant of the calypso that was included by another calypsonian, Duke of

Albany, in 1947 changes the chorus but retains the same message:
Every now and then cuff them down
They love you long and they love you strong
Black up the eye and bruise up the knee
And then they love you eternally

Slinger Francisco or the Mighty Sparrow, who attained massive popularity

as a calypsonian from the fifties onwards, revived this version of the calypso
and included it in his repertoire in the 1970s. Now in a climate where a
contemporary western feminist consciousness could not be disregarded, he
changed the last line of the chorus to Then they leave you eternally. This
advice on the rough treatment that women apparently desire has become so
mythologized into gender relations in the wider Caribbean context that it is
presented as folk wisdom rather than as the witty ditty of a misogynistic
calypsonian in the thirties. Its recurrent rendition by other calypsonians
through the decades appears almost part of the rites of manhood in the soci-
ety, a form of instruction to the younger men. This message is so gripping
that, by the eighties, another calypsonian employing a more contemporary
idiom and less violent language repeated the same mythology in Woman
Dont Like Soft Man, a song imbued with double entendre and sexual innu-
endo, which earned him great popularity in the calypso halls of fame.
The first female response we have is Lady Ieres calypso Love and Affec-
tion, sung in 1935. In my view this puts the date of Atillas Treat em
Rough before 1935. This is also the first female voice in calypso we are
hearing in the twentieth century. While the lyrics are unavailable, the title of
her tune suggests that it is possibly a response to Atillas view that women
expect brutality in a relationship. Instead she is proposing love and affection
as other main ingredients in a love affair.29
In 1936 King Radio sang a calypso that gained immense popularity, Man
Smart Woman Smarter. The calypso was recorded as jazz entered its swing
phase, which made it accessible to a much wider audience. The title again
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 151

posits the female as the more deceptive or more ingenious of the two sexes.
What is clear from its popularity among the crowds is that calypsos that
created stereotyped gender identities were fast becoming fashionable in the
calypso repertoire. Included in this set of calypsos that comment on gender is
the Roaring Lions The Fall of Man, recorded in April 1936, and the
Growling Tigers Money Is King. Rohlehr notes that this last calypso ad-
dresses the idea that the possession of money is the yardstick by which a
mans value is assessed in society. The calypso focuses on the way in which
society will overlook a mans disabilities or criminal records as long as he has
money. Money and masculinity go hand in hand, as Tiger proposes in his
refrain in Money Is King:
If you have money and things going nice
Any woman will call you honey and spice
If you cant give her a dress, or a new pair of shoe
Shell say she have no uses for you
When you try to caress her, she will tell you, Stop.
I cant carry love in the Chinee shop.
Ah sure most of you will agree its true
If you havent money, dog better than you
The reference to the Chinee shop has specific relevance to the poorer
classes, who do much of their buying on credit from the local store owned
generally by a Chinese man. Tiger implies that the man cannot even feed his
woman, so she has no time for him.
This theme of no-money-no-love is continuously replayed in calypsos and
attained classic proportions by the 1970s when the Mighty Sparrow sang
No Money No Love. In Sparrows calypso, the female protagonist is ex-
plicit about her needs, and as with Tigers innuendo, it is implied that women
are the more mercenary and pragmatic of the two sexes:
Yuh cyar love without money
Yuh cyar make love on hungry belly
Darling, you see, you are the only one for me
Youre my turtle dove
But no money no love

The Fighting Continues, Woman versus Man30

Between 1937 and 1939 there was an increase in the number of calypsos
dealing with gender-related themes, and these are selectively discussed as
they continued sketching an idea of gender relations. Some of this increased
interest in gender-related themes must be attributed to the interplay between
152 / Patricia Mohammed

calypsonians themselves whose call-and-response to each other spurred on a

dialogue within the group. By 1937, however, we see the emergence of Lady
Trinidad, who begins to outline a female viewpoint in her Advice to Every
Young Woman. She warns young women not to be taken in by the guile of
faithless young men. Lady Trinidad sang a duet with Rass Kassa or Inveigler
entitled I Cant Live on Macafouchette this same year. Caressers Maca-
fuchette sung in 1938 suggests that Macafouchette refers to the leftovers
from a rich mans plate.
One of the dominant themes that signal a persistent idea of femininity
versus masculinity, and the relation between the two, is that of woman as
prostitute, played out in the song version as the classic biblical temptation of
the helpless and hapless male. This idea rears its head in Cobras Mamaguy
Me and Growlers In the Dew and the Rain. These were among a cycle of
calypsos, sung only by men, that castigated prostitution and prostitutes. It
seems that with increasing urbanization more young girls were being forced
into prostitution. The calypsonian, whose milieu would have exposed him to
seedier aspects of urban nightlife, would have been aware of the growth of
this profession. The presence of the Coterie of Social Workers founded by
Audrey Jeffers in 1920, which among its other aims worked on the eradica-
tion of prostitution and the protection of young girls who had left their
homes and boarded in working girls hostels in the city, also indicates that it
was a growing phenomenon in urban life. The imagery of the prostitute was
a savage and unrelenting one. Growler visits retribution on the prostitute in
In the Dew and the Rain with
Too late too late shall be the cry
When St. Peter put water in their eye

He reinforces the biblical injunction against harlotry in the Old Testament,

the fault of course lying with the low-flying birds of the night, rather than the
prowlers who prey on these birds.
Cobras imagery of the woman as predator is more graphic in Mamaguy
Me:
I couldnt believe the girl was like that
But she prove to be a vampire bat
But when you take them down to Teteron
You will be frightened to see the size of they craw
The woman is the devourer of men, the man the innocent who is misled by
first appearances. The colloquial term mamaguy is used in Trinidad generally
to describe men who are fooled by women. Phonetically and syntactically it
suggests a commonsense notion of the man or guy who is ruled by his
mamamother or womanharking back to the idea of the man who cannot
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 153

stand on his own two feet because of his dependency on his mother, therefore
a soft man who is easily fooled, in this case by a prostitute. The logic is
consistent: the woman does the fooling, and the man is always being misled.
The warning for the female on the path to prostitution is found in Zieg-
fields Advice to Young Ladies to Remain with Mamie in her decent
home. Like Growler, Ziegfield foretells biblical retribution onto women
who go astray:
If you should upkeep your prestige in life
Some day a gentleman will make you his wife

But the seed you sow, such fruit you shall reap
And like your mother, some day its your turn to weep
But too late: dont cry, for now its no use
Prepare for Maracaibo or Lapeyrouse

Woman as prostitute persists in Roaring Lions Girls of Today, and Be-

ginners Second Hand Girls. The perception of sexual encounters with
prostitutes is that of secondhand goods already used by other men.31
This theme of woman the temptress is embellished through the revisiting
of a mythological creature called La Diablesse, the female devil. The female
devil is a popular figure in western mythology, and a foundation myth in
Caribbean folklore. According to the myth, La Diablesse is disguised as a
beautiful woman who entices the man into the forest, away from his home
and village, and when he has been led astray, far from his familiar terrain, he
realizes he has been fooled as he sees one of her feet is a cattle hoof. So
gripping was this tale that in my own childhood in the fifties in a village in
Trinidad, this myth that we were weaned on frightened us into good behav-
ior. It also continued the dichotomy of good and bad women, and expressed
empathy for the ingenuous men who were deceived. The other mythological
female creature was the Socouyant, the bloodsucking witch who shed her
clothes at night and flew through the village preying on other womens blood.
In both myths the female is depicted as avaricious, thirsty, predatorthe
qualities of a loose woman as opposed to a good wifeand always the tempt-
ress of the unwary male or the virtuous female. In 1937 Lord Invader ren-
dered a literal interpretation of this myth in La Ja Blesse Woman, where he
is led into the metaphoric forest of temptation.
She had a pair of magnetic eyes
Thats what had me hypnotise
As she was walking by herself alone
I said, Young lady, may I accompany you home?
And with the lady then I made self-introduction
154 / Patricia Mohammed

She said, Invader, there is no objection.

Still I insisted and I chat her to my very best
Yet I didnt realise she was a La Ja Blesse.
Rohlehr writes that this is the classic story whose version in English poetry
is Keatss La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It belongs to that body of Western
mythology through which female sexuality is demonised and male sexual
inadequacy rationalised. . . . The Diablesse is the Caribbean version of the
most powerfully anti-feminist European myth and merits close ethnological
study, if just as a means of exploring how Europe transported not only eco-
nomic, political and social structures but also her deepest phobias, embedded
sexual fears and patriarchal fears (1990: 17071). This would be true if the
mythology of woman as temptress, possessed by strange and mythical quali-
ties that men fear, did not evolve similarly, yet independently from each other,
in all cultures, east and west, north and south. The answer, therefore, seems
to me to lie not only in the legacy of colonialism but in the essentialist biologi-
cal and psychoanalytic differences between the sexes that have given rise to
these myths in the early development of human society in most known cul-
tures. By the time they were inherited in colonial Trinidad, the package in-
cluded the symbolic fears of western society, the imagery of African mythol-
ogy, and a blending of indigenous and recent history in the new society.
A second calypso, Lajabless Woman by Executor in 1938, supports the
argument that new mythological features are grafted onto the old ones and
given their Trinidadian peculiarities. More poetic and allegorical in its pre-
sentation, Executors calypso brings into the foreground the Indian male,
another masculine presence in Trinidad society. The protagonist here is
Nabadeen, a poor Indian lad of St. James who is innocently entrapped by the
demonic woman but manages to free himself from her clutches and escape
unscathed.
She led him over mountains and plains
If he missed a step hed smash his brains
She led him over precipitous rocks
To fill his body with electric shocks
There must have been some good angel by his side
Or otherwise he would have died
This was the rumour we hear next day
Lajablesse sha ya le alla
The next verse in this calypso continues with no sexual temptation but with
the fear of physical danger as well the black magic trick that gave him a
fright. Granted, the protagonist is a young rather than an experienced older
man, which may account for the undercurrent of fear that is laced through-
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 155

out the calypso. In my view, however, this calypso is also about a contest
between different masculinities in the same society. Thus far the working-
class man of African descent symbolizes the aggressive masculinity in the
society. The newcomer, the Indian male, is generally viewed as physically not
his equal, and must therefore not tangle with his female counterpart, the
black woman. While all men are drawn together in this web of brotherhood
against the female of the species, yet the poor Indian lad Nabadeen is not
sexually aroused, has no opportunity to consummate the sex act, he is simply
afraid for his life in the face of the black magic. This interpretation on the
perception of Indian masculinity in Trinidad society in the first half of the
twentieth century is not a casual or impressionistic one. In my research on
Indians for this period, I encountered several instances where the aggression
of the black man was the overpowering symbol of black masculinity, while
that of the Indian male was a more introverted one, not sexually charged, yet
violent, not to other men, but towards Indian women.32 While the history of
the black male slave as stud and marginal to the family has left its own
mythology of black masculinity, the indenture system that transported far
more Indian males than females, and isolated them on estates, has made for
a different ideology regarding Indian masculinity in the society.
By 1939 the range of womens vices as prostitutes or loose women is
extended in Ziegfields Bad Girls and Roaring Lions Badwoman. With
Invaders Rum and Coca Cola in 1943 (both mother and daughter work-
ing for the Yankee dollar) and by 1956 the Mighty Sparrows Jean and
Dinah (Rosita and Clementina, round the corner posing, bet your life is
something they selling), the female prostitute as prototype in calypso be-
comes indelibly inked into the framework of indigenous gender mythology in
Trinidad society. As mentioned before, an in-depth analysis of gender rela-
tions during and after the Second World War is sorely needed to continue this
thematic enquiry.
The spate of calypsos between 1937 and 1939 firmly establishes not only
the symbolic fear of woman as temptress and sinner, but a literal fear of her
in the day-to-day business of life. Radio proclaims, Tell the world I dont
want no wife, Lord Invader sings Sweet Man Bachelor and A Bachelors
Life, and Lord Ziegfield says categorically, I dont want a young girl. In
the last calypso Ziegfield states a preference for older, more experienced
women to the younger girls who humiliate men in public. Older women
tolerate indifferent or bad treatment from men because of their own anxiety
that the younger man will abandon them. Ziegfield describes the young
women as tyrants, the older women as more tolerant:
You got to stay silent in front of the tyrant
Or shell send you in LHospice for a month.
156 / Patricia Mohammed

You could do them what you like, they wont get enraged
They fraid you may strike for a higher wage.

This fear of woman was not restricted to their loving and leaving of men,
but also designated the particular class and race of woman who must be
feared, one of whom is typified in Lord Caressers Madam Khan. By no
means an Indian as her name suggests in the setting of Trinidad, Madam
Khan is depicted as a black woman, physically very strong, and ruthless in
her attitude to men.
I never see a woman with a right hand so
One from she nail me to a door
I really thought that I was dead
When a nail in the door went right through me head

Chorus:
Hold your hand Madam Khan
Youll hear the same from woman and man
Talk about a woman bad like a crab
Your heart and soul all she would grab
Cut out your pocket and leave you to groan
Beat you with big stick, bottle and stone.

Not me in this kind of thing

Friend, I rather to walk about daily and sing
I could make my living in an easier way
Than to have a woman licking me every day

I never see another human like that

She boast how she big and she strong and she fat
The female Carnera a heavyweight
Breaking down the scale at ninety-eight

Such a desperado cant tackle me

Shell be coming to meet her own destiny
Though if I slip I slide or lose my post
Shell give me all the blows I want, God knows

She got the heart of an octopus

That nigger woman too dangerous
When she saw she couldnt put an end to my life
She even tackle me with an old grass knife
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 157

The Emergence of Feminine and Masculine Stereotypes

It is useful to compare the various stereotypes that calypsonians presented of

the varied groups of women in Trinidad in the decades of the 1920s and
1930s. If Madam Khan was to be feared, an image of the ideal feminine
beauty that was desired is contained in Caressers Rubina, sung in 1937.
Rubina is the daughter of a wealthy Spanish family.
Rubina was the girl I saw
One morning standing in front her door
She gazed at me with eyes of blue
Then she gave me a fine how-dye-do
You can imagine how I really felt
By receiving such a greeting from a girl of wealth
Whose family was in Spain

She would like to get a sweetheart

But one who is native to Trinidad
Hoping that he will not treat her bad
Rohlehr comments that the ideal women had to be white, rich and stupid.
This theme is also reproduced in Lord Pretenders Yo no quiero trabajo
where the Spanish woman Margarita buys him a Victrola and promises him
a car. Pretender boasts:
Even friends they envy me
But I am idolized by the family
And sooner or later Ill buy a car
To drive around the circular
The Growling Tigers Panchita of 1938 continues the theme of the ste-
reotyped rich white Spanish woman who falls in love with the black working-
class man. The somewhat ambivalent relationship between Trinidad and the
neighboring society of Venezuela has made the Spanish woman or payol (a
bastardization of espaol) consistently one of the favorite subjects of the
calypsonian. For instance, in 1959 the Mighty Sparrow proclaimed his undy-
ing love for a woman named Maria: Maria, girl, I love you so bad, he
croons, making the calypso into a heartrending love ballad. At the same time,
Sparrow also sang one of his most derogatory songs against a Venezuelan
prostitute named Raphaela. The payol woman does not always get el-
evated treatment as the desired in Trinidad society, nor does any other class
or group of women, for that matter. By the 1980s, however, in another deft
twist to a Latino curve, David Rudder would unconditionally elevate the
158 / Patricia Mohammed

Bahia girl who combines voluptuous sensuality with a free expression of her
sexuality. The times had changed, and so had some of the men who sang
calypsos.
Two other themes have been recurrent ones in Trinidad calypsos since the
1930s. The first is depicted in the Growling Tigers In Love with Foreign-
ers, sung in 1938.
Some girls always promise to take them far
To England, France or America
And shes undoubtedly a girl with personality
And parents with big properties
But you could see them when the Carnival season gone
Escorting a big ugly barefoot one
The foreign woman, generally Caucasian, is portrayed as rich and person-
able, and usually attractive. An attachment to a woman like this promises
enhancement in status and pocket, and the possibility of travel, the modern
Caribbean gigolos dream. Growler already is prescient of what has become
a stereotype in Caribbean society today, the practice of men latching on to
foreign women or tourists during and out of Carnival season, with the hope
of future rewards in travel and upkeep, very consistent with the ideas devel-
oped by Rohlehr, the goal being survivalism through women.
The second theme deals with other ethnic groups who were outside the
circle of writers and singers of calypsos but generally came in for a harsh or
uneasy time. As we have seen, Indian men and women, the second largest
group in the society by this time, were also unwilling subjects of the calyp-
sonian. If the Indian man was construed in calypso as aggressively guarding
Indian female sexuality, the Indian woman has been painted in different
tones. Two calypsos emerged in this period that demonstrate the general
tenor of treatment of these women, Atillas Dookhani and Lord Executors
My Indian Girl Love. Atilla presents in Dookhani a portrait of a beau-
tiful and no doubt overly romanticized Indian womanhood:
She was the prettiest thing Id ever met
Her resplendent beauty I cannot forget
With her wonderful, dark bewitching eyes
I used to gaze at them hypnotized
Then she had the kind of personality
That tempted one to behave ungentlemanly

She was exotic, kind and loving too

All her charms I could never describe to you
When she smiled her face lit up rapturously
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 159

Radiating joy, life and vitality

The most reserved was bound to feel
The power and force of her sex appeal
Executors Indian girl love is also named Dookhani, but in this instance
his desire is reciprocated, and she is willing to confront her father for the sake
of love, another expression in the realm of fantasy, although it is not alto-
gether unlikely that this kind of situation had arisen once or twice in the
society, particularly in the urban area of St. James, where the festival of
Hosein had encouraged freer mixing of peoples. The majority of Indian
women in the society were, however, not available to non-Indian men. By this
time, unlike the earlier period of indentureship in the nineteenth century,
fewer women were able to challenge the patriarchal norms reestablished in
Indian society with the reconstitution of villages, family life, kinship obser-
vances, religion and marriage customs. The western notion of romance was
still relatively new to the Indian community, and marriages were largely ar-
ranged by parents, or with parental consent between the two families in-
volved and with the same religious background. Executor nonetheless sings
convincingly:
It was on the night of the Hosein
That gala Indian fete I mean to say
Pretty Indian belles was seen around
Happy consolation there I found
Music, dancing and drum beating
All the time her love she was repeating
Me tell am papa
Me love am Lord Executor
Two fairly accurate ideas about Indian femininity can be gleaned from
these calypsos. Indian indentureship had just come to an end in 1917, and
in general Indian women were relatively inaccessible, particularly in an ur-
ban environment, and the milieu of the calypsonian. This unattainability, the
fact of not being accessible, creates the illusory beauty as embellished by
Atilla. Executor alludes to the overprotection of Indian men and to his one-
upmanship seen in her confrontation on his behalf. These calypsos reinforce
the point that different masculinities were being confronted in the society,
and that this art form provided one means by which differences were articu-
lated between the groups.
If ideas of femininity were constantly being invoked by the male calyp-
sonians, then we can also read into a myriad of calypsos, by this time, the way
in which masculinity was perceived or being fashioned by the men them-
selves. In their competition to outdo each other onstage through invention
160 / Patricia Mohammed

and illusion, a persistent theme was the male outsmarting the female by
making use of her, and in this way outdoing his male peers. In 1937 the
Growling Growler sang I Want to Rent a Bungalow. This was immediately
followed by King Radios I Am Going to Buy a Bungalow, and, not to be
outdone, Atilla responded with I Dont Want No Bungalow.
While the virtues of owning or renting a bungalow, itself a fantasy for the
working-class man, are being debated, the lyrics of Growlers calypso in fact
suggest that the female adjunct is part of this acquisition of property. Growler
sang:
I want to rent a bungalow:
I want to rent a bungalow
I want a guitar, a banjo a cuatro, piano
To practice calypso

Yes and I want a pretty Jane

The only thing is she must not make me shame
If I make a mistake and I charge a blow
She must call me Papito

Invaders Maharaj Daughter, sung in 1939, was originally entitled My

Ambition Is Luxury in 1938, and in similar vein he tells us:
And if my wife doesnt like my disposition
Shell have to leave me and get another husband
That time I know I have my money and property
Ill get plenty girls and live luxuriously
Another aesthetic of female beauty and behavior had also emerged in the
society. A direct descendant of slavery, a product of the mixture between
black and white, we see the evolution of the brown-skin woman. Where she
was of very light complexion, the calypsonians and others referred her to as
high brown. In singing about the high brown, the male calypsonian was
accentuating the importance of his virility despite lower-class status, and his
capacity to attract a woman who, elevated by the color of her skin, was
desirable to other men, especially to men of the upper classes. In My High
Brown Atilla sings:
I got a high brown working for me
Thats why Im happy as can be
The acutest depression cant trouble me
I have a high brown working for me.

Growler, however, debates the merits of aspiring above ones station, in No

High Brown Again:
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 161

The high brown believe in only two things

Plenty rouging, plenty dressing
Every new fashion dress that they see
This is they talk: Honey buy one for me.
And when you give them, this is what they would do
Charge a pretty kiss to mamaguy you
Doo doo, darling, and patting you head
Until you catch Mr. Jamesie under your bed

With a high brown woman you have plenty trouble

Dont ask how they would have you miserable
They wont wash your clothes; they wont cook your food
And when you speak to them, they want to be rude
And if you hit them they will bawl for murder
Run in the Station for the Super
And when he come because she pretty and she skin brown
He will rough you, beat you and carry you down.

My darkie will work and give me a help

Flannel pants, buff shoes also Wilson felt
And pretty rings to wear on my hand
And a Raleigh bike to ride all over the land
She will clean my nails also comb my hair
And bet her sweet life her love is sincere
But the high brown would not do that for me
So you see I bound to love my darkie
Although her hair is pickie and hard
Above everything she wont treat me bad

By the end of the decade of the 1930s, a pattern of gender relations was
becoming clear to working-class men in the society. Although the familiar
was commonplace and unexciting, aesthetically unappealing, and denoted a
reduction in status in the eyes of other men, at least the black female counter-
part was dependable as a partner. Beauty was inextricably linked to color and
mixture of race. The high brown woman, later to be dubbed red woman in
Trinidad, was more desirable and brought higher status to the man who
courted her, but the black woman, although her hair is pickie and hard,
was valued for her good treatment of her man. This love/hate contradiction
in the relations between men and women within a particular ethnic group,
however, must not be reduced entirely to the legacy of colonialism. While the
binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized forms the basis for much
of the sexual subjectification of the colonized woman as treated in such texts
162 / Patricia Mohammed

as Robert Youngs (1990), Anne McClintocks (1995) and the Caribbean

Carolyn Coopers (1993), I am unconvinced that these arguments fully ex-
plain the patterns persisting in societies into postcoloniality. These need to be
analyzed in the context of more complex ideas pertaining to difference and
sexual fantasy that the dialectic of gender involves.

Conclusion: A Blueprint for Gender

The calypso has allowed the evolution of a creole aesthetic and a popular
culture that, though provincial in its appeal, at the same time has fostered the
growth of indigenous ideas and imagery possessively claimed by islanders at
home and abroad. This rootedness of the calypso in local affairs supports my
notion of its function as creole aesthetic. It explains in part the lack of univer-
sal appreciation of the lyrical calypso, and the almost incestuous relationship
that Trinidadians in particular and Caribbean islanders in general have with
this musical tradition. Precisely because of this closeness to the art form, their
personal relationships with calypsonians and idiosyncratic preferences for
calypsos and the issues they address, the medium of the calypso is puissant,
conveying ideas and concepts that have far-reaching and long-lasting appeal.
They have become the verbal icons of an emerging society.
The idea of the calypso as creole aesthetic is also supported by its versatil-
ity, the hallmark of creolit. Born initially out of difference, it continues to be
accommodating of differences in music, dances and lyrical experimentation,
as the society develops. With the absence of more dominant means of com-
munication that would emerge in the later decades of the twentieth century,
the calypso in the 1920s and 1930s provided an avenue through which ideas
were transmitted and debated. My description of it as creole is a very
fundamental one: it is a form native and unique to the society and the region.
It has evolved within the society as a medium through which the miscreant
the errant husband, the unfaithful wife, the corrupt politiciancan be pub-
licly shamed. It has developed as a mechanism both to achieve social change
and to ensure that unacceptable behavior does not go unnoticed.
What are some of the lines of the blueprint for gender established by
calypsos of the twenties and thirties? The patriarchal contract between men
of different races is being drawn up. White men, the jacketmen, must not
assume control over the women of other races. Black men, unsure of their
social status and weakened by the poor state of their pockets, are nonetheless
a force to reckon with by virtue of their sexual prowess or physical strength.
There is an uneasy tension between the latecomer Indians and working-class
black men; the control over women becomes part of the struggle for main-
taining power and status. Masculinity is a battle fought between men in
relation to women. It is equally a demonstration of the power that one group
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 163

of men has over another, the source of power deriving not necessarily from
money or privileged position but from the capacity of the less privileged male
to resist or rebel. The labor power of black men would no longer be violently
coerced as it was during slavery. There were other ways of making a living,
such as a liaison with the rich mans wife or daughter, or a temporary flirta-
tion with the rich female tourist.
Masculinity is multidimensional, plural, allowing a range of possibilities
for men of the different races and classes. Femininity is depicted through
male eyes and voices, construed as contradictory, yet its boundaries are rela-
tively fixedgood or bad women, desirable or undesirable, pretty or ugly. In
debating the virtues and attractions of women of different societies, the idea
of otherness and therefore of the cultural identification is being worked
through. By stereotyping the Venezuelan, Grenadian or women of other
countries, the calypsonian is also attempting to decipher the difference of this
islands cultural and gender identity. Concepts of beauty are determined by
color, race and availability, and are consistent with the values that emerged in
colonial society: the fairer the skin, the more beautiful the woman. This is
contradictory, however, for the less attainable white or foreign woman may
be beautiful, but the working-class male, dependent on his female counter-
part, also acknowledges, The blacker the woman, the sweeter she be. Add-
ing further to the uneasiness that masculinity has with femininity, beautiful
women are not to be trusted and the ugly/black woman is the more trustwor-
thy, the assumption here being that she is less likely to have a choice of
anxious partners. The Indian woman also represents the unattainable at this
time, guarded as she is jealously by father and family. The struggle, however,
is between the black and Indian men, to win mastery over each others
women. Indian men are unequally placed to deal with black women, so the
struggle is at first asymmetrically balanced in favor of the black man. Even-
tually the high brown begins to epitomize the mixture that aesthetically ap-
peals to all men, but, being desirable, she is still untrustworthy. She repre-
sents a mixing of blood as well as class, and perhaps, in the aesthetic of
beauty that is evolving in the society, she presents a more socially acceptable
cultural alternative to the dominant bourgeois and European ideal that is
ideologically rejected while secretly remaining desirable.
The double standards in male and female sexuality are firmly entrenched.
The virtuous woman is the faithful wife and good mother; the bad woman is
the prostitute, La Diablesse (the temptress), the Socouyant (the bloodsucker).
Women are deceivers ever, they will trick the always unwilling men into
marriage, tying they foot by fair or foul means. Men are allowed many
sexual partners, but are helpless against women who set out to trap them.
Female sexuality is unknown, desired but feared. There is an apprehension
towards femininity and its potential in the society, especially echoed in
164 / Patricia Mohammed

Atillas calypso Women Will Rule the World. Women must therefore be
controlled. The formula for control is a physical one: every now and then
cuff them up, they love you long and they love you strong. The ideas about
love are tossed around by calypsonians like a dog playing with a favorite
bone. You cyar love without money, you cyar make love on hungry belly,
from Sparrows calypso sung in the sixties, sums up one notion of love. Yet
black women will love you for what you are. Following the doctrine accord-
ing to Atilla, if you beat your woman, then she knows you love her, hence it
follows that women like to be beaten into submission. The relations between
black men and women are couched in violent and antagonistic terms, and
love is merely a honeyed battle of the sexes. These messages remain potent in
the history of gender relations within this society and in the Caribbean in
general. As calypso continues its gender commentary on the society into the
twenty-first century, many male calypsonians and now more females have
begun to fill in the text between mythology and reality, between stereotypes
and experience, to change the aesthetic of early creole society, and to erase
some of the lines in the blueprint.

Notes

This essay is based on a paper first presented at the Caribbean Association confer-
ence, Baranquilla, Colombia, May 1997.
1. Rohlehr, Calypso and Society, 8.
2. Rohlehr, ibid., 1617, makes this crucial point, drawing on the pathbreaking
work carried out by Maureen Warner-Lewis. He cites several of her publications,
among them The Yoruba Language in Trinidad (Kingston, 1984), Yoruba Songs from
Trinidad (Kingston: UWI, 1984), and The Influence of Yoruba Music on the Minor
Key Calypso, in Papers: Seminar on Calypso (St. Augustine: Institute of Social and
Economic Research, UWI, 1986).
3. Daniel Millers work on consumption patterns and aesthetics in Trinidad is an
example of new anthropology that has begun to investigate these processes; see Con-
sumption.
4. Craig, Germ of an Idea, 75. This comment of Craig in relation to the devel-
opment of the steelband movement, which together with calypso continued to define
notions of masculinity and femininity in Trinidad, is clearly the next step for textual
analyses of gender identity through popular culture in this society.
5. In my extensive research on newspapers of this period of Trinidad history, this
feature emerges clearly.
6. Quevedo, Atillas Kaiso, 20. These references to public speakers refer largely, to
my knowledge, to men prominent on the local scene.
7. Kim Johnson develops this argument extensively in The Fragrance of Gold. He
examines the period of Spanish invasion in the Americas and into Trinidad in particu-
lar in the fifteenth century. Johnson points out that it was clearly recognized since this
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 165

time by the imperial powers that the full control of a people was possible only through
language. This explains the struggle that took place in the nineteenth century in
Trinidad where English and French competed for primacy in the economy and society.
8. This and other quotations of Ray Lucas are located in a brief and insightful
printed article entitled The Great Calypsonians which is included among a series of
song lyrics and musical scores of Sparrows calypsos. Unfortunately, I do not have the
full reference for this publication.
9. Earlier examples of this process include the popularity of songs like Brown
skin gal stay home and mind baby or Come Mr. Tallyman, tally me banana, day-
light come me wan go home, the latter taken to the rest of the world by singer Harry
Belafonte. Such songs came to represent a notion of Caribbean culture to the rest of
the world. I have not as yet been able to locate the origins of these songs.
10. Mama, Beyond the Masks, chapter 1, Introduction, 1.
11. This perhaps is one explanation, in my opinion, for the laissez-faire attitude
ascribed to Trinidadians and Trinidadian culture. The social conflicts between groups
become resolved differently, possibly through less violent means. It has also been very
necessary in a society constantly populated since the fifteenth century by new groups
of migrants, each bringing a different set of ideas and traditions and competing for
social space within a relatively small land area.
12. Ray Lucas; see note 8.
13. I am not completely comfortable with this statement, since it is probably more
true to say that there were many currents at work in the villages and smaller towns in
Trinidad and Tobago. Nonetheless, for the purposes of constructing a dominant
mythology, I imagine that the center, which was undoubtedly Port of Spain, was the
most influential.
14. Gender as it is being used in this essay refers to the social organization of
sexual difference and specifically to the ways in which masculinity and femininity are
continuously being presented and represented over different historical periods. Mas-
culinity and femininity are always undergoing construction and deconstruction,
nonetheless retaining the universality that defines the difference of the essential male
body from the essential female body. What changes over time are the values and
attitudes as well as the range of possibilities for each sex. This process is a dialectic
one; masculinity and femininity shape and define each other. The existing imbalanced
power relations between male and female in society, however, generally mean that this
process is not an equal one for each sex, and the configurations of class power and
ethnic differences interact with gender identification.
15. Johnson, Social Impact of Carnival, 184.
16. Johnson, ibid., 179, notes that when middle- and upper-class women began
participating in Carnival around the 1930s, they were closely chaperoned and segre-
gated in trucks, removed from the crowds.
17. Ibid., 185.
18. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 32, cited in Rohlehr, Calypso and Society,
54.
19. Brereton, Race Relations, 166.
20. These observations were made in a written response to me by Bridget Brereton
166 / Patricia Mohammed

on reading a draft of this essay. She disagreed with my unsupported comment that
there was a decline in female participation in calypso and Carnival from the nine-
teenth to the twentieth century. Suggested reading for this line of thought includes
John Cowley, Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), and Stephen Stuempfle, The Steelband Movement (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
21. This calypso is undated and not attributed to anyone in particular in
Quevedos Atillas Kaiso. As it succeeded the previous calypso written in patois, it is
likely that the calypso was being sung in the first or early second decade of the twen-
tieth century.
22. Rohlehr, Calypso and Society, 21377. Also published in Mohammed and
Shepherd, Gender in Caribbean Development.
23. An interesting consequence of the freedom allowed the calypsonian is the way
in which a culture of free press including a rampant degree of picong has also
developed alongside the calypso in Trinidad. An early newspaper of this type was the
Bomb, and a later one the TnT Mirror, both of which perform a function similar to the
calypso in some ways.
24. Calypso singers had to make their money as troubadours essentially. It was
not always a good living, and although the calypsonian may have been popular with
the masses, he was by no means considered an eligible bachelor for impressionable
unmarried girls.
25. Rohlehr notes (Calypso and Society, 147) that between 1912 and 1934, Ameri-
can recording companies began to record and sell Trinidads music as a genre of Latin
American music. This clearly made economic sense to Bill Rogers, who advertised this
openly in the title of the song.
26. Greer, Sex and Destiny, 134. Greer points out that both Stopes and Sanger
were concerned at this time with the plight of poor women who were burdened by
producing too many mouths to feed. The prevailing Malthusian doctrine influenced
their ideas that womens reproduction needed to be controlled in order to curb over-
population. While these sentiments and ideas fed the early development of contracep-
tion, the womens liberation movement of the 60s and 70s benefited from the wide-
spread and additional benefits that emerged in subsequent decades with improvement
in contraceptive technology, allowing women in the later twentieth century greater
control of their sexuality. In 1935 these ideas had not yet entered a mainstream dis-
course on female liberation.
27. Quevedo formally entered politics in 1946 and won a seat on the Port of Spain
city council, eventually serving a term as deputy mayor. He was president-general of
the now defunct Trinidad Labour Party, and among his other activities, in 1950 he
was elected to the Legislative Council of the colonial government then existing in
Trinidad and Tobago.
28. See note 22.
29. It would be interesting to get the lyrics of this calypso and compare it to what
Atilla and other men were singing at the time to see if a different female stance
emerges. This area is wide open for research still.
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 167

30. This heading is a line appropriated from the song Woman versus Man by
David Byrne of the American pop group Talking Heads.
31. By the next few decades, a litany of words evolved in Trinidad to describe the
loose woman, such as the ever persistent jamette, wabin, jagabat, and continues
with many others. A useful study will be to examine the origins of these idioms in
Trinidad society and see if they are in any way linked to calypso.
32. These ideas are developed in my Ph.D. dissertation, A Social History of Indi-
ans in Trinidad 19171947: A Gender Perspective.

Bibliography

Allsopp, Richard, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1996.
Brereton, Bridget. Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 18701900. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the Vulgar Body of
Jamaican Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1993.
Craig, Susan. Germ of an Idea. Afterword to Labour in the West Indies: The Birth
of a Workers Movement, by W. Arthur Lewis, 75. London: New Beacon Books,
1977.
Elder, J. D. Evolution of the Traditional Calypso of Trinidad and Tobago: A Socio-
historical Analysis of Song Change. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania,
1966. (University Microfilm, Ann Arbor, Mich.)
Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Greer, Germaine. Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility. London: Picador,
1985.
Johnson, Kim. The Social Impact of Carnival. Paper presented to a conference on
Carnival, Institute of Social and Economic Research, UWI, St. Augustine,
Trinidad, 1983.
. The Fragrance of Gold: Trinidad in the Age of Discovery. St. Augustine,
Trinidad: University of the West Indies, Department of Extra Mural Studies, 1997.
Mama, Amina. Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Miller, Daniel. Consumption as the Vanguard of History. In Acknowledging Con-
sumption, edited by Daniel Miller. London: Routledge, 1995.
Mohammed, Patricia. A Social History of Indians in Trinidad 19171947: A Gender
Perspective. Ph.D. diss., Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1994. Published
as Gender Negotiations in Trinidad, 19171947 (London: Palgrave, 2002).
Mohammed, Patricia, and Catherine Shepherd, eds. Gender in Caribbean Develop-
ment. Mona, Jamaica: UWI, Women and Development Studies Project, 1988.
Pearse, Andrew. Mitto Sampson and Calypso Legends of the Nineteenth Century.
168 / Patricia Mohammed

In Trinidad Carnival, edited by Gerard Besson, 14063. Port of Spain: Paria,

1988.
Quevedo, Raymond. Atillas Kaiso: A Short History of Trinidad Calypso. St. Augus-
tine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies, Department of Extra Mural Studies,
1983.
Reddock, Rhoda E. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. Kingston:
Ian Randle, 1994.
Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad. Port of Spain:
Rohlehr, 1990.
Warner, Keith Q. Kaiso! The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Lit-
erature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1982.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New
York: Routledge, 1990.
 Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s / 169

Popular Imageries of Gender and Sexuality

Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses
on the Use of Their Bodies

Carolle Charles

In Haiti, as in many other peripheral societies, issues of gender hierarchies

and inequalities are not at the forefront of sociopolitical and cultural
struggles for social change. Indeed, many feminist researchers have observed
that most Haitian women tend to avoid public discussions of gender. This is
indeed a paradox, because Haitian women are mostly responsible for the
making of life in the country, but that contribution is not translated into a
political presence and they still are second-class citizens. Rather than fighting
to eliminate their specific oppression, they put their energies toward broader
and larger struggles. Haitian women also want all the entitlements associated
with full citizenship. Yet gender issues like sexual and reproductive rights are
intimately linked to meanings of a more complete citizenship.
This distance from a narrow and exclusive definition of gender oppression
is not a unique Haitian phenomenon. Similar experiences in many other
Third World countries have led to a questioning of theories that define
womens struggles exclusively through the dynamics of male-female rela-
tions. Instead, Third World feminists have come to reconceptualize the speci-
ficity of womens oppression and womens consciousness as an intersection
of gender, class, race and color, nationality, and sexuality (Mohanty, Russo,
and Torres 1991; Jelin 1990; Collins 1990; Charles 1991; Staffa 1987;
Albrecht and Brewer 1990).1
An important aspect of gender hierarchical relationships is body politics.
In most societies, powerful forces are at play regarding the regulation and
control of womens bodies. Body and sexual politics are generally based on
widely shared conceptions of gender associated with ideas and beliefs about
femininity and masculinity. These ideas and beliefs are very pervasive and can
become part of the repertory of popular culture. They are reproduced and
reinforced through patterns of behavior, forms of representation, and cul-
170 / Carolle Charles

tural practices. With the emergence and development of feminist struggles

and the relative gains of some womens rights, the body, and in particular the
female body, has become a very complex object of political and cultural
struggles. Issues of sexuality, desire, and reproduction are being contested
over the body. Discourses on the body and on sexuality are part of that
contestation. They may reflect forms of social control and/or forms of self-
expression and empowerment (Hollander 2001: 8384).
In Haiti, popular culture displays many elements that are part of hege-
monic discourses about female and male sexuality. These discourses are hege-
monic because they tend to reinforce forms of social control and because they
are given the greatest ideological and cultural support within the society. In
contestation with these hegemonic ideas and beliefs is a discourse created by
Haitian women about their own bodies, about their sexuality and its forms of
representation. In Haiti, poor and working women speak in a different way
about the image and usage of the body for social reproduction, for economic
survival, for social status, and for heterosexual encounters and conjugal rela-
tions. The contesting discourse on the body and on sexuality stands in oppo-
sition to the prevailing gender categories of appropriate social and sexual
norms. While the dominant discourse symbolically describes women and
their bodies as ripe fruit ready to be eaten, working class women, in con-
trast, define their bodies as a resource, an asset, a form of capital that can
reap profits if well invested. Kom se kawo tm (my body is my piece of
land) claim many poor Haitian women. As this essay argues, giving new
meanings to bodies allows for a redefinition of sexuality in its relationships to
class, economic survival, and race/color hierarchies. At the same time, the
construction of an alternative discourse allows for more negotiation of space.
Although this discourse does not profoundly transform gender hierarchies, it
does create some space for self-expression and some empowerment. It is also
an expression of consciousness of the existing relations of gender oppression
and inequality.
This essay attempts to provide a sociohistorical analysis of the most im-
portant factors that have informed such a countercultural narrative on fe-
male bodies and heterosexual forms of relationships. It argues that in order
to understand the complexities of these contesting imageries, there is a need
to analyze practices and dynamics of sexual politics and of sexuality as they
relate to kinship relations and to racial and class practices inherited from
slavery and transformed with the postcolonial state. It is also important to
look at the impact of poverty in defining the relationship of sexuality to
struggles for economic survival and strategies for social mobility.
The chapter is organized into three main parts. First, I discuss the forms of
sociopolitical and economic arrangements that define location of women
within these structures and social processes. Second, I analyze the dynamics
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 171

of Haitian forms of sexual relations and their links to fundamental sociopo-

litical and cultural processes. Finally, a sociohistorical argument is developed
in an attempt to analyze the context leading to the emergence of these coun-
terhegemonic narratives. Three main sources are used to support these argu-
ments: secondary ethnographic and sociohistorical analyses, participant ob-
servation in Haiti and in the Haitian communities in North America, and
informal group and individual interviews with various Haitian women.

Gender, Sexuality, and Social Power in Contemporary Haiti

Although Haiti has been an independent nation-state for nearly two centu-
ries, many forms of social relations inherited from the colonial period still
affect social institutions and social practices in contemporary Haiti.2 The
Haitian social context is distinctive in many ways. Haitiformerly French
St. Dominguewas the richest colony in the New World during the eigh-
teenth century. Its wealth was derived from the production of sugar, coffee,
and cotton in large-scale agricultural plantations through the exploitation of
a black slave labor force. Two centuries after the most successful slave revo-
lution in human history (in 1804) and the creation of the first black republic,
Haiti remains the poorest country in the hemisphere.
For many observers, widespread poverty is the most important challenge
to development in Haiti. Haiti occupies 152nd position in the 1998 ranking
of the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Pro-
gram (UNDP). In 1997 Haiti had a population of some 7,395,000. Sixty-one
percent of the population was under twenty-five. Women represented 50.8
percent of the total. Approximately a quarter of the population was women
of childbearing age (between fifteen and forty-nine). Moreover, a 1994 study
of the Institut Hatien de Coopration Rgionale (INHACOR) indicated that
more than 80 percent live with an average annual per capita income of $246.
Indeed, the overwhelming majority actually had an average annual income
under $150 (Foster and Valdman 1984; DeWind and Kinley 1988; Farmer
1994). Other indices of poverty are no less chilling: malnutrition is wide-
spread; infant mortality is 115 per thousand live births; only 20 to 27 percent
of children go to school in the rural areas. Haiti is still an agricultural society,
with more than 65 percent of its population living off the land in rural areas.
Beyond the large landownersthose who own large estates and employ
wage labor or sharecroppersand the various groups of middlemen who
buy from the peasants and sell to the export houses, the bulk of the rural
population are peasants who are also black (Nicholls 1985; Girault 1981,
1984).
Concentrations of wealth and privilege are a counterpart to the extreme
poverty. In Haiti, income distribution is highly skewed and income inequality
172 / Carolle Charles

is dramatic. One-twentieth of the population receives nearly half the national

income. Such a structured system of inequality implies the centralization in
the hands of a small elite composed of blacks and mulattos of decision-mak-
ing activities in all spheres of life. This also entails the exclusion of the major-
ity of the population from the arenas of political and social life and the
marginalization of rural areas to the profit of the capital city, Port-au-Prince.
Haitian society also displays cleavages of color, language, religion, and cul-
ture, which separate the peasantry and the urban working poor from the
urban elite (Charles 1990b; Dupuy 1989; Hooper 1984; Valdman 1984).
Data from the World Bank in 1998 indicated that 66 percent of the popu-
lation live below the absolute poverty line, 14 percent between the indigence
and poverty lines, and only 19 percent above the poverty line. The majority
of the Haitian population have little access to basic human needs like public
education, health, and potable water. To compound their economic depriva-
tion, poor Haitians are also subject to political and social exclusion. Haiti is
also extremely dependent on foreign assistance. Between 1972 and 1981,
foreign assistance financed approximately 70 percent of Haitian develop-
ment expenditures (DeWind and Kinley 1988).3
Since the mid-1990s the Haitian economy has shown a real annual nega-
tive growth of -3.0 percent. The slight improvement experienced between
1994 and 1995 was due to massive external aid; there was no creation of jobs
in the formal sector. In 1991, agriculture accounted for 34.2 percent of GDP,
industry 19.8 percent, and services 40.5 percent. In 1998, the numbers were,
respectively, 42.1, 13.7, and 37.2. In fact, in spite of the apparent increase of
output in agriculture, the trend has been toward the decline of the primary
sector and the increase of activities in the tertiary or service sector (Montas
1998). During the embargo of 199194, the countrys economic perfor-
mance deteriorated. Real GDP dropped by about 30 percent and inflation
increased from 7 to 52 percent. Exports and imports declined, and humani-
tarian assistance and external arrears largely financed the external current
account deficit.
Peasant households use mostly family labor and occasionally wage or in-
kind labor. The size of their plots varies, with an average of around three
acres. Many independent peasants also farm land through the system of
mtayage.4 The lack of access to credit and other financial resources puts the
peasants in a situation of extreme economic dependence on the middleman.
Paternalistic social bonds reinforce this dependence. Indeed, the category of
middleman is somewhat misleading, for many are also prominent landown-
ers, merchants, or politicians, purchasing coffee from the peasants and sell-
ing it to the merchant houses (Girault 1981). Often as merchants they ad-
vance credit and goods from their stores to the peasants in return for future
coffee harvests.
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 173

Although the effect of this crisis on gender remains to be assessed, many

studies assert that it has an important impact on women.5 Womens economic
role is very significant. They make up 48 percent of the total workforce; they
control around 90 percent of retail trade and commercialization of agricul-
tural products.6 They constitute more than 70 percent of the workforce in the
offshore production sector. This percentage does not include women work-
ing in the informal sector. In general, the majority of Haitian women of all
social and economic backgrounds work. In the agricultural sector, women
participate in all activities related to production (Girault 1981). Peasants
produce both coffee for export and subsistence crops. Usually the woman is
responsible for working a piece of land, and she shares some of the revenues
with her mate (Moral 1961). Women are responsible for almost all food
distribution, controlling 80 percent of that trade. They are the link between
the rural areas and the towns and cities. Though the distribution of food is
entirely controlled by women, the distribution of the export crop is a male
domain (Girault 1981). In 1995 the total active population was 44.25 per-
cent. Of this total, the female part of the economically active population
(EAP) was 42.84 percent. Data from USAID by occupational sector, exclud-
ing agriculture, indicated that between 1992 and 1996, female participation
was 32.6 percent in the Administration category, 39.3 percent in Professional
and Technicians, 88 percent in Service and Commerce, and 65 percent in
Clerical Work (Tardif 1992; Neptune Anglade 1996).
Women are generally expected to contribute financially to all household
expenses, especially if they get an income from their market activities. There
is a clear dependence of men on the labor of women. Furthermore, the pos-
sibility of transforming market activities into a profitable business is real.
Such potential to become economically independent significantly enhances a
womans bargaining power within the household and family. Such potential
also creates space to renegotiate the meaning of womanhood and sexuality.
In addition to their productive work, Haitian women are also responsible
for most household chores. Often they delegate parts of these responsibilities
to their children in accordance with age and sex. Girls are the most frequent
candidates for these tasks. Men will perform some of the female tasks only
under extraordinary conditions, such as childbirth, illness, prolonged ab-
sence of the woman from home, or when other kinswomen are not available.
Child rearing, however, is an exception (Comhaire-Sylvain 1974; Lowenthal
1984). In fact, parenting is independent of the relationship between spouses.
Men often point out that they have the duty and the right to care for their
children. They are proud to claim that they participate fully in many house-
hold and child-care activities.7
174 / Carolle Charles

Dynamics of Forms of Sexual Relations

Kinship systems often reflect the relationship between gender, sexuality, and
power (Rubin 1975). These relationships are the base for body politics that
operate at two different yet interconnected levels. Sexual and body politics
are enacted through the physical use and control of the body, in particular of
womens bodies, and through the various forms of representation of sexual-
ity, the discourses and narratives that define sexual norms, roles, and behav-
iors.
In Haiti, despite the limited amount of scholarship on kinship relations,
there are a few studies on the various forms of sexual relations, on sexual
discourses and their impact or links with the process of household and class
formation.8 Sexual relations leading to the creation of family and household
relationships arise in two specific contexts: legal marriage and common-law
partnership or plasaj. The church and the state regulate legal marriage, while
plasaj is a Creole creation of conjugal relations sanctioned by norms and
customs. It is the equivalent of a common-law marriage (Laguerre 1978;
Allman 1980; Bastien 1961; Comhaire-Sylvain 1961, 1974; Simpson 1947,
Bouchereau 1957). These two forms of socially sanctioned marital and
sexual relations do not, however, exhaust all forms of sexual encounters.
There are three other forms of union, which need not entail cohabitation.
They are rinmin (to date), fiyans (to be engaged), and viv avk (to live with).
Although each of these unions involves sexual relations and some form of
economic support, they differ in residence, legal and social standing, and
economic and social obligations. Nonetheless, rinmin and fiyans tend to
precede the dominant forms of conjugal relationships (Comhaire-Sylvain
1961; Allman 1980; Lowenthal 1984).
In both poor urban and rural areas, women enter into long-lasting conju-
gal relationshipsconsensual or legal marriagewhen they reach their
twenties (Allman 1980). However, it is socially accepted that women can
have sexual relations in their teens. As long as they observe appropriate
behavior and protect their reputation, a respectable marriage is secured.
There is no pressure for females to marry as they reach puberty. Rather, as
Allman (1980: 22) states, women follow a developmental cycle of conjugal
unions. Children are born to young women in their twenties while still living
in the family of orientation. Then the mother leaves that household to form
a conjugal household with the father of her children.
The Haitian Constitution does not differentiate between legitimate and
illegitimate children. The status of a child rather depends on recognition by
the father. However, registry of birth certificates distinguishes legitimate and
natural children. In addition, a married man cannot by law recognize a child
born out of wedlock. Equality of the sexes guides inheritance patterns: all
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 175

children, male and female, have equal right to the property of both parents.
Nonetheless, there is a tendency for male children to become privileged in
gaining access to the resources inherited from their parents. Legal marriage
the most valued form of mating relationsdoes not necessarily guarantee
more privileges to women. In case of divorce, there is no provision for child
care or alimony. Interestingly, a woman in a plas relationship who has chil-
dren may be in a more favorable situation than a legally married but childless
woman (Charles 2000).
The multiplicity of forms of conjugal unions is not a unique Haitian phe-
nomenon. Indeed, many scholars have observed some of the same patterns
elsewhere in the Caribbean. Gordon (1988) even argues that these practices
are a form of resource multiplicity strategy where Caribbean women of a
certain age are more likely to enter a certain type of union when resources of
their own lineal kin network are limited. Allman (1980) analyzes the signifi-
cance of each of the Haitian forms of union. He indicates that rinmin and
fiyans do not imply cohabitation and bring only slight economic support. In
contrast, plas and legal marriage do, and also carry more economic support
and cooperation. The most interesting form appears to be viv avk, which
does not imply cohabitation and yet brings slight economic support.
Although these unions seem to be very materialistic and very economically
determined, many elements including class, notoriety in the community, kin-
ship network, and religious organization play important roles in their mak-
ing. The existence of a multiplicity of forms of union does not mean the
prevalence of plural mating for women. Although women may enter several
kinds of union, most often it will be with the same partner. In fact, unions like
rinmin or fiyans often lead to plasaj or legal marriage. The exception seems
to be viv avk, which is a more urban phenomenon and appears to be formed
after the failure of a previous relationship. For Allman (1980) it is a way for
women to maintain their economic independence without relinquishing
sexual activity.
Class also informs forms of conjugal and household relationships. Even
though in the rural areas legal marriage is less prevalent than common-law
and visiting unions, it correlates significantly with class and status. Likewise
in the urban area, legal marriage predominates among the middle class and
the oligarchy.9 Generally, the forms of conjugal and mating relationships
condition male relationships to their female partners. Responsibilities may
vary in terms of economic assistance, time spent, type of residency estab-
lished, and support and obligations to children. Although around 40 percent
of conjugal relations are not legally sanctioned, the ideology of legal mar-
riage is strong. Marriage, in particular religious marriage, connotes class
mobility and social status.
Discourses and forms of representation of sexuality may inform patterns
176 / Carolle Charles

of conjugal and family relations and may also help to construct gender roles
and sexual norms. In Haiti, these forms of representation are present in the
popular culture. Sexual meanings and codes permeate the proverbs, songs,
sayings, and the daily language. Gason se chen: men are (hunting) dogs.
Their aim is to increase their potential access to a wide range of partners
(Lowenthal 1984). Men may simultaneously marry, maintain a consensual
wife in a second household, and conduct one or more relatively stable extra-
residential affairs with varying degrees of responsibility. The portrayal of
women is in close relation to the way mens sexuality is depicted. Women are
called kokoye (coconut), labapen (breadfruit), and mango, all fruits that fall
from the tree with maturation. In spite of these demeaning forms of represen-
tation of women as sexual objects, the discourse on women is more complex.
Women are also described as poto mitan, the center of the household, and
therefore are expected to dedicate themselves to a monogamous relationship.
These dichotomist constructions reflect conceptions of gender that associate
men and masculinity with prowess, adventure, strength, while women and
femininity imply vulnerability and weakness (Hollander 2001).
The seemingly contradictory discourse on sexuality reflects the complex-
ity of gender relations in Haiti. The sex/gender ideology praises males sexual
prowess. As they reach puberty, men are granted all freedom. In the urban
areas, in particular in the middle class, men compete with each other and
acquire status by having a great number of mistresses. Since there is a rich
supply of women as a special kind of commodity, competition among women
is fierce. In that process, color also plays a significant role. While the number
of mistresses reflects status and power, to have a mulatto mistress is highly
valued. This valorization of mulatto women has been observed in many
former slave-based plantation societies, including the United States. It is a
legacy of slavery, where sexuality was an important component of the white
planter-class domination. It is a practice of color/caste and sexuality where
paler skin color implies superiority and respectability. Patriarchy in slave
society meant power over the bodies of slaves and sexual power as a form of
control of gender relations. In that process, distinct sexualities were created
for black and white women. This distinction was based not on sex but on
race and economics (Bush 1981). White women became respectable mothers
and wives and black women were primarily workers and mistresses. With the
emergence of postcolonial societies, mulatto women who were in more fa-
vorable positions tended to assume the attributes of the white women.
While in the urban areas and among privileged groups the dynamics of
sexual and conjugal relations are more reflexive of a social context of rigid
class and color hierarchies informed by the dynamics of a market-oriented
society, in the rural areas and among urban women of the lower strata, be-
cause of poverty and the daily struggle for survival, sexual and conjugal
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 177

relations are more complex. For example, in the urban areas an important
expenditure among women of middle-class background is on cosmetics,
luxury goods, and jewelry. All these artifacts are used as part of the process
valorizing the body. Their use is perceived as enhancing the womens sexual
attractiveness and increasing their value as potential partners. In contrast,
among poor people in both urban and rural areas, union forming is always
an arrangement, a deal. Sexual encounters that lead to the formation of
households are from the beginning social. Both males and females manage
their sexuality in these terms. More important, women participate actively in
the shaping and making of categories of sexual politics. For many poor Hai-
tian women, sexuality and its material mediation, the body, is an important
resource. It is a capital. As poor working-class and peasant women often put
it, kom se kawo tm (my body is a piece of land) or se lajamm (it is
money) (Lowenthal 1984). For most of these women, sex with a partner or a
mate or a husband is not fun but work. The body becomes the instrument of
labor that can bring rewards with the use and control of a plot of land. A
sexual encounter resulting in childbearing may also lead to a more stable
mating relation and may bring change in the position of the woman within
the household. Men tend to give more financial support to a manman pitit
(mother of his offspring) than to a single mistress.
The real potential for economic independence is crucial. In that vein, the
discourse on the sexual use of the body is revealing. The different forms of
mating may entail different privileges and rewards. The most important is the
right to appropriate the produce created on the farm where the woman lives.
This opens the door for new activities in trade and commercialization of
consumption goods, a network of economic activities controlled fully by
women. Moreover, as they become more financially independent, many
women may end unsatisfactory conjugal or mating relationships more easily
(Comhaire-Sylvain 1974; Mintz 1974b; Fass 1988). Indeed, the high propor-
tion of female-headed households indicates that a significant number of
women voluntarily opt out of the conjugal system. A 1974 study on Haitian
womens economic role indicated that many women, as they reached middle
age, came to depend more on the labor of their sons or on hired labor. They
devoted their time to commercial marketing activities. They were quite satis-
fied to escape the aggravations of conjugality. The study concluded that,
when successful, these women were praised by other women for their
achievements (Mintz 1974b). All other forms of sexual encounter that do not
lead to a formal unionf af, f kondision, f dezod, and byin avk (to have
an affair or to have pleasure)are informal ties where sexuality as desire
takes precedence.
The existence of an alternative discourse on sexuality and on the body as
well as the prevalence of different forms of conjugal relations does not mean
178 / Carolle Charles

absence of patriarchy. In fact, it is the peculiarity of the dynamics of gender

hierarchies and oppression in Haiti, and in many other parts of the Carib-
bean, that explains the existence of the discourse and of the other various
forms of conjugal relationships. These specificities are also manifested in the
quasi absence of women in the political processes and in the male control of
the practices of plural unions. For example, few women are engaged in the
political processes of decision making. In addition, even if Haitian women
may have between one and four partners during their lifetime, few are en-
gaged, as males often are, in more than five unions with different partners. In
Haiti patriarchy is still alive, though it is a patriarchy in absentia, as other
Caribbean scholars point out (Momsen 1993; Charles 1994). Moreover,
since sexuality is an important component of gendered power relations, one
may argue that Haitian womenin conditions of poverty and exclusion
use sexuality as a force to subvert and negotiate gendered power relations.

Roots of a Counternarrative

The distinct female imagery on the sexual meaning of the body helps to some
extent redefine the meanings of sexuality as it relates to social reproduction
and to practices of survival. Historically, sexual politics has been a central
feature of the process of development of class, race, and gender relations.
During the early nineteenth century, with the transformation of Haiti from a
slave-based colonial society into an independent nation-state, specific forms
of gender relations developed.
In Haiti, as in many other Caribbean societies, the multiple and complex
realities of slave societies never corresponded to a bipolarization along race
and class lines, as is found in the United States, for example. Gender, al-
though often omitted, was an integral part of the dynamics and patterns of
race and class relations in these societies. Moreover, the complexities of the
conflictive relationships of gender to class and race created a space for the
emergence and/or transformation of relations of power, domination, and
inequality.
In colonial Haiti, the power of the white planter class was expressed in
ownership of slaves and other property. Yet control over slave womens sexu-
ality and reproductive capacities also defined white power. The sexual use
and abuse of slave women reinforced that power. This form of control was a
key element in maintaining class/race/gender hierarchies within the slave so-
ciety (Davis 1971, 1981; Hine and Wittenstein 1981; Collins 1992; Bush
1990; Morrissey 1989). The paradox is that subordinated groups could and
did use these forms of domination as their strategies of resistance, accommo-
dation, and empowerment. Consequently, the dynamics of gender, sexuality,
and power became part of the process of development of race and class rela-
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 179

tions in Creole societies (Morrissey 1989; Smith 1987; Bush 1990). In par-
ticular, black women slaves used their sexuality and their reproductive ca-
pacities as a means of gaining relative or temporary respite from the horrors
of their situation. Slave women were clearly aware of the value of their repro-
ductive capacity as a source of relief from the oppressive slave system, and
they did use that knowledge. Childbearing was a way to obtain protection
and to guarantee material privileges. Yet infanticide and abortion were also
used to set the terms of prevailing sexual practices (Collins 1992; Bush 1990;
Morrissey 1989). These practices were part of the daily routine of resistance
and accommodation of female slaves. Morrissey (1989: 147) notes that
slave women learned the value of sexual ties with European men and some-
times aggressively sought them. Economic motives and dealings might be
rewarded then by a slave womans freedom, or by food, clothing and petty
luxuries for herself and her kin. It was not that sex benefited women but
rather that slave women could use sexuality to mediate and undermine race
and class hierarchies.
A case in point is the process of formation and consolidation of a free and
wealthy mulatto group, as in Haiti. In 1789, on the eve of the Haitian revo-
lution, the population of French St. Domingue comprised 500,000 blacks,
27,500 gens de couleur or colored, and around 31,000 whites (Trouillot
1990). Although the category gens de couleur is not indicative of a privi-
leged political and social status or of an exclusive racial composition of all
members, it is historically evident that free mulattos dominated among this
group. As an ethnosocial group, the mulattos owned one-third of all land, a
quarter of all slaves, and one-fourth of other properties. They held good
positions as merchant traders and artisans (James 1963; Hall 1972; Debien
1950).
The emergence of this particular group had its origins in the role of sexu-
ality in the process of gender, race, and class relations in colonial St. Do-
mingue. As we argue, it is clear that any form of sexual relation between a
slave woman and a white master was conditioned by the coercive nature of
the slave system, yet the presence of such important groups cannot be ex-
plained solely as the result of coerced sexuality and of rape. It is conceivable
that both black female slaves and freed mulatto and black women manipu-
lated the prevailing sexual practices. The result was the emergence of a rela-
tively important and affluent free colored population. The existence of such
a relatively large segment of freed persons of mixed European and African
background also occurred in many other Caribbean and Latin American
slave-based societies. In most French Caribbean slave-based plantation soci-
eties, sexual and mating relations in the form of concubinage between whites
and blacks and whites and mulattos were tolerated in spite of the restrictions
imposed by the Code Noir promulgated in 1685. Statistics for Martinique
180 / Carolle Charles

depict the realities of Creole/slave society in the eighteeth century: from 1727
to 1749, legitimate births only slightly outnumbered illegitimate ones (a ratio
of 173:166) and between 1749 and 1759 they were overtaken (91:100); be-
tween 1800 and 1823, this ratio escalated to merely 425 births in wedlock for
1,000 without. The old restrictions were clearly breaking down (Elizabeth
1972: 15657), and all attempts to regulate sexuality and households failed.
In colonial Haiti the prevalence of informal unions had important conse-
quences for race and class relations. It was not uncommon to find some of the
best lands in the country passing to the mulatto offspring of white planters.
Many colonial administrators complained about these practices.10
The mediation of sexuality in the relations of gender, race, and class could
thus transform social structures and relations and their meanings. The devel-
opment of a racially mixed freed group, their accumulation of wealth in some
areas like Haiti, and their assimilation and acculturation to European values
evidenced these transformations. The legal and racial differences created by
the dominant white group vis--vis blacks and mulattos had the capacity to
redefine the character of many Caribbean colonial societies. With the Haitian
revolution and the formation of the Haitian state, relations of gender, class,
race/color, nation, and sexuality were altered. Yet the legacies of the colonial
slave society were also part of that process. In particular, gender and sexual-
ity became a central component in the redefinition and transformation of
relations of power and domination in the postcolonial Haitian society.

The Creation of the Haitian State and Gender Relations

The modern Haitian state emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as the
result of the first victorious slave revolution. The process began with the
massive slave revolt of 1791 and culminated in independence in 1804.
Women were active participants in these struggles. Authoritarian regimes,
economic deprivation, poverty, disease, human rights violations have always
characterized life in Haiti. The use of violence and force has always been the
hallmark of the Haitian state. The absence of a strong civil society created no
limits for the systematic implementation of repressive and exclusive state
policies toward the majority of the population, and toward women in par-
ticular. Indeed, from its inception the state has discriminated against women
(Charles 1995b). Up to the 1980s all the promulgated constitutions codified
the systematic politics of exclusion of women. Women up to 1979 had the
status of a legal minor, and they lost their citizenship upon marriage to a
foreigner (Charles 1995b).
The historical accounts at best ignore the important participation of
women in the antislavery and anticolonial war of independence during the
early nineteenth century. Lip service paid to their political participation
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 181

tended to focus on the benevolent actions of the wives of leaders. Moreover,

although Haitian women played a decisive political role in the making of the
country, it is through their struggles against the violence of the Duvalierist
state that they could get some recognition.
Indeed, the Duvalierist state restructured and redefined gender roles and
representation by inventing two categories of women. It reappropriated an
historical gender symbol represented by a rebellious slave woman, Marie
Jeanne, creating a category of women called les filles de la rvolution (daugh-
ters of the revolution); any woman who did not fit in that category of Du-
valier loyalists became an enemy of the state and of the nationa female
other defined primarily as subversive, unpatriotic, and unnatural
(Charles 1995b).
The Duvalierist state systematically used state violence against the second
category of women. State practices of gender politics paradoxically brought
political legitimacy to Haitian women. Thereafter, Haitian female activists
could claim that they too had paid their dues in the struggle against the
dictatorship. The more politicized segments of the female population, at
least, could begin to claim their right to real political recognition (Charles
1995b).

The Conquest of a Place

The emerging Haitian rulers wanted to keep the plantations and control the
labor of the free workers, while the former slaves wanted to move away from
the plantations by establishing a system of free peasant holdings. This
struggle, crystallized around the issues of control of land and labor and the
form of economic development, was also gendered. With independence, the
most important outcome was the creation of a free independent peasantry.
For this Haitian peasantry, confined to less favorable land and subject to
market exploitation as the networks of trade and commerce were controlled
by the new ruling class (Charles 1990b), the real victory was their cultural
resistance.
Resistance took different forms but was particularly expressed in the
many African-derived cultural practices that Haitian peasants reinvented.
Among these were the creation of a Creole language against the imposition of
French as the official language; the development of a Creole religion, voo-
doo, against the hegemony of Catholicism as the state religion; and the vari-
ous forms of conjugal and household relations against the dominance of the
monogamous nuclear family and household structure. Paradoxically, such a
situation provided the context for the emergence of the gender division of
labor and a distinct form of expression of gender relations. The reliance on
the extended family as a primary source of labor supply for their subsistence
182 / Carolle Charles

production, as well as the need to maintain the cohesion of the household

against state control, led to Haitian male peasants ceding control over certain
economic activities to women.
The new gender division of labor relied not only on the reproductive ca-
pacity of women but also on their labor for the marketing of agricultural
products. In such a context, Haitian women did gain a relatively important
economic position, they became the poto mitan and were able to create a
sphere for themselves by manipulating sexual politics in order to reinforce
access to the base of their relative autonomy. It is in that context that sexual-
ity could become a mediation to many other forms of social relations and the
body could take on, in many instances, the meaning of capital. The compro-
mise, however, also penalized and excluded married women who up to 1983
were considered legal minors. Until recently, few Haitian women partici-
pated in formal politics. Women gained the vote only in 1957. Since 1805,
the Haitian Constitution did not make a distinction between offspring born
within or outside legal marriage. Even within progressive circleslet alone
among traditional male-oriented political parties or groupswomens place
is still in the kitchen. Nonetheless, during the past two decades, Haiti has
witnessed the emergence of various social movements comprising, among
others, many women organizations and feminist groups. The period marked
the incorporation of womens demands into the political agenda. Women
organized food riots and school stoppages, mobilized grassroots movements,
and formed their own organizations.

Meanings of a Counterdiscourse: Survival, Resistance, and Counter-Power

Discourses on the potential and real sexual use of their bodies as claimed by
Haitian women are also related to forms of conjugal and household rela-
tions. For Haitian women, sexuality mediates access to some economic gain,
but it may also lead to a redefinition of gender relations within the house-
hold, creating space for a relative autonomy and empowerment of women.
Internal retail trade is an area of economic activity that crystallized these
strategies of survival/resistance and empowerment. Strategic practices of
sexual politics are only one form of expression of the daily struggles of resis-
tance and of empowerment of Haitian women against the hierarchy of gen-
der relations. In fact, the counterdiscourse is an expression of defiance and
manipulation of relationships within the household, as the case of the Madan
Sara illustrates.
The voicing of an oppositional discourse by poor Haitian women on the
sexual and social meanings of their bodies indicates that these practices are
the result of overlapping experiences (past and present) of gender, class, race,
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 183

and national oppression. Moreover, the legacy of past practices from slavery
plays an important role in shaping these experiences. In redefining categories
of sexuality that prevail particularly in the rural areas, Haitian women are
constructing and reshaping hegemonic discourse on sexual politics. It is a
politics that goes against prevailing norms and conventions, and against the
sex/gender hierarchy. It is a strategy of resistance, of daily defiance that
demystifies the prevailing ideology of womanhood and that also constitutes
a disavowal of public sexual symbols.

Conclusion

This essay has attempted to explain in part the dynamics and the specificity
of the sex-gender system in Haiti. It looks at the ways in which Haitian
women create a counterdiscourse about their sexuality and the sexual mean-
ings of their bodies. It argues that this counterhegemonic discourse is an
expression of the complexity of gender relations and of sexuality in Haiti.
Moreover, as the essay points out, gender relations must be analyzed taking
into account the role of slavery, its mediation in the transfer and retention of
certain African cultural practices, and the impact of the new social relations
that emerged with the formation of the Haitian nation-state.
Resistance and opposition to gender inequalities and gender hierarchies,
particularly in the peripheral areas of the world economy, imprint womens
struggles with a double character: on the one hand, it is a struggle waged at
the level of representation and discourses on issues of gender roles, of ideol-
ogy of womanhood, and on the issue of sexual norms; on the other hand, it
is a struggle that focuses on issues of daily survival, of citizenship, of eco-
nomic and political inequality. Resistance to gender oppression is not neces-
sarily the result of formal and collective organizing. Rather, it becomes part
of the daily defiance to an oppressive system. It does not necessarily pose a
threat to the state; it is, as Scott (1985) aptly points out, the ordinary
weapon of a relatively powerless group.
The countercultural discourse not only shows the role of sexuality in me-
diating gender and class relationships, it also pinpoints the weaknesses of
analyses that focus on gender as mostly an issue of rights. Where gender
inequality is compounded by class and race inequality, and by economic
dependency and extreme poverty, the manipulation of sexual practices and
discourses are means that women use to cope with all these sources of oppres-
sion and inequality. These strategies of sexual politics are part of the capacity
and creativity of women to give meanings to their sexuality and to negotiate
the terms of sexual relations in a context of patriarchy in absentia. More-
over, the possibilities for empowerment of women are weak without an un-
184 / Carolle Charles

derstanding of the dynamics of these sexual practices, because this leads the
way to a redefinition of womanhood, of gender relations, and of power rela-
tions in and out of the household.
From a Haitian womans perspective, this counterhegemonic discourse
underlines a strategy of resistance/survival and embeds the seeds of empow-
erment. Such a practice indicates a particular definition of sexuality, and a
form of manipulation of sexual categories where the body becomes the social
expression and the embodiment of real and potential economic relations.
Defined as a tool, the body can thus be used to gain economic independence,
to get access to resources, and to renegotiate gender relations. This strategy
must be understood by looking at the historical roots of the gender division
of labor and of the sex/gender system in Haiti.
The reluctance of Haitian women to directly attack the issue of male
dominance and gender hierarchy, and at the same time their capacity to cre-
ate a counterdiscourse that goes against the dominant ideology of woman-
hood and the prevailing discourse on sexuality, points to the complexity of
the forms of expression of gender relations in this society. These strategies
pinpoint the complexity of gender consciousness in Haiti and force us to
reexamine some of the categories that are usually used to analyze gender
oppression. Male dominance cannot be comprehended without looking at
the sociohistorical context, without looking at how women resist and under-
mine that dominance. Such analysis may help explain strategies and mecha-
nisms of empowerment that women have created outside the political arena.

Glossary

Code noua: Black code.

Contre-pouvoir: Counter-power.
F af and f kondision: Same as viv avk.
F dsod and byin avk: A casual encounter.
Fiyans: Dating, more formal than rinmin; an engagement.
Gason se chen: Men are dogs.
Kawo tm: A kawo, from the French carreau, is a measure of land equivalent
to three acres.
Lajamm: My money; my capital.
Lakou: Spatial organization of household and residency. Some argue that it
is rooted in the compound of West African households while others link its
origin to the organization of the big slave house.
Plasaj: Common low or consensual union. The literature also refers to this
form of union as concubinage. This mating practice prevailed during the
slavery era, encompassing all members of the slave societies of every race
and class.
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 185

Rinmin: Literally, dating or an affair, which might include sexual relations.

Viv avk: Similar to plasaj but more casual and less engaging.

Notes

Some of the data have appeared previously in an essay in Social Construction of the
Past: Representation as Power, edited by George Clement Bond and Angela Gilliam
(London: Routledge, 1994).
1. Such a perspective presumes, as Mohanty (1991: 55) notes, that women [are]
an already constituted coherent group with identical interests and desires regardless
of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions. Such an assumption implies a
notion of gender, of sexual differences and hierarchies which can be applied univer-
sally and cross-culturally.
2. A case in point is the authoritarian form of power relationship between the
ruling elite and the majority of the people. Likewise, the practice of sending poor
young peasant girls to live as domestics in more affluent urban households is reveal-
ing. This child labor practice represents a modern form of quasi slavery and has been
denounced since 1993 by many human rights organizations.
3. For a more detailed analysis of the contemporary economic situation, see Foster
and Valdman, HaitiToday and Tomorrow, 28; Walker, Foreign Assistance, 205,
22630; Valdman, Linguistic Situation, 77100.
4. Mtayage is an economic arrangement similar to sharecropping. A peasant
works a piece of land that he does not own. In return he pays rent, which can take the
form of cash and/or produce. There is a contract between the owner of the land and
the direct producer. The terms of the contract, as well as the nature and proportion of
the rent, may vary.
5. For a more detailed account of womens living conditions, see Tardif 1992;
Neptune Anglade 1986, 1996; Tardieu-Bazin, Magloire, and Merlet 1991, to cite a
few.
6. Haitian female traders control the internal marketing system of food and manu-
factured goods of national and foreign origin for domestic consumption. In 1989
there were 221,000 Haitian female traders, compared with 64,731 male traders
(Plotkin 1989: 5). The Madan Sara, the name given to female traders, carry out the
distribution of consumption goods between town and urban markets. During the last
three decades, many Madan Sara have extended their commercial activities geo-
graphically, traveling outside Haiti in search of merchandise to resell in the capital
and the provincial towns.
7. This is less often the case in urban areas, because of the availability of domestic
workers even to poor-working class households.
8. The development of these forms of social organization of family life and house-
hold structure arose in the postcolonial period during the nineteenth century, with the
movement of former slaves away from the plantations and the emergence of a free
peasantry. These processes led to the formation in the rural areas of the lakou, a large
household compound where a male patriarch, the head of the extended family, lives
with his wife, his mistresses, his concubines, his offspring, and all other relatives.
186 / Carolle Charles

Since the mid-twentieth century, the lakou has tended to disappear, yet some of the
social relations embedded in it continue to exist.
9. In 1980, for example, Allman states that 48 percent of women were not at the
time engaged in a conjugal relationship.
10. Cohen and Greene (1972: 1012) suggest that, with the accumulation of
wealth by many mulattos, the previous unions of whites with slaves were supplanted
by those of whites with free colored or mulattos, particularly in areas where the latter
were numerous and prosperous. For Greene, the complex color coding that prevailed
in most Caribbean and Latin American slave societies may have been operative in
terms of marriage preference and social status.

References

Albrecht, Lisa, and Rose M. Brewer, eds. Bridges of Power: Womens Multicultural
Alliances. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990.
Allman, J. Sexual Unions in Rural Haiti. International Journal of Sociology of the
Family 10 (JanuaryJune 1980): 1539.
Bastide, Roger, and Sidney Mintz, eds. La Femme de couleur en Amrique Latine.
Paris: Anthropos, 1974.
Bastien, Rmy. Haitian Rural Family Organization. Social and Economic Studies
10 (1961): 478510.
Bouchereau,, Madeleine G. Sylvain. Hati et ses femmes; une tude dvolution
culturelle. Port-au-Prince: Les Presses Libres, 1957.
Bush, Barbara. White Ladies, Coloured Favourites and Black Wenches: Some
Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole
Society in the British Caribbean. Slavery and Abolition 23 (1981): 24562.
. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 16501838. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1990.
Castor, Suzy. Thories et pratiques de la lutte des femmes. Port-au-Prince: Centre de
Recherche et de Formation Economique et Sociale pour le Dveloppement
(CRESFED), 1988.
Charles, Carolle. Are All Haitian Women Equally Exploited? Review essay on
LAutre Moiti du dveloppement by Mireille Neptune Anglade. Journal of Carib-
bean Studies 7, nos. 23 (1990a): 26466.
. A Transnational Dialectic of Race, Class, and Ethnicity: Patterns of Identi-
ties and Forms of Consciousness among Haitian Migrants in New York City.
Ph.D. diss., SUNY-Binghamton, 1990b.
. LExploitation, est-elle la mme pour toute femme hatienne? In Hati 86
88: Continuits et Ruptures, edited by Cary Hector and Hrard Jadotte, 49095.
Port-au-Prince: Henry Deschamp, 1991.
. Feminist Action and Research in Haiti. Caribbean Studies 28, no. 1
(1995a): 6175.
. Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierist State,
Transnationalism and the Emergence of a New Feminism (19801990). Feminist
Studies 1, no. 1 (1995b): 13564.
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 187

. Gender and Development in Haiti: A Report Prepared for UNDP. New York:
United Nations Development Programme, 2000.
. Sexual Politics and the Mediation of Class, Gender and Race in Former
Slave Plantation Societies: The Case of Haiti. In Social Construction of the Past:
Representation as Power, edited by George Clement Bond and Angela Gilliam,
4456. London: Routledge, 1994.
Cohen, David W., and Jack P. Greene, eds. Neither Slave nor Free. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Collier, Jane Fishburne, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds. Gender and Kinship: Es-
says Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Comhaire-Sylvain, Suzanne. La Paysanne de la rgion de Kenscoff. In La Femme de
Couleur, edited by Roger Bastide and Sidney Mintz. Paris: Anthropos, 1974.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1981.
Debien, Gabriel. Gens de couleur libres et colons de St. Domingue devant la
Constituante. Revue dHistoire de lAmrique Franaise 4 (1950): 21132.
DeWind, Josh, and David H. Kinley III. Aiding Migration. Boulder: Westview, 1988.
Dupuy, Alex. Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race and Underdevelopment since
1700. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989.
Elizabeth, L. The French Antilles. In Neither Slave nor Free, edited by David W.
Cohen and Jack P. Greene, 13471. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972.
Farmer, Paul. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994.
Fass, Simon M. Political Economy in Haiti: The Drama of Survival. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 1988.
Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
Foster, Charles R., and Albert Valdman, eds. HaitiToday and Tomorrow. Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 1984.
Girault, Christian. Le Commerce du caf en Hati: Habitants, spculateurs et
exportateurs. Paris: CNRS, 1981.
. Commerce in the Haitian Economy. In HaitiToday and Tomorrow, ed-
ited by Charles R. Foster and Albert Valdman, 17380. Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 1984.
Gordon, Sally W. Kith or Kin: Alternative Economic Strategies of Women over the
Adult Life Span. Cimarron 1, no. 3 (1988): 6083.
Hall, G. M. Saint-Domingue. In Neither Slave nor Free, edited by David W. Cohen
and Jack P. Greene, 17292. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Herskovits, Melville J. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Knopf, 1937.
Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kate Wittenstein. Female Slave Resistance: The Econom-
ics of Sex. In Black Woman Cross- Culturally, edited by Filomena Chioma
Steady, 289300. Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman, 1981.
Hollander, Jocelyn A. Vulnerability and Dangerousness: The Construction of Gen-
der through Conversation about Violence. Gender and Society 15, no. 1 (2001):
83110.
188 / Carolle Charles

Hooper, M. The Monkeys Tail Still Strong. North American Congress on Latin
America 18, no. 6 (November 1984): 2432.
Institut Hatien de Coopration Rgionale (INHACOR). Les Voies dune coopration
conomique: Haiti et la Rpublique Dominicaine. Port-au-Prince: INHACOR,
1994.
Jelin, Elizabeth, ed. Women and Social Change in Latin America. Translated by J.
Ann Zammit and Marilyn Thomson. London: Zed Books, 1990.
Labelle, Micheline. Idologies de couleur et classes sociales en Haiti. Montreal:
Presses de lUniversit de Montral, 1978.
Laguerre, Michel S. Ticouloute and His Kinfolk: The Study of a Haitian Extended
Family. In The Extended Family in Black Societies, edited by Demitri B. Shimkin,
Edith M. Shimkin, and Dennis A. Frate. New York: Mouton, 1978.
Legerman, C. Kin Groups in a Haitian Market. In Peoples and Cultures of the
Caribbean, edited by Michael M. Horowitz, 38290. New York: Museum of
Natural History, 1971.
Lowenthal, Ira P. Labor, Sexuality, and the Conjugal Contract in Rural Haiti. In
HaitiToday and Tomorrow, edited by Charles R. Foster and Albert Valdman,
1534. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.
McKinnon, C. A. Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective. In Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 105
16. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Mintz, Sidney W. Caribbean Transformations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974a.
. Les Roles conomiques et les traditions culturelles. In La Femme de
Couleur, edited by Roger Bastide and Sidney Mintz. Paris: Anthropos, 1974b.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colo-
nial Discourses. In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 5180. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Momsen, Janet, ed. Women and Change in the Caribbean. Kingston: Ian Randle,
1993.
Montas, Rmy. Emploi et chmage en Haiti. Programme des Nations Unies pour
le Dveloppement (Port-au-Prince) (May 1998).
Moral, Paul. Le Paysan hatien. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1961.
Morrissey, Marietta. Slave Women in the New World. Boulder: Westview, 1989.
Mullins, L. Uneven Development: Class, Race, and Gender in the United States
before 1900. In Womens Work, edited by Eleanor Leacock and Helen I. Safa,
4157. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.
Neptune Anglade, Mireille. LAutre Moiti du dveloppement. Montreal: Arce, 1986.
. Femmes Hatiennes en chiffres. Port-au-Prince: Confrence Internationale
sur le Financement du Dveloppement (United Nations), June 1996.
Nicholls, David. Haiti in Caribbean Context: Ethnicity, Economy, and Revolt. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1985.
Ortner, Sherry B., and Harriet Whitehead, eds. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Con-
 Poor and Working-Class Haitian Womens Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies / 189

struction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1981.
Plotkin, Donna. The International Traders of Haiti: The Madan Sara. Report for the
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations,
1989. Mimeographed.
Reddock, Rhoda. Women and Slavery in the Caribbean. Latin American Perspec-
tive 12, 44, no. 1 (1985): 6380.
Rubin, Gayle. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex. In
Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157210. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Shimkin, Demitri B., Edith M. Shimkin, and Dennis A. Frate, eds. The Extended
Family in Black Societies. New York: Mouton, 1978.
Simpson, George Eaton. Sexual and Familial Institutions in Haiti. American An-
thropology 44 (1947): 65574.
Smith, R. T. Hierarchy and the Dual Marriage System in West Indian Society. In
Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis, edited by Jane Fishburne
Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, 16396. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1987.
Staffa, Susan Jane. Dimensions of Womens Power in Historic Cairo. In Islamic and
Middle East Societies, edited by Robert Olson, 6297. Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana
Books, 1987.
Tardif, Francine. La Situation des Femmes Hatiennes. Port-au- Prince: Confrence
Internationale sur le Financement du Dveloppement (United Nations), 1992.
Tardieu-Bazin, Danielle, Daniele Magloire, and Myriam Merlet. Femmes/population/
dveloppement: Organizations fminines prives en Hati. Vols. 1 and 2. Port-au-
Prince: FNUAP, 1991.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of
Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.
Valdman, Albert. The Linguistic Situation in Haiti. In HaitiToday and Tomor-
row, edited by Charles R. Foster and Albert Valdman, 77100. Lanham, Md.:
University Press of America, 1984.
Walker, J. Foreign Assistance and Haiti Economic Development. In HaitiToday
and Tomorrow, edited by Charles R. Foster and Albert Valdman, 20530.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.
World Bank. 1998 Report on Haiti. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1998.
190 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

The Infamous Crime against Nature

Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions
in Puerto Rico

Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

Naming sexual relationships between women has been part of a process of

regulating sex through laws and public discourse within a heterosexual nor-
mative structure that defines and outlaws certain sexual practices and iden-
tities. This prohibition works overtly by defining and naming certain sexual
acts as perversions, but more importantly for lesbians in Puerto Rico during
much of the twentieth century, it has operated covertly by constituting what
Judith Butler has called unviable (un)subjectsabjects, we might call
themwho are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the
law (1997: 306). Nevertheless, the naming of sexual relations between
women not only has been the product of punitive or exclusionary practices;
it has also been a continuous and active reinvention of identities, sexualities
and desires by women themselves.
Rather than assuming the existence of a genuine lesbian identity that has
been repressed and can only flourish once the veils of false consciousness
have been lifted, I propose a framework in which lesbian identities arise from
the dissonant and contradictory messages contained in the norms of hetero-
sexuality they appear to negate. I argue that the subversion of sexual norms
has not arisen outside the heterosexual matrix; rather it has arisen from the
contradictory nature of gender norms and the impossibility of complying
with the dualisms contained in the definitions of acceptable sexual behavior.
These definitions assume an impossible separation between masculine and
feminine and an equally impossible dichotomy of bad and good women. The
discourse I will examine shows heterosexuality as a legal artifice that normal-
izes an oppressive structure. Nonetheless, as heterosexuality sets itself up as
the norm by outlawing anything outside its matrix, it also creates the possi-
bility of the other, a subject who is defined by the prohibited behaviors. In
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 191

this way, it can also be argued that lesbian identity arises within the hetero-
sexual matrix, not outside of it.
I examine two ways in which the reinvention and renaming of outlawed
identities occurred. One of them was within a private and secretive world, the
other a more public defiance through political action. The defiance of these
norms was initially experienced in private and in silence with the complicity
of other women who shared this secret world and its codes of sexuality and
desire. With the emergence of lesbian feminism in the early 1970s in Puerto
Rico, a public space for the construction of new identities through political
action was created. The emergence in 1974 of the Comunidad de Orgullo
Gay (COG) and the womens group formed within this organization, the
Alianza de Mujeres de la Comunidad de Orgullo Gay, opened a space for the
creation of a positive and more public identity in open defiance of the social
norms of heterosexuality. This organization and the ones that were formed in
the following decade did this by redefining the meaning of social justice to
address the discrimination against and marginalization of lesbians.
The emergence of identity categories in lesbian and gay contestatory
movements poses the potential of creating regulatory regimes in the same
way as the categories constructed through the prohibitions of the law. Het-
erosexuality sets itself up as true, authentic and normal, repressing all other
sexualities. To the extent that lesbian and gay politics set up an authentic or
proper sexuality, they too create regimes of regulation and exclusion. As
Spivak (1983) and Butler (1997) have argued, lesbian identities should be
contingent, rather than fixed; they should be construed as sites of revisions
and contestations of normative categories of sexualityrallying points for a
resistance to classifications.
In my discussion, I will look at the Puerto Rico Penal Code and various
municipal ordinances to show the particular ways in which the law has de-
fined and reproduced a heterosexual normative structure and has simulta-
neously created subjects who are defined by the prohibited behaviors as well
as subjects who are neither named nor prohibited by the law. I will then
examine the private spaces in which women reinvented and renamed out-
lawed and unnamed sexualities. To do this I will rely on life stories I collected
between 1987 and 1994 among thirty Puerto Rican lesbians of two genera-
tions interviewed in San Juan and New York.1 The first generation was born
between 1920 and 1935 and the second generation between 1940 and 1960.
My discussion of the emergence of identity categories in the lesbian and gay
contestatory movement in the early 1970s is based on these life stories as well
as on newletters and other documents produced by this movement.
The first generation of lesbians, a generation that reached adolescence in
the 1930s and 1940s, was socially situated within the context of the early
192 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

years of the U.S. rule of the islands of Puerto Rico that began with the mili-
tary invasion of 1898. This military invasion was followed by the accelerated
incorporation of Puerto Rico into the U.S. economy and polity. During these
years womens situation in society changed dramatically. Rapid increases in
womens participation in the paid labor force were accompanied by a sharp
decline in fertility (Vzquez Calzada 1988). School attendance became com-
pulsory, and a wider system of public education was instituted than under
Spanish rule. This produced an increase in the educational level of women of
all social classes. As did Faderman (1991) in her discussion of the early twen-
tieth century in the United States, I also hypothesize, within the context of
Puerto Rico, that the prospect of obtaining an education and being finan-
cially independent was an important factor in the development of romantic
relationships between women. Economic independence gave women new
opportunities to negotiate their roles within the family, and offered greater
possibilities of economic survival outside of marriage (Crespo 1994).
A look at the law against sodomy in Puerto Rico sheds some light on the
normative assumptions about sexuality prevalent during most of these
womens lifetimes. We learn about women through the ways in which they
are spoken of, and even more through the ways in which they are not spoken
of. As we will see, the law conceived women as nonsexual beings, passive
victims of male sexual aggression. The silence on womens sexuality in the
law was part of its repression, and it mirrored the social spaces within which
women lived and expressed their sexuality.
The infamous crime against nature [el infame crimen contra natura]
appeared for the first time in the Puerto Rico Penal Code of 1902, which was
modeled after the California Penal Code (Pueblo v. Marn Vega 1977). Ar-
ticle 278 established a punishment of not less than five years imprisonment
for every person who is guilty of the infamous crime against nature commit-
ted with mankind or with any animal. This made it a felony, the most seri-
ous of crimes. Two questions arise from the first reading of this text: what is
the gender of the persons who can be found guilty of this crime, and what acts
define this crime? Both questions were contested and subsequently answered
in the jurisprudence that followed the instatement of this code. In fact, the
Supreme Court of Puerto Rico was asked to pronounce on both of these
questions in the very first case litigated before it in 1926, Pueblo v. Daz.
Pueblo v. Daz makes it clear that only a man can be the perpetrator of this
crime. We learn this through a description of the body parts involved in the
alleged crime. The prosecutors interrogatory of the medical expert lets us
know that he wanted to clearly establish that a penis produced the anal
lacerations suffered by the victim. The acts that define this crime are further
clarified when we examine who the possible victims are. Although in this case
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 193

it was a man, the judge lets us know that the victim of this crime could be
either a man or a woman. Thus we learn that the mankind referred to in
article 278 whom the crime was committed with could be a man or a
woman. The words committed with are misleading because in Pueblo v.
Daz, and in all but one of the cases of sodomy brought before this court,2 the
imputed acts were not consensual.
If all the cases of sodomy were nonconsensual, why were they not legally
defined as rape? What is rape, according to the law? In the language of the
law, the crime of rape can only be committed against women. In the Penal
Code of 1902, rape was defined as acceso carnal con una mujer que no fuere
la propia [sexual intercourse, accomplished with a female not the wife of the
perpetrator] and el ultraje inferido a la persona y sentimientos de la mujer
[outrage to the person and feelings of the female]; the code further stated that
cualquier penetracin sexual por leve que fuere, bastar para consumar el
delito [any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the
crime] (Penal Code of 1902, secs. 255, 257). It is assumed here and reiterated
through jurisprudence that the body parts involved in acceso carnal are a
penis and a vagina (Nevares Muiz 1995: 161). While acceso carnal is
translated as sexual intercourse in the English version of the 1902 code, a
more literal translation is carnal access.3
More is said to affirm the distinction that the law establishes between the
crime against nature and rape in a case considered in 1945, Pueblo v.
Len. Here we are told that Carmen Mara Soto was taken by surprise and
held from six in the evening until three in the morning of the next day by three
men whom she later charged with rape. She testified that the accused had
contacto carnal con ella [carnal contact with her] on seven occasions and
that these acts were violent. Given this testimony, it was expected that the
doctors examination would reveal trauma to the vagina. Yet we learn that
the vaginal examination performed by the doctor found no evidence of vio-
lence. When the victim was asked more specifically with what part of the
body this carnal contact had occurred, she responded que fue con la parte
sucia [it was with the dirty part]. These facts are important, the judge tells
us, because

Nos llevan al convencimiento de que aunque qued probado que los

tres acusados tuvieron contacto carnal con la perjudicada por medio de
la fuerza y la violencia, no realizaron con ella ese acto en la forma
ordinaria, sino ms bien en forma anormal. Se trata pues, de dos delitos
completamente separados y distintos y dentro de una acusacin por el
delito de violacin no puede rendirse un veredicto por el infame crimen
contra natura.
194 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

[They lead us to the conviction that although it was proven that the
three accused had carnal contact with the victim through force and
violence, they did not perform this act in an ordinary form, rather in an
abnormal form. It is thus a matter of two completely different and
separate crimes, and within an accusation of the crime of rape it is not
possible to render a verdict upon the infamous crime against nature.]
Although the descriptions of the body parts involved in the infamous
crime against nature help answer what acts define this crime, the question
continued to be raised by those accused from 1926 to the last case recorded
in 1993. In Pueblo v. Daz, and in all the subsequent cases where the court
was asked to interpret article 278, the judges maintained that it was not
necessary to define the specific acts that constituted this crime. This assertion
by the judges seems to contradict the basic principle that the law must define
the crimes that are to be punished so that citizens know what conduct is
prohibited, and to guarantee that in criminal proceedings the accused per-
sons are notified of the nature and cause of the accusation. In Pueblo v. Daz
the judge conceded that when a crime is defined by the statutes in generic
terms it is necessary to express the specific acts that constitute the crime.
Nonetheless, he stated, the crime against nature is an exception, dada la
naturaleza vil y degradante de este delito [given the vile and degrading na-
ture of this crime]. All that is required is that its nature be easily compre-
hended, or, as stated in the original, que su naturaleza sea fcilmente
comprendida, es todo lo que se exige. Se ha resuelto que el trmino sodoma
describe suficientemente el delito y por consiguiente tambin el infame delito
contra natura [It has been determined that the term sodomy describes
sufficiently the crime and consequently also the infamous crime against
nature].
Again, in Pueblo v. Gutirrez (1950), the judge affirmed that por lo
degradante del delito, el mismo no aparece definido por nuestros cdigos
[this crime is so degrading that it is not defined by our legal codes]. Judges in
other cases argued that ordinary people easily comprehended the nature of
this crime. However, the judge in Pueblo v. Santiago Vzquez (1967) assures
us that even though common delinquents might have limited intellectual
capacity because of their socioeconomic background, if there is still any
doubt, it is certain that the lawmakers who criminalized the act and the judge
who has to instruct the jury about it have read enough biblical scripture,
history and science to know what sodomy is. Judges and lawmakers also
purportedly know which are the practices contra naturam and the mean-
ing of this concept in the Penal Code. This is stated in Pueblo v. Santiago
Vzquez as follows:
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 195

Es cierto tambin que en el delincuente corriente, que por lo regular

viene del lecho social menos privilegiado, puede existir limitada capa-
cidad intelectual para entender el lenguaje del Art. 278. Pero el legis-
lador que penaliz el acto en ese lenguaje y el juez que ha de hallar
culpable de su comisin o ha de instruir al jurado sobre su comisin han
ledo las escrituras biblcas [sic], el Gnesis, el Deuteronomio; saben de
Sodoma, la antigua ciudad de Palestina y sus prcticas sexuales des-
viadas; han ledo a San Pablo, Epstola a los Romanos y a Santo To-
msSuma Teolgicaque tratan del asunto. Conocen la legislacin
antigua romana, la goda, los fueros, las partidas de Alfonso el Sabio
Ley 1, Partida 7a.conocen la historia y las ciencias y son personas
intelectualmente cultivadas que saben qu es la sodoma y cules sus
prcticas contra naturam, y qu significa este concepto en el estatuto
penal.

Thus the acts that constitute the infamous crime against nature remain ex-
plicitly and deliberately undefined in the Penal Code because, according to
the judges, moral decency precludes the description of acts that common
knowledge and a long biblical, theological, scientific, and legal history have
laid out. As I previously commented, all but one of the cases that were heard
before the Supreme Court concerning article 278 described forced and vio-
lent acts. The nonconsensual character of these acts makes them no different
from rape. The main purpose of both antisodomy and rape laws, then, seems
to be to punish forced sexual acts whether they involve natural (penis/
vagina) or unnatural (penis/anus) sexual acts. This said, it seems that it
would be sufficient to criminalize any nonconsensual act. Yet we know that
the law has explicitly and insistently upheld the distinction between sodomy
and rape.
Evidently there is more at stake here. The law is not only prohibiting
forced sexual acts. As the law identifies the body parts that are implicated in
rape and in the crime against nature, it inscribes these body parts with mean-
ings and discourses about gender, sexuality and sexual difference. The law
reminds the citizen that these body parts have a history of sexual hierarchy
(and of sexual erasure, I would add). By invoking these acts and body parts
and their history, the law lets the citizen know not only what behaviors are
prohibited or criminal but also what behaviors are appropriate.
The abnormal (as opposed to ordinary) way Carmen Mara Soto was
sexually assaulted, as interpreted in Pueblo v. Len (1945), inserts into the
legal discourse assumptions about propriety that go beyond establishing the
nonconsensual nature of the acts perpetrated against her. Here the law iden-
tifies the penis and the vagina as the body parts involved in normal sexual
196 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

acts. Heterosexual acts performed with the possibility of procreation are

thereby set up as legitimate and privileged as the natural. In a similar
fashion, heterosexuality is set up as the norm in the legal definition of rape in
the Penal Code. It requires the penetration, however slight, of a penis into
a vagina. It is defined as an outrage to the person and feelings of the female
and as acceso carnal con una mujer que no fuere la propia [carnal access
with a woman who is not ones own] (Penal Codes of 1902 and 1974;
authors translation). This language openly denotes the cultural assumptions
of sexuality as sin and of women as their husbands property. An active mas-
culine subject, the penetrator, performs this act upon a female subject who is
penetrated and passive.
Nonetheless, the articulation of the natural simultaneously creates the
possibility of many other acts and subjects that, although unnamed in the
law, are legislated and criminalized. They remain unnamed, yet prohibited.
In this way, the social discourse articulated through the law attempts to erase
them from history. Through prohibition, the law thus constitutes both
proper, viable subjects and (un)proper, (un)viable subjects (Butler 1993). The
sexual other who does not conform to the description of the masculine or
feminine subject, nor to the code of heterosexuality defined quite narrowly as
acts that are directed toward procreation, is defined as deviant, perverse,
immoral and criminal. An act of penetration with another man, for example,
violates the code of masculinity and is outlawed.
In the Penal Code, the man who is penetrated is not constituted as a viable
subject, and the act is only conceived of as violence. Indeed, violence is one of
the strongest stereotypes of lesbians and homosexual men. This representa-
tion of homosexuality invokes a fear of an irrepressible sexual drive, per-
verse, immoral and destructive. In the case of lesbians, the construction of
perversion occurs through the representation of the feminine as the passive
recipient of sexual acts performed only with the purpose of procreation. Its
corollary, the fabrication of pleasure as sinful and motherhood as that which
sanctifies sex, makes women nonsexual subjects. This social construction of
femininity presented as natural and immutable, nonetheless, also contains its
opposite: the possibility of an unbridled sexuality, a sexuality constructed
independently of a masculine subject, violent and feared.
The ideal femininity, conceived as passive and nonsexual, is assumed in
the image of women as victims of male sexual aggression. Women were spe-
cifically mentioned as potential perpetrators of crimes only in the sections of
the code that dealt with the abandonment and neglect of children, in one of
the sections on abortion, and in the sections that criminalized adultery and
bigamy (Penal Code of 1902: secs. 263265, 267, 269275). The aspects
described in these sections were directly related to their roles as wives and
mothers. Articles related to prostitution, under which we could imagine that
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 197

the penal code might address women specifically and in a way directly related
to their sexuality, did not codify prostitution as a crime; rather it was a crime
to own or operate a house of prostitution or a scandalous house. It was
also a crime to make a business out of promoting or facilitating the prostitu-
tion of another person. Prostitution, defined as the act of accepting, offering
or soliciting sexual relations for money, was not incorporated into the Penal
Code until 1983 (Ley de Puerto Rico Nm. 55, 3 June 1983).
The fact that female sexuality was not criminalized in the Penal Code of
1902 is significant. This silence on female sexuality reiterated the masculine
power to name itself and render women invisible. The silence on womens
sexuality was thus part of its repression. The discussion of the constructions
of masculinity, femininity and the heterosexual matrix as set up in the law is
an important frame of reference within which to situate the narratives of
lesbians that describe the ways in which they constructed spaces for emo-
tional and sexual ties with other women. The repression through silence that
we have described in the law mirrored other social dynamics. We find this in
a wide variety of social norms that differentiated masculinity and femininity
and segregated males from females. This segregation was geared toward sup-
pressing and prohibiting manifestations of female sexuality. Unlike male
manifestations of sexuality, displays of female sexuality were perceived as
undesirable. Female sexuality was associated with sin, witchcraft and classist
and racist notions of the supposed promiscuity and immorality of black and
poor women (Matos-Rodrguez 1995; Sued Badillo and Lpez Cantos 1986;
Crespo 1996).
On the other hand, the repression and silence on womens sexuality pro-
vided spaces for women to define unnamable or unthinkable sexualities. The
physical segregation, the sexual division of labor and the different emotional
spaces assigned to women opened locations for the production of these de-
sires and sexualities. Moreover, the prevalent idea that women were not (or
should not be) sexual beings, as men were by nature, could have allowed
sexual relations between women to go more unnoticed than among men. The
possibility of an unnamed and outlawed sexuality arising from within the
heterosexual matrix is demonstrative of the fissures of power and of the
spaces of agency and action that subjects construct. This reiterates the fissure
we observed above in the legal code where the representation of the feminine
as a nonsexual subject, the passive recipient of sexual acts performed by
active male subjects, contains its opposite: the possibility of an unbridled
sexuality, a sexuality constructed independently of a masculine subject.
The women of the first generation in our study constructed lesbian iden-
tities in various ways. Sometimes socially prohibited desires remained indi-
vidual and hidden, unnamed and expressed to no one. At other times they
were experienced (although not outwardly acknowledged) within family and
198 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

neighborhood gatherings and within heterosexual marriages. Similarly, seg-

regated spaces intended to preserve and regulate femininity, such as girls
schools and the Girl Scouts, offered many opportunities for the subversion of
compulsory heterosexuality. Most lesbians born in the 1920s through 1940s
did not produce change by being open and defiant. Rather, many were in-
clined to construct alternatives for themselves out of very traditional spaces.
For the most part these relationships were not visible, and women led lives as
both heterosexual women and lesbians.
Often long-term sexual relationships between women were maintained
while in heterosexual marriages and sometimes within the same household
shared with husbands. Marriage was expected, and many times it did not
involve love or passion. When women discovered love and desire with other
women and no longer were willing to have sex with their husbands, they
could take advantage of the popular assumption that women were not very
interested in sex and use it as an excuse to end conjugal relations. Work
outside the home and the opportunity of going to school increased womens
spheres of social interaction, putting them in contact with other women out-
side their immediate family. One woman describes a relationship she had
with a woman she met at the university, which lasted for eight years:
Me cas sin amor . . . I married without love and, besides, it was not
what I expected. Yes, he was an older man, but he didnt have a lot of
experience [with sex] and it was here that my other life began. I fell in
love. While I was married to my husband I had a relationship with a
woman who, like me, also studied at the university. My husband didnt
notice it very much. After I started this relationship I no longer shared
sex with him. But he didnt realize that it was because of this. No. I
already had my kids. They were small when I started this relationship,
but I guess he thought that since I wasnt interested in having any more
children, sex didnt really matter to me. (Elena 1993)

Luisa had a similar experience. She was twenty-eight when she met
Amanda, who was married. Luisa describes the relationship:
Estuve con ella . . . I was with her for ten years, and she was married all
that time. I was here and she was in her own house. At seven in the
morning I was already on my way to her house and I got back here at
twelve or one in the morning. Then on weekends I stayed at her house
and slept in the living room. She didnt sleep with him. She would make
a bed on the sofa and we would sleep there, and he never said anything.
(Luisa 1992)

The Girl Scouts of America were established in Puerto Rico in 1929. Eugenia
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 199

and Elena describe this as a female environment propitious for encounters

between girls and also between staff.
Ponan a las nias juntas . . . They put girls together so that they will be
feminine and so they wont get together with boys before theyre sup-
posed to. What they really do is create an ideal environment for girls to
relate to each other, sometimes in a sexual way. I was always a Girl
Scout leader. I remember I had a troop and now that they are grown up
all of them are gay. Some of them got married for a short time, and
others were married longer, as I was. That didnt matter, we were gay in
that way. There was the little Girl Scout house where we would meet,
and we also went camping. I went with my husband and my children
and, I dont know, he was there but not a part of it. In that situation we
were women together. It was as if we were in a womens school. We
were women, period. Girls. All I know is that it was there that I met all
the women I had relationships with. (Eugenia 1992)
Although spaces for sexual relationships between women were ambigu-
ous and confined, they laid out a crucial terrain that, in the next decades,
women would expand and recreate. The second generation of lesbians, who
reached adolescence in the 1960s and 1970s, experienced conditions a lot
different from their mothers. The rise in womens labor-force participation
rate, along with a marked decline in the rate for men, produced more situa-
tions where women raised their children without a husband. This made it
easier for daughters to imagine a family setting without male figures whose
needs they had to cater to.
I remember when I was growing up that mi ta [my aunt] worked as a
seamstress and made more money than my mother, and besides, she
had a husband. So they had nicer things in the house. But in addition to
working, my aunt had to come home and cook and she didnt eat until
her husband got home. He had to be served first and then everyone else
ate. In my house there was no man. It was just my mother and me. And
I liked it because there was no one we had to do anything for. (Marta
1991)
The spaces that lesbians in the first generation carved out for themselves
were visible to many younger women. Consuelo knew one of these lesbians,
and this also helped her imagine a world different from the world of her
mother and most of the women around her who were wives and mothers.
When I was a teenager, there was a woman I talked to a lot that had
lived with another woman. I used to do some work for her after school.
I would press some blouses and dresses and she paid me. Sometimes I
200 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

had a little time and I would talk with her, just about my dreams, and
what I wanted to do. I was fascinated by her lifestyle, although I never
really became her close friend or anything. (Marta 1991)
As in the case of lesbians of the first generation, notions of acceptable
sexuality were defined by prevailing norms of heteromasculinity. Proper or
acceptable femininity was not sexual. The norms of virginity required that
women be chaste before marriage, and within the marriage itself sex was only
for procreation and was sanctified by maternity. The pain of childbirth and
the sacrifices of motherhood were requirements of femininity. They were
used to erase the notion of pleasure and restore the virtues and status of
virginity to married women. Racial and class codes defined acceptable femi-
ninity as chaste, upper class and white by depicting black and poor women as
promiscuous. Sex outside marriage was compared to prostitution. Nonethe-
less, it was more acceptable to be a prostitute than a lesbianmejor puta
que pata. Codes of national identity assumed nonheterosexual sexualities to
be a negative result of foreign influences.
Many women describe their experience of creating a sexual identity within
that normative framework. Marta grew up in New York and wanted to be
allowed to go outside the house. Her mother, like many other first-generation
migrants, was very protective, more than she would have been in Puerto
Rico. This was a different country, it was racist and people spoke English.
This protectiveness was expressed by making sure that her daughter was a
proper woman. Because Marta wanted to be outside and often tore her
clothes while playing, her mother called her pata alz [one who does not
stay put, although pata also means lesbian]. Girls who liked to play in the
street with the boys were called ttera [unruly, disrespectful, one who hangs
out in the street and gets into trouble], marimacha or marimacho [man-
nish, masculine woman]. Sometimes girls who did not exhibit appropriately
feminine behavior were called machorra [barren female] or sucia [dirty,
immoral, degenerate]. This name-calling was a punishment for desiring for-
bidden activities and forbidden places. It was intended as a way to control
and produce shame. It caused a lot of pain.
The framework of masculinity was the socially sanctioned point of depar-
ture for acquiring freedom and being sexual. This was nonetheless a frame-
work that was only for boys; girls adopted it as a fantasy.
Recuerdo que quera ser un hombre . . . I remember that I wanted to be
a man. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my best friend and I would
cut classes and go to the beach to play that we were boys. We had a
fantasy of being able to roller-skate all day and return to our house on
the beach where we lived. We were both boys, so we could do whatever
we wanted. (Leida 1991)
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 201

The images presented are framed within the binary constructs of

masculine and feminine. The names used to describe and punish unac-
ceptable behaviors constructed an other placed outside the norms
and behaviors that defined the viable and appropriate feminine subject.
Nonetheless lesbians did not construct their identities solely through
the punitive structures of laws and other social norms that made them
improper subjects. They also devised their own performances, cos-
tumes, desires and identities as a way to reinvent themselves and these
norms. Ada describes the image of lesbians she grew up with and then
tells us how she redefined the meanings associated with these images. In
many ways its seems that she played out the heterosexual constructions
of appropriate behaviors while investing them with other significa-
tions.

Una lesbiana era . . . A lesbian was a woman that spent her time in el
cafetn [the coffee shop and bar] near the public square. She was fuerte
como el odio [as strong as hate]. She was very masculine and heavy, and
she wore jeans and a mans shirt and carried a wallet in her back pocket.
The people she hung out with were all men. It was only when you came
up close that you saw her breasts and realized it was not a man. She was
a strong butch. What I heard in my town was that lesbians were danger-
ous, very jealous, and they went after pretty women. They were very
aggressive and they were indecent. (Ada 1991)

In light of this portrayal it was not easy for Ada to come to terms with her
own feelings and experiences. She had to reconstruct this image. For Ada it
literally meant standing in front of the mirror and calling herself these
namespata, cachapera, marimacha, tortillera, lesbianawhile at the same
time telling herself that these names did not mean what she had been told.
This is what you are, but it does not mean the terrible things you have been
told.
Cuando me d cuenta . . . When I realized at age nineteen that I had
fallen in love with a woman and that she wasnt aggressive or jealous,
she wasnt going to kill anyone, that I did not go after women harassing
them, that I was not the picture of the lesbian I had been shown, I was
confused. Then I said, so lesbians are not that way, because what I feel
is very beautiful and pleasurable. So I began to look desperately for a
definition of what a lesbian was. I couldnt accept what I had been told,
and a satisfactory definition wasnt in any book. The only lesbian I
knew was the woman I had fallen in love with, and she fit the image of
the lesbian that I had been presented with: she was big, heavy, and
looked like a man. But she was not aggressive, she was tender and
202 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

delicate. She taught me that pata, lesbiana, tortillera, cachapera were

not bad names. She used to tell me that you stand in front of a mirror
and you say those names to yourself many times. You repeat them
many times so that you realize that is what you are, but you realize that
it is not all the things you have been told. (Ada 1991)

Leida was a part of various lesbian communities in Puerto Rico from her
first high school years in the early 1970s. She identified as a lesbian when she
fell in love with a girl at school and started hanging out with a group of gay
teenagers who introduced her to the gay scene on Condado Beach in San
Juan. There were all sorts of gay people there. Working people, teenagers,
drug users, gay people who had nowhere else to go because they had been
ostracized by their families, tourists and hippies, which was the name
given to anyone who had long hair or wore torn clothing or loud colors. She
spent a couple of years in this community. But at a certain level, she never saw
herself as belonging to that scene. One day she left and never went back. She
went home as if she had never left, and enrolled at the university. Here she
shared living space with a group of women and became active in student
movements. One day she heard a talk on the radio that had a lasting impres-
sion on her. A woman was talking about feminism and lesbianism. This
seemed like a miracle, and Leida thought it was the most wonderful thing she
had ever heard.
The message that Leida heard was the declaration of the Comunidad de
Orgullo Gay during the first public meeting of gays in Puerto Rico on August
4, 1974. Ana Rivera, the spokeswoman of Mujer Intgrate Ahora (MIA), a
feminist organization formed two years earlier, read their declaration on the
radio.4 This declaration began:
Nuestra sociedad ha impuesto un estigma sobre las personas que diferi-
mos en nuestras preferencias sexuales de los patrones mayoritarios de
conducta. La comunidad gay de Puerto Rico ha decidido organizarse en
la Comunidad de Orgullo Gay para combatir en forma vigorosa la
legislacin sexista y antihomosexual aprobada por nuestra Asamblea
Legislativa y para desarrollar una campaa de orientacin encaminada
a fomentar la solidaridad y el orgullo de ser gay entre nuestros her-
manos y hermanas que sufrimos la persecucin y el prejuicio de un
gobierno y una sociedad moralmente hipcrita. (Declaracin Pb-
lica)
[Our society has imposed a stigma upon persons whose sexual prefer-
ences differ from mainstream patterns of behavior. The gay community
of Puerto Rico has decided to organize as the Gay Pride Community to
vigorously combat the sexist and anti-homosexual legislation approved
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 203

by our Legislature and to develop an educational campaign to promote

solidarity and gay pride among our brothers and sisters that suffer the
persecution and the prejudice of a morally hypocritical government
and society.]
The Comunidad de Orgullo Gay (COG), the first gay organization in
Puerto Rico, was formed to galvanize a movement in repudiation of the
newly revised Penal Code.5 This code broadened the scope of article 278 of
the 1902 Penal Code to include sexual relations with a person of the same
sex in addition to the infamous crime against nature already included in
1902. The adjective infamous was removed from the new code. It reads:
Sodoma. Artculo 103. Toda persona que sostuviere relaciones sexuales
con una persona de su mismo sexo o cometiere el crimen contra natura con
un ser humano ser sancionada con pena de reclusin por un trmino
mnimo de un (1) ao y mximo de diez (10) aos (Penal Code of 1974).
Article 103 codifies, for the first time, the possibility of lesbian sex in the law.
When this article of the Penal Code was changed to include women, the name
of the crime also changed from infamous crime against nature to sod-
omy. The criminalization of sexual acts with animals, which in popular
culture were associated exclusively with men, was now treated in a separate
article, with the felony reduced to a misdemeanor. The model penal code
(Proyecto Pagn) presented to the Puerto Rico legislature had proposed
eliminating the outlawing of private consensual homosexual relations and
penalizing only acts that, if heterosexual, would be considered by the law as
rape (Nevares Muiz 1995). Nonetheless, in response to pressures from reli-
gious groups, the legislature decided to keep the antisodomy laws and ex-
pand them to include women.
The explicit inclusion of women in the criminalization of same-sex rela-
tions was accompanied by an expansion of the scope of antisodomy laws.
While previously the outlawing of same-sex relations was limited to the ar-
ticle on crimes against nature, in the revised Penal Code of 1974 sodomy was
also included under the articles dealing with prostitution. The new code out-
lawed not just houses of prostitution but also houses of sodomy, and the
definition of house was expanded to include annexes or parts of buildings
(Penal Code of 1974, art. 108). When approved in 1974, this was immedi-
ately used to threaten or close gay establishments (Calero). The articles
outlawing the promotion of prostitution of others for profit also included
sodomy for the first time in 1974 (art. 110c). Furthermore, the Penal Code
was amended by a new law, number 56 of 3 June 1983, specifying that the
laws against prostitution applied regardless of the sex of the persons in-
volved. This allowed the criminalization of sexualities other than heterosexu-
ality under the laws against prostitution.
204 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

The inclusion of women in the antisodomy laws was not without ambigu-
ity. Although the language of the article includes the possibility of sex be-
tween women, neither the word woman nor the body parts that identify
her are included. The law retains its phallocentrism. The title of article 103,
Sodomy, refers us to the jurisprudence that has defined this as an act that
only men are capable of performing. The decisions of the court have reiter-
ated that there must be a penis to perform sodomy. Thus, the law has no
name for sexual relations with a person of the same sex if these persons are
women. These are women whose sex cannot be defined within the hetero-
sexual matrix. They are neither the masculine subject who penetrates nor the
feminine subject who is penetrated. From this point of view, the sexual act
itself is unintelligible (What in the world do they do? is a question frequently
asked). On the other hand, this inability of the law to articulate sexual rela-
tions between women reflects with remarkable clarity the matrix within
which lesbians experienced sexuality. They experienced it in secret, in spaces
that were constructed to protect femininity, within heterosexual marriages,
as a relation that was not perceived as sexual by the world and often not even
by themselves. In this way, the discourse of sodomy is in effect the legal
construction of the closet.
Article 103 seems to establish a second modality of sodomy when it adds
the second clause that reads or commits the crime against nature. As we
have seen, the courts previously used the terms sodomy and crime against
nature interchangeably. In this light, the second modality, crime against
nature also designates a crime that only men can commit. Nonetheless, this
has been the crime that the law and the judges have repeatedly refused to
define, given its vile and degrading nature. Through this prohibition, the
law has codified heterosexuality as that which is natural or the norm. As we
have argued earlier, heterosexuality through its exclusionary power has cre-
ated the possibility of many sexual acts, subjects, identities and desires that
are defined as deviant, immoral and unnamable. Heterosexuality erects itself
as the eternal, immutable norm, where masculine and feminine are the only
viable subjects. But in doing so, it fails.
The inclusion of women in the antisodomy law, albeit as a subject whose
sex cannot be definedshe is neither penetrated nor can she penetrate
mirrors the irruption of women into the sphere of politics. Feminist activists
transformed politics to include women, but womens presence was not intel-
ligible within this sphere. In the early seventies feminists transformed politi-
cal discourses by pointing to the discrimination against women in all areas of
social life. The term womens liberation became a rallying cry that pointed
to the need for a radical transformation of society that would include
women. Feminist organizations were formed outside political parties and
government agencies to establish their independent agendas for social
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 205

change. These included a reform of family and labor laws that discriminated
against women, and a reform of laws against rape. Feminists pointed to the
lack of representation of women in public office and in political parties. They
proposed changes in the education system to provide equal opportunities to
women and radical transformations in gender socialization. Mujer Intgrate
Ahora (MIA), the first of the feminist organizations formed in this period,
also advocated womens right to control their own bodies and presented a
criticism of heterosexuality and the nuclear family as social norms.
The presence of women and of feminist activism in the political arena
provoked many hostile and negative reactions from many sectors of society,
from the most radical to the most conservative. To many, their presence re-
sulted in something that was unintelligible and threatened social order. What
was a liberated woman? Who were these liberationists? Where did the values
they espoused come from? Were they a result of foreign influences? Why did
feminists hate men? Were there good feminists or were they all bad? Sectors
of the political left attempted to construct an image of the good, revolution-
ary feminist who privileged class struggle over all else. The good, revolution-
ary feminism was opposed to a bad, bourgeois, misguided feminism that
identified men as their enemies and wasted their time in banal protests.
Within the political left this discourse was seldom if ever identified as sexist
and homophobic. As in the case of womens inclusion under the antisodomy
laws, womens emergence in the political sphere occurred within a phallo-
centric regime that could not locate women with a proper framework.
Many gays and lesbians tried to join proindependence organizations and
student movements, but because they did not hide their sexual preference,
they were accepted only as volunteers and not as formal members. In proin-
dependence organizations, homosexuality was seen as a disease of capital-
ism, and it was argued that lesbians and gays were not to be trusted. In an
open letter from un joven independentista [a young proindependence ad-
vocate] published in Pafuera!, the first gay newsletter in Puerto Rico, an
otherwise anonymous writer describes his experiences with leftist organiza-
tions as quite disheartening. These organizations, he argues, refused to dis-
cuss the issues that affected gays, and they often barred gays from entering.
Leftist groups assigned inferior roles to women and to the homosexuals who
did gain entry into these organizations. Neither were allowed to rise within
the ranks to positions of leadership. Revolutionary movements sustained
that homosexuals were untrustworthy, immature and easily blackmailed or
seduced (La Izquierda Organizada).
Seen through the lens of nationalism, lesbians represented a foreign influ-
ence and were a threat to the nation and to the movements that claimed to
represent national aspirations. Moreover, their sexuality was represented as
a result of bourgeois decadence and was associated with U.S. feminism. Ac-
206 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

cording to Carmen Torres, a leader of the Comunidad de Orgullo Gay, the

gay movement developed outside leftist organizations.
Para la izquierda nosotros no existamos . . . As far as the left was
concerned, we didnt exist. They did not want to become involved with
us. We had more contacts with the right than with the left because we
held educational activities with the police and in schools to create pub-
lic pressure that would help eliminate repression against lesbians and
gay men in the streets. (Torres 1993)

Lesbophobia and homophobia were quite prevalent even within many

feminist groups and individuals. Judging by the silences and the attempts to
make lesbians invisible, we should consider that prejudices against lesbians
were even stronger than against gay men. Many feminists attempted to dis-
tance themselves from positions that could identify them as lesbians, includ-
ing the use of the word feminist, which frequently was considered synony-
mous with lesbian. When the term feminist was adopted, it seemed
necessary to some to assert that they were not lesbians or were not against
men.
In October of 1974 the newsletter Pafuera! announced the formation of
a womens group, the Alianza de Mujeres de la Comunidad de Orgullo Gay
para estimular a las mujeres gay a liberarsecomo gays y como mujeres. .
. . Como principal propsito, la Alianza se propone levantar la conciencia de
las mujeres gay, para que stas puedan expresarse como lo que son [to
encourage gay women to liberate themselvesas gays and as women. . . . As
its primary objective, the Alliance seeks to raise the consciousness of gay
women so that they may express themselves as what they are] (Mujeres Gay
se Organizan). With this statement lesbians set out to challenge the invisibil-
ity imposed by the social order and name themselves.
The Alianza de Mujeres struggled within the organization to create a space
for themselves, which many male members saw as a threat. An editorial in
Pafuera! narrates the reaction of one of the male members of COG who was
outraged that the organization had allowed a feminist activist to speak
about sexism. The editorial responds to this member: La COG no permiti
esas circunstancias: las busc. El tema fue escogido y su presentacin
organizada porque la eliminacin del sexismo es parte ntegra de nuestra
lucha por liberarnos, no slo como gays, sino tambin como seres humanos
[COG did not allow this to happen, we sought this opportunity. The topic
was chosen and the presentation was organized because the elimination of
sexism is an integral part of our struggle for liberation, not only as gays, but
also as human beings] (Feminismo). Carmen Torres describes the recep-
tion of this group within the COG:
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 207

Cre tremendos conflictos dentro de la organizacin . . . It created

tremendous conflicts within the organization. Men wanted to go to our
meetings. They did not understand why there should be a separtion
between men and women. They thought we were creating a separate
power structure. On the other hand, some of the men, such as the presi-
dent of the organization, perceived our group as something marvelous.
Many men wanted to attend our events, and sometimes we allowed the
younger male members of the COG to be present, but only to listen.
They were not allowed to speak, to express their opinions, or to make
faces. They were simply there to learn. On other occasions the topic of
our discussion was private and we were not interested in having men
present. But, yes, the men created a lot of pressure. They wanted our
space. Why did we have to hold our meetings on Fridays, they would
ask. Our response was, Well, because we deserve it, we need it, and
that space is ours on Fridays. (1993)
The Alianza de Mujeres set out to address the needs of women who were
forced to leave their homes when their parents found out they were gay, and
to provide support and counseling to others who ran away from home. The
organization sponsored talks in schools and in communities, maintained a
small library and distributed their newsletter Pafuera! in gay bars, beaches,
and other places frequented by lesbians and gays. Providing spaces for lesbi-
ans to socialize was an important activity of the Alianza de Mujeres, given the
dearth of options outside of bars that were available for women. In these first
years of lesbian activism many of the efforts were geared toward addressing
personal and family-related issues arising from ingrained stereotypes of lesbi-
ans and homosexuality.
Although the Penal Code laid out the heterosexual matrix that outlawed
and defined inappropriate sexualities, the laws that had the greatest direct
impact on gays were municipal ordinances. These, not the Penal Code, were
used by the police to arrest and harass homosexuals, transvestites and lesbi-
ans, in the latter case particularly butches. The growing visibility of gays
made these municipal ordinances and police brutality an important and
pressing issue for the COG. Ordinances outlawing certain kinds of dress and
immoral conduct, passed as early as 1902 in San Juan, could be applied
widely to many misfits and outcasts including poor people, the homeless,
prostitutes, the mentally ill, homosexuals and transvestites. Other ordi-
nances were directed specifically at homosexuals and transvestites. This was
the case of a 1906 municipal ordinance that prohibited the presence of men
dressed as women in public (Consejo Municipal 1906). A 1907 San Juan
ordinance penalized los que se muestren en la va pblica en forma o traje
que pueda ofender el decoro de las gentes que transitan o producir
208 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

escndalos (Consejo Municipal 1907). The words mostrarse en forma o

traje suggest a wide variety of bodily displays and forms of dress that could
be punishable on the grounds that they offended public decorum or produced
scandal. Ordinances of 1935 and 1941 forbade the transit in public road-
ways of persons indecorously dressed (Junta de Comisionados 1935, 1941)
or persons who caused repulsion to spectators or constituted a menace to
public order (Junta de Comisionados 193536). Dispositions such as these
and the ordinances of 1902 and 194950 that prohibited gatherings of more
than three persons on a sidewalk were often used to harass and arrest pros-
titutes, gay men and increasingly also lesbians (Consejo Municipal 1902;
Junta de Comisionados 194950). These last two ordinances were struck in
1971 because their language was deemed to be of dubious constitutionality
(Asamblea Municipal 1971).
Transvestites in particular, but also butch women, had many problems
with the police, who arrested, accosted and mistreated them. It was often
difficult for them to walk down the streets without being harassed. Accusa-
tions of alteracin a la paz [disturbing the peace] were very commonly
used to arrest transvestites. Wearing a vest was many times sufficient reason
for the police to pick butches off the street. They would not arrest them, but
would force them to enter the police vehicles and intimidate them there
(Torres 1993).
The revision of the Penal Code revealed that lesbianism had made its way
into the imaginable, into the thinkable. Although the precise content, mean-
ing and acts that constituted that subject remained unintelligible, the sugges-
tion that women were sexual beings was a sign that the silence on womens
sexuality had started to break. Lesbians of the first generation contributed to
breaking that silence by building their sexualities and intimate relationships
within the heterosexual family and within the spaces designed to protect and
guard femininity. As women entered the paid work force in larger numbers,
more women gained the possibility of surviving economically outside of
marriage. Lesbians of the second generation questioned the rigid separations
between masculine and feminine behaviors and defied the freedoms and
privileges assigned to men and boys in a more open way. Cachapera, mari-
macha, tortillerathe names that women were called when it was known or
suspected that they did not conform to the standards of acceptable behav-
iorwere a sign of visibility, albeit negative. Within this framework of pro-
hibition, lesbians began to articulate alternatives to the negative discourse of
heteronormativity. They articulated the possibility of sexuality independent
from men, a sexuality that was not understandable within the framework of
masculine and feminine subjects. As Ada stood in front of the mirror, she
shouted out the names used to describe her in negative ways and constructed
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 209

new meanings for these same words. The possibilities for new meanings were
many.
The Comunidad de Orgullo Gay and the Alianza de Mujeres de la Com-
unidad de Orgullo Gay were a political expression of the many individual
challenges to the heterosexual social order. The lesbian feminist discourse
that began to be articulated during this decade added a new dimension to the
discussion of the transformation of gender roles and womens control over
their own bodies. It posed the possibility of a radical critique of gender roles
and reproductive freedom that would address the assumptions of hetero-
sexual normalcy upon which the distinction between male and female was
constructed (Hinojosa 1998).
Feminist, lesbian and gay activism was an important component of the
transformations in the constructions of gender and sexual difference wit-
nessed during this century. The legal discourses have constructed and repro-
duced the matrix of gender and heterosexuality. They also mirror the contra-
dictory social contestations of this framework.
The language used by the Supreme Court judges since 1974 seems to re-
flect some of these changes. The Supreme Court decisions of 1977 and 1993
address the same issue of the vagueness of the law of previous decades. The
judges were asked to specify the acts that define this crime. Although some
magistrates still invoke moral and biblical traditions in the same language
that Pueblo v. Daz (1926) and Pueblo v. Gutirrez (1950) used, in 1977 a
Supreme Court judge acknowledged for the first time the possibility of con-
sensual sexual relations between persons of the same sexalthough to reaf-
firm that the case before him was not by any means consensual. Judge Tras
Monge questioned the theoretical basis of previous decisions sustaining the
view that the act need not be defined because moral decency precludes its
articulation. He noted that many states have abolished sodomy laws because
of their vagueness (Pueblo v. Marn Vega 1977).
Similarly, in 1993, when confronted with a case in which the vagueness of
the sodomy law was adduced by a defendant accused of incest and sodomy,
in a concurrent opinion Judge Hernndez Denton stated that the case before
him involved an act of penetration of the anus by a penis, which was suffi-
cient to define sodomy. Nonetheless, he suggested that cases involving a con-
sensual relation between adults needed to be addressed by the court in an-
other context (Pueblo v. Santos Molina 1993).
The judges recognition of the possibility of consensual sexual relations
between adults of the same sex brings the court closer to decriminalizing
lesbian and gay sexualities. A recent administrative order by the Puerto Rico
Department of Justice also brings us closer to the same goal. This order
nullifies an administrative order issued by the previous Secretary of Justice
210 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

that prohibited prosecutors from bringing cases on behalf of victims of do-

mestic violence who were in lesbian or homosexual relationships or who
were cohabiting without being married. This is recognition of the rights of
lesbians and gays to protection under the law. Senator Velda Gonzlez, one of
the principal authors of the law against domestic violence (Law number 54 of
15 August 1989, Para la Prevencin e Intervencin con la Violencia
Domstica), has reiterated in various public forums that the legislative intent
of the law was to provide protection against domestic violence to all persons
regardless of their sexual orientation. This intent, she has argued, is evident
as well in the gender-inclusive language of the law (Senate of Puerto Rico,
Public Hearings on Senate Bill 201, Para Crear la Oficina y el Cargo de
Procuradora de las Mujeres, March 2001).
Most recently, Puerto Rico Law number 20 of April 2001 establishes the
office of the Procurator of Women with investigative, economic and quasi-
judicial powers to set public policy and ensure adherence to the Constitution
of Puerto Rico and all the laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of
gender. The law specifically prohibits, in the processes and functions of the
office, any discrimination owing to sexual orientation.
These are all opportunities to introduce public discussions that question
the assumptions of normality and abnormality, immoral and moral sex. The
challenge posed to the lesbian and gay movements is to address the construc-
tions of gender built on the assumption that heterosexuality is natural, im-
mutable and eternal. An indictment of this normative structure needs to
avoid setting up other sexualities as normal homosexualitysuch as the
lesbian who can pass, who can have children, who can get married to another
woman, or who doesnt look lesbian. A more radical task would be to
imagine identities and sexualities along a range of endless possibilities. The
narratives I have presented express the complex interplay of the normative
constraints within which identities and desires have been formed, and the
limitless possibilities that can be imagined. As Butler (1993) has argued, the
recognition of lesbian identities as strategic constructions, identities that can
be posed as sites of revisions and contestations rather than essences, is impor-
tant for lesbian politics.

Notes

1. All the names used to identify the women interviewed are pseudonyms.
2. Pueblo v. Castro, 63 D.P.R. 473 (1944); Pueblo v. Gutirrez, 71 D.P.R. 840
(1950); Pueblo v. Santiago Vzquez, 95 D.P.R. 593 (1967); Pueblo v. Marn Vega, 105
D.P.R. 676 (1977); Pueblo v. Santos Molina, 93 J.T.S. 78 (1993). Pueblo v. Gutirrez
involved two men. The circumstances of the accusation are not stated, so it is not clear
whether this was or was not a consensual relation.
 Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico / 211

3. The Puerto Rico Penal Code is officially published in both English and Spanish.
The English translations of the Penal Code are the official ones, except where noted.
The translations of court cases and municipal ordinances are mine.
4. Rivera read this statement in her individual capacity, not as the spokeswoman
of MIA.
5. Article 278 had been previously challenged at the end of the 1960s when Santos
P. Amadeo, a constitutional lawyer, asked for the annulment of the sentences of two
inmates for this offense. He argued that their convictions were a violation of the
doctrine of the separation of church and state and of the right of the inmates to
privacy. In 1971 legislation was submitted to study the legalization of prostitution
and homosexuality. See V. Padilla, Amadeo Pide Anular Fallos por Delito Contra
Natura, El Mundo, 15 May 1969, 12A; V. Padilla, Dice Castigo por Sodoma
Viola Constitucin, El Mundo, 23 October 1969, 5A; E. Combas Guerra, En
Torno a la Fortaleza, El Mundo, 12 May 1971, 6A.

References

Ada. Interview by author. Tape recording. New York, February 1991.

Asamblea Municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ordenanza nm. 6, 1971.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
. Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In The Second Wave: A Reader in
Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, 300315. New York: Routledge,
1997.
Calero: Polica Har Cumplir Leyes Anti-gay. Pafuera!, October 1974, 1.
Consejo Municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ordenanza nm. 9, 1902.
. Ordenanza sobre Mscaras y Disfraces, 1906.
. Estableciendo Penalidad por Ciertos Actos Inmorales que se Detallan, 1907.
Crespo, Elizabeth. Puerto Rican Women: Migration and Changes in Gender Roles.
In Migration and Identity, edited by Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, 13750.
Special issue of International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994.
. Domestic Work and Racial Divisions in Womens Employment in Puerto
Rico, 18991930. Centro: Journal of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueos 8,
no. 12 (1996): 3041.
Declaracin Pblica. Pafuera!, September 1974, 1.
Elena. Interview by author. Tape recording. San Juan, 1993.
Eugenia. Interview by author. Tape recording. San Juan, August 1992.
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Feminismo. Pafuera!, JuneJuly 1975, 2.
Hinojosa, Claudia. Expanding the Social Justice Agenda in Mexico: a Lesbian Femi-
nist Perspective. Paper presented at the twenty-first international conference of
the Latin American Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 2426,
1998.
212 / Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler

Junta de Comisionados de San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ordenanza nm. 268, 1935.
. Ordenanza nm. 271, 193536.
. Ordenanza nm. 719, 1941.
. Ordenanza nm. 18, 194950.
La Izquierda OrganizadaLa Voz de un Joven Independentista. Pafuera!, June
July 1975.
Leida. Interview by author. Tape recording. New York, March 1991.
Luisa. Interview by author. Tape recording. San Juan, 1992.
Marta. Interview by author. Tape recording. New York, February 1991.
Matos-Rodrguez, Flix V. Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop-Owners and Domestics:
Some Aspects of Womens Economic Roles in Nineteenth-Century San Juan,
Puerto Rico (18201870). In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in His-
torical Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara
Bailey, 17693. New York: St. Martins Press, 1995.
Mujeres Gay se Organizan. Pafuera!, October 1974, 6.
Nevares Muiz, Dora. Cdigo Penal de Puerto RicoRevisado y Comentado. Hato
Rey, Puerto Rico: Instituto para el Desarrollo del Derecho, 1995.
Pueblo v. Castro, 63 D.P.R. 473 (1944).
Pueblo v. Daz, 35 D.P.R. 230 (1926).
Pueblo v. Gutirrez, 71 D.P.R. 840 (1950).
Pueblo v. Len, 67 D.P.R. 557 (1945).
Pueblo v. Marn Vega, 105 D.P.R. 676 (1977).
Pueblo v. Santiago Vzquez, 95 D.P.R. 596 (1967).
Pueblo v. Santos Molina, 93 J.T.S. 78 (1993).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakvavorty. Displacement and the Discourse of Woman. In Dis-
placement: Derrida and After, edited by Mark Krupnick. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983.
Sued Badillo, Jalil, and Angel Lpez Cantos. Puerto Rico Negro. Ro Piedras, Puerto
Rico: Editorial Cultural, 1986.
Torres, Carmen. Interview by author. San Juan, August 1993.
Vzquez Calzada, Jos L. La Poblacin de Puerto Rico y Su Trayectoria Histrica.
San Juan: Escuela Graduada de Salud Pblica, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1988.
Sexual Orientation and Male Socialization
in the Caribbean
 7

The Role of the Street in the Socialization

of Caribbean Males
Barry Chevannes

Socialization is the process whereby values and behavioral norms are trans-
mitted to a succeeding generation. Generally speaking, the family, the school
and the church are seen as the main institutional agents of this process. It is
somewhat strange that, notwithstanding the dominance of functionalism in
American sociology and British social anthropology in Caribbean studies,
with their emphases on values, so very little has been attempted to under-
stand the socialization of Caribbean children. Madeline Kerrs (1952) was
the first and, to my knowledge, the only systematic attempt, but hers was
guided more by the need to understand the formation of personality than by
the need to understand the roles of the various socializing institutions. What
we have come to know about the socialization processfor example, early
gender role divisions, early sexual initiation, the transition to adulthood
derives more from general studies of the family than from any focus on the
process itself. Among the most notable studies in this regard are the seminal
works of Clarke (1957), Cumper (1958) and Ray Smith (1956), and the later
studies by Peter Wilson (1973) and Victoria Durant-Gonzalez (1976). In any
event, rapid social change, including urbanization, migration and structural
adjustment in the economy, makes these studies dated.
The updating of knowledge of any sort may be justified on purely intellec-
tual grounds. However, since we are witnessing all around us disquieting
trends in the ethics and aesthetics of the young, there is the need at least to
understand what is happening. Consider, for instance, the fact that in educa-
tion, one of societys most important socializing activities, females are mak-
ing use of the opportunities in greater proportion than males. In Jamaica over
the past several years, females have been outnumbering males by as much as
two to one at the University of the West Indies and among Caribbean Exami-
nation Council high school graduates. On the other hand, an extraordinary
rise in crime over the past twenty-five years, ranging from robbery to drug
trafficking to murder, is largely the handiwork of young males, far in excess
216 / Barry Chevannes

of their ratio in the population. Issues such as these are generating many
questions. Has our value system changed? Are we reaping the result of a
different pattern of socialization from that of earlier generations? Specifi-
cally, how are our males being socialized? Drawing on the ethnography of an
urban ghetto community, Joetown, this chapter highlights some of the results
of a qualitative research project on the socialization process in Jamaica. It
focuses on an important agent of socialization often overlooked, namely the
wider communityor, as informants put it, the street.

Methodology

Carried out over a period of six months, from February to July 1994, the
research combined ethnographic data gathering and animated group discus-
sion. A team of researchers working in each community included an ethnog-
rapher, two animators and a documentalist. Data gathering took the forms of
conversational and in-depth interviews, observation and group discussions.

Joetown

Joetown is situated in the densely populated heart of downtown Kingston.

The city of Kingston now comprises the parish of Kingston, the capital of
Jamaica, and the urbanized section of the parish of St. Andrew surrounding
it. Only two square miles in area, the parish of Kingston was once the main
center of commerce, banking and political activity, besides being the site of
several residential communities. The focus of these operations has shifted
northwards into neighboring St. Andrew, where New Kingston is now the
banking district, Half-way-Tree the leading commercial center, and Newport
West the main port.
It is several decades now since St. Andrew replaced Kingston as the parish
of urban population growth; now the adjacent parish of St. Catherine is
replacing St. Andrew. Thus the Kingston Metropolitan Area comprises all of
Kingston, all of the flat parts of St. Andrew and the Portmore part of St.
Catherine. What is left of the parish of Kingston are the markets, informal
and formal retail trading targeted at low-income earners, and dilapidated
buildings abandoned by their owners but housing the poor and the destitute.
This is downtown. Roughly speaking, downtown today is the parish of
Kingston, while uptown is anywhere above Cross Roads and Half-way-Tree
in St. Andrew.
Uptowners regard downtown as a place to be avoided, because of political
and gang-related violence; many young uptown dwellers born since the
1970s have never been there. Downtowners have mixed feelings about up-
town. On the one hand, uptown is where the snobs and the scornful, who
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 217

stereotype downtowners, live; on the other hand, it is the symbol of achieve-

ment, the place downtowners aspire to live.
The community we call Joetown comprises seven streets and lanes running
north-south for four large city blocks, and five streets running east-west.
There are more than thirty rum bars, thirty small grocery shops, fifteen work-
shops, six race-horse betting shops and six beauty salons, scattered through-
out the community but with a concentration in the eastern half.
Though old, the buildings tend to be solid concrete structures, showing a
coat of paint no more than four years old. Some, recently renovated, look
quite good. The dwelling houses, on the other hand, are quite dilapidated,
some showing the ravages of time and natural disasters. From one of our key
informants we learn that only six buildings have been constructed since
1951, the year Hurricane Charlie struck.
Roughly 80 percent of dwelling houses are tenement yards, mostly owned
by people living somewhere uptown and visiting to collect rent every month.
A small tenement yard will comprise one large house or two small ones, home
to some ten or fifteen people. A very large one will have either one extremely
large house or several medium to fairly large ones. We gather that two of
these each have more than forty-five occupants. In between the small and
large tenement yards are those comprising two or three small houses and
housing fifteen to twenty-five people. A few family houses may still be found,
some upstairs from a grocery or bar and housing its family members.

The People

According to the 1982 census, three thousand people lived here. Making a
rough calculation with the assistance of four key informants over three days
in March 1994, we estimated approximately 2,500 people. Informants sup-
port our estimate by pointing to the number of people who emigrated, moved
out, have been imprisoned or died, without much in-migration.
One convenient way of classifying the people that comprise Joetown is by
age. We found that age correlated in some respects with function. Beginning
with the elderly, we found that the most important role played by the old
women was looking after infants, walking them to and from the basic school
or church inside the community. Some set up small food stalls outside their
gates, where they sit and wait for the occasional buyer. For recreation they
take up a seat by the gate on a stool, a small bench, the upturned bottom of
a bucket, just looking out or holding an occasional conversation. The old
men, by contrast, may be found either at home or at the bar. At home they
help with the younger children or read the newspaper; at the bar they partake
in a drink and socialize with friends. A few are known gamblers.
The main breadwinners are the middle-aged women and men, no longer
218 / Barry Chevannes

youthful but definitely not old. A number of the women are food vendors at
their own gates, on the street or at the school gates, but most seem to be
domestic helpers, janitors, store clerks, higglers in the market and owners of
small businesses, all of whose gainful occupations take them outside Joe-
town. Those who are not employed may be found at home washing and
performing various domestic chores. Their male counterparts are artisans,
construction workers and public sector workers, who also make the daily
trek outside the community.
The youth, adolescent and young adult, make up the largest section of the
unemployed. This is the population of Joetown that is most into the informal
sector, which, for the women, spans a range from officially recognized activi-
ties such as hairdressing and informal commercial importing to illegal and
dangerous ones such as street gambling, prostitution and trafficking in ganja
and hard drugs. The roughness of life at this level is sometimes borne perma-
nently on the faces and arms of women disfigured by acid burns for steal-
ing other womens men or getting the worst of a quarrel.
A large percentage of the men in this age group may be seen in the morning
going to, and in the evenings coming in from, work, but an equally large
portion are unemployed. These form the core of the gambling, which seems
to be a major form of activity in Joetown, and other illegal activities. When
not gambling, some sit idly by their gates, walk aimlessly, play football or
basketball in the street, listen to music from a cassette player or make their
own. This is the group from which the drug dealers, pimps, pickpockets,
thieves and a handful of male prostitutes may be found. Once one gets to
know Joetown, one can distinguish between the genuinely idle and the drug
pushers. The pickpockets usually travel in threes, for foiling and defense,
targeting buses and other crowded gatherings like cricket at Sabina Park or
football at the National Stadium. A few young men are deportees1 who are
feared for their notoriety. Said one to a teenager, Yu a notn fi mi kill yu, an
yu know dat, cause mi kill nuf idiot like yu already! [It takes nothing for me
to kill you, and you know it, for I have killed many idiots like you already].
Some deportees are believed to have brought back the tabooed practice of
homosexuality.
Most children of school age do attend school, but a large number, mainly
the boys, do not. We were surprised to find so many girls over twelve years
old attending high school. They may be seen bustling out early in the morn-
ing, in larger numbers than their male counterparts. A few are dropouts,
owing mainly to careless or intended pregnancy. We found them sexually
active but aware of contraceptives. Community and family members gener-
ally watch girls of primary and high school age carefully. The few we ob-
served playing basketball up to dusk and after always had a brother or their
mother close by. Those who have been unfortunate enough to fall victim to
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 219

the gang rape known as batterywe were told of two, aged fourteen and
fifteencarry the humiliating nickname Mattress. On the whole, the girls in
Joetown are noticeably clean, well dressed and presentable when appearing
in public, even when wearing their batty riders,2 as some do.
A noticeably large number of Joetown boys who should be in school are
observed gambling, playing marbles or basketball, or just walking the streets.
When not accepted into adult gambling circles, they create their own in aban-
doned houses, at the back of yards, in tracks between houses, even in the
churchyards, and gamble for marbles, elastic bands and money. Stealing is
another major activityempty bottles, school childrens lunch moneyand
picking peoples pockets. Some are couriers and messengers for drug dealers.
The number of boys attending school is larger than the number of those
who are not. Nevertheless, the two groups are indistinguishable in terms of
their peer group relations. They not only mix socially, but the ranks of the
dropouts swell from time to time as parents, faced with little money for
school, send their daughters but keep back their sons.
Finally, there are the children under six years old. Most of them are placed
in privately run basic schools, but here, too, girls outnumber boys. According
to one basic school principal, the girls receive better care from parents and
more lunch money, and attend more regularly, than the boys. Those seen
alone on the street were usually on errands, as a way of socializing them, for
which parents will praise them. A little girl unsupervised on the street was a
rarity. The only one we saw, a girl of four or five, provoked the contemptuous
remark of an elderly lady that the childs parents were low dong for allow-
ing her on the street alone. No such care is extended to the boys. They too run
errands, but they are allowed the freedom to pull their toy trucks, wheels and
skates along.
Gambling is a round-the-clock, everyday activity. A mainly male activity,
it takes place nonstop, on the street corners, in the yards. A serious activity,
it receives the undivided attention of its players. Men are at their inhospitable
worst when gambling. They must never be interrupted. Ludo is a popular
gambling game, and several Ludo clubs may be found in the community.
The area is also known for its gangs. Young males, on reaching adoles-
cence, run the grave risk of being drawn into the underworld of hard drugs,
gun toting, robbery and other crimes. Guns are easily available, as elsewhere
in the inner-city communities. At night they sometimes replace the quarrel-
some barking of the dogs.
This is the setting in which children are socialized into the ideas and values
explicitly or implicitly defining how they view themselves or governing their
day-to-day interpersonal and social relationships. Little boys at play in basic
school express anger by verbally or in gesture threatening to shoot one an-
other, or tease little girls with an erect penis; they practice rolling imaginary
220 / Barry Chevannes

splifs (of ganja); a thirteen-year-old describes himself as a rude yout be-

cause he fears no one; a group of boys between eleven and thirteen years old
use an abandoned house for gambling at half past eight in the morning
school, one of them says, is buorin stuff, for girls.

Thursday, 14 April, midday

Nearing the end of the street, I see six boys in an abandoned house and peep
to see what they are doing. One runs, scattering the money and cards they
have been using to gamble with.
I am not a police! Here is my ID.
Show mi di police ID now, the eleven-year-old leader challenges me.
If mi a did police yout, mi ouda drape unu long time an, gaan wid unu!
[Were I a policeman, I would have arrested you long ago].
Three of them say they are living with only their mother, two with grand-
mothers. Only one has both mother and father. What about fathers? One in
prison, a second in the Bronx, a third mi mada duon si im since shi preg-
nant, and two living uptown (Cherry Gardens and Liguanea, upper-middle-
class suburbs).
Why are they not in school? Four give the standard explanationno
lunch money, no clothesone finds school boring, and another lies
about being on holiday. Not surprisingly, of the six of them, four attend
school sometimes, while the remaining two have not been in school since
grade 2 or 3.
What about the sisters? One boy with an uptown father smiles. He is
about thirteen. My sister luk laik di buk. Ye, man, shi paas fi Wulmaz an mi
uncle tek ar. Shi bright. Mi no bright [My sister likes book learning. She
passed the Common Entrance Examinations for Wolmers High School, and
my uncle took her to live with him. Shes bright, Im not]. The Bronx-father
one puts in: Yeh, man, girls love buorin stuff.
The one with both father and mother explains that when things get rough
and they cannot afford to send both his sister and himself, they send her, for
which he is glad. Sometimes mi tell dem fi sen ar kaaz shi young. Mi kya
read [Sometimes I tell them to send her, because shes young. I can read]. He
is eleven years old.
For survival two of the boys beg on their way from school, one claiming
that according to his mother it is his lunch money for the next day. Three
hustle by running small errands for uptown buyers in the market, or pushing
a sky juice cart with Juusi.3
I ask them what their mothers do for a living. Two sell in shops, one vends
food in the market during the day and works in a bar at night, and two are
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 221

domestic helpers. The one whose father is in prison says he doesnt know
what his mother does for a living. But from the giggling of the others I guess
she is a prostitute. He is clearly embarrassed, so I do not push the issue.
Taking leave of them, I encourage them not to give up, pointing out that
many persons have made it from worse situations, but am taxed ten dollars
by the leader of the group, with the Bronx father.
Back in the street, I pause long enough over a box of orange juice to absorb
what these boys have just told me and to make some notes before setting off
again past a video shop. The owner is filing away cassettes while screening a
blue movie. There seated before the video are my six little friends, all seeing
blue. And the owner never even looks at me standing in the doorway with my
mouth half open. It is nearing one oclock.
This excerpt, taken directly from our Kingston field notes, captures a re-
current theme throughout all six communities in the research, namely the
role of the yard, the school and the street in the construction and reproduc-
tion of ideas about gender.

Street and Yard

Street and Yard are not only socializing agents, as such; they also serve as
embodiments of social identity. The concept of the yard, as Mintz (1974)
pointed out, is an important part of Caribbean cosmology and, as Brodber
(1975) emphasized, an important historical space and arena of cultural and
social intercourse. By yard people refer to the space behind a fence and a
gate, hidden and protected from public view, where people are domiciled;
where they cook, eat, sleep, relieve themselves, wash, bathe and so on. Most
yards in Joetown are what the people know as tenement yards, private
space shared by as many families as there are rooms to rent. They share the
bathrooms, toilets, kitchens and standpipes, as well as the actual courtyard,
sometimes paved, often not. In the rooms are personal possessions and valu-
ables, like chests of drawers, dressers, television sets, stereos, videos, and
blenders. Almost all the homes we entered were well kept, floors shiny or
carpeted from wall to wall.
The yard is the only place where mothers are able to control the socializa-
tion of their children, not only because they have them within sight or ear-
shot, but also because of the sense of responsibility that other adults in the
yard exercise towards younger children (Brodber 1975: 3637).
Andrea is one woman who looks to the yard to keep her children from the
dangers of the street. She is the thirty-four-year-old owner of a bar. Two of
her three children live with her, a seventeen-year-old son and a fifteen-year-
old daughter. Her last child, a boy of ten years, was taken by his father when
222 / Barry Chevannes

the two of them broke up. She allowed him custody because he was a man of
substance. The child is in prep school and doing well. Her daughter, Keesha,
just had a baby, so at thirty-four Andrea is a grandmother.
Keesha is her favorite child, and always was, even though she loves her son
because he is her firstborn, and even though Keesha disappointed her with
the pregnancy. From the beginning, she confesses, she wanted a boy, since
girls tend to get pregnant and rude towards their mothers. She and Keesha
have shared life together as only women can, she says, suffering the ab-
sence of her spouse, Keeshas father, in a way that drew them closer. She is
certain she could never have been as close with her son. In addition, Keesha
is bright. The worst she ever placed in school was twelfth in a class of thirty-
eight, the best fourth of forty-two. All the more reason, then, for her disap-
pointment at the pregnancy. But now that the baby has come, she has quickly
adjusted to the idea of being a grandmother and taking care of her grandchild
while its mother returns to school. Andrea remains proud of Keeshas bright-
ness and, as it turns out, her athletic talent as well, for she has won many
medals.
It was the streets that spoiled Keesha. By her own account Andrea used to
beat Keesha, punching her up so hard that when she was through, she sari
fi ar [sorry for her]. Keesha loved the street, in stark contrast to her big
brother, who confined himself mostly to the yard; if he went on the street, it
was to a movie with one of his cousins, then home and to bed. Keesha was
different.
With the pregnancy, however, Keesha changed. She dropped her bad
friends. Now, according to her, there is nobody in Joetown she could use as
a role model. Sir, dem call nuf a di girl dem here Marky Belly an Bun-up
Face an Cemetery an Whore.4 Thats why, Keesha admits, she has no
friends now.
Being on the street does not look good, even for an adult woman. Were it
not for her bar, Andrea says, she would be found nowhere else but her yard.
Girls mus stay a dem yard and fin someting fi du! Out on the street
anything can happen, worse tings dan di bwaai; dem kyan riep ar! [worse
things than could happen to the boy; she could be raped].
The yard represents a protective circle around the children, especially the
daughters. Parents are less concerned for their sons, even though they admit
the dangers of the street pose greater problems for them than for the girls.
What, then, does the street represent? By street is meant all that space
outside the confines of the yard. It is a somewhat residual category. For
Joetown, it refers to the three lanes and nine streets that form the grid within
which our study was confined, but from the point of view of the yard it refers
also to the bars, video shops, street corners, even the abandoned house where
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 223

our six little gamblers were ensconced. So a man who it is known may be
found at Shirleys Bar will be said to be out a street.
Compared to the tidiness and pride in the yard, the street, at least in
Joetown, strikes a stark contrast: potholes everywhere, uncollected garbage,
sometimes a broken sewage main overflowing through a manhole. At the
start of our fieldwork in February we counted no fewer than six such broken
mains, though three were quickly repaired.
The actual streets are busy all day and into the night with people. During
fieldwork they became desolate only twice, as a result of shoot-outs between
rival gangs.
The street holds one key to the socialization of the children in the commu-
nity, especially the boys. One little boy grasping the contrast between yard
and street told us:
Di good tings we mi learn mi learn dem a mi yaad! [The good things I
learn, I learn them at home].
The bad things, he implied, he learned on the street. As mentioned before,
it is the young menteenagers and adultswho control the street, regulate
its flow of life, make it safe for some and unsafe for others, engulf the prepu-
bescent male only to release him a pubescent boy fully socialized into values,
predispositions and behavior that leave many parents, the mothers especially,
at a loss as to what to do to counteract them.
Boys are trained to be tough, to defend and give good account of them-
selves, to win. Losers are punished, as the following illustrates.

Thursday, 16 June

I am in the community quite early this morning. As I enter the lane I notice a
crowd, in ring formation. A fight is in progress. Two boys, one about thirteen
years old, the other about fifteen, are locked in struggle. I am there some five
minutes watching, when the older one struggles free and dashes for a rock.
But before he can use it, his opponent wrests it from him and smashes his
knees, first the left and then the right. Weakened, the bigger boy collapses
under the punches of the younger, and the fight ends.
Then comes a most telling sequence. Out of the cheering crowd steps a
man who proceeds to rain down lashes on the loser with the buckle end of his
belt. Damn wotlis! [worthless] are his words. A woman also swoops down
and fires a slap across the poor boys face. They are, I am shocked to find out
later, his parents. Only as the boy cries for his knees does his mother realize
he is hurt; seeing the blood soaking through his trousers and realizing, she
grasps his hand outstretched for help. But even as she gives him help, she
cannot help but loose at him a string of curses. Fuckin wotlis! Her only
224 / Barry Chevannes

encouraging words, as she helps him away, are: One day, yu gwain murder
im! His father, meanwhile, will have nothing to do with him. He leaves
before I can see where he is headed.
The fight illustrates two other important themes in the socialization pro-
cess. One is the value placed on age.5 Age differences in Jamaica are signaled
by terms that indicate size: big and little. The first order of distinction is
between adults and children. A big man or big woman means an adult male
or adult female, in contrast to a child of whatever age. But among children a
bigger child means an older child, a smaller child a younger one. Within the
family setting, older children are expected to be responsible for their younger
siblings, and along with this responsibility goes the exercise of authority.
When children or their parents invoke these age differences, it is usually to
assert or enforce a point of authority, since authority comes with age. Thus
the embarrassment felt by the parents of the fifteen-year-old loser derived in
the main from the fact that their son should not have lost to a younger boy.
That is why they cursed him as being worthless.
The other theme is that no bounds were set between fair means and foul.
It did not seem to matter to the onlookers that by bringing a rock into play
the bigger boy, whose parents were apparently present, sought to change the
balance. This was not about a fair test of physical strength between boys. It
was about winning, subduing the opponent, with available means. That the
bigger boy was disarmed of and overcome by the very weapon with which he
sought victory made his predicament the worse. It raises questions about the
communitys attitudes to the use of more lethal weapons like knives and
guns. It is quite striking that serious wounding and even manslaughter are
sometimes defended on grounds of provocation and that young people, in-
cluding primary and high school students, routinely travel with knives, ice
picks and, not unheard of, firearms. What they seem to have uppermost in
their minds is not that they might kill someone, but that they must be able to
fight back and win.
It is the male who is the target of socialization by the Street. The owner of
a grocery, which is also furnished with gaming machines, confirms that girls
hardly come here to play, but di boys flood di shop. I spend almost an hour
there, while she tells me how easy it is for boys to be led astray. I see boy
come here from country, and in less than two weeks im into drugs, she says.
Girls too are easily influenced, she agrees, but into being sexually active early,
but although dem a screw hard, dem a use all sort of protection. Observe,
she pointed out, how many little cliques of boys there are in the community,
but only few girl groups you will see. Boys gamble, thief, hide gun, sell
drugs, even rape in groups. An when you see a small group, it soon turn big.
That there is a kind of opposition between Yard and Street, paralleling to
some degree the gender differences, may become clearer from the attitudes
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 225

adopted by Joetown residents. One has been mentioned already, namely the
exercise of protective custody over children, particularly the girls.
A second attitude is resignation. Eight boys between eleven and sixteen
years old are playing marbles in an empty yard. Noticing our researchers
interest in them, a friendly middle-aged sidewalk vendor describes them for
him: four live with their mothers alone, three with both mother and father,
and one with neither mother nor father. The last is dirty in appearance and
quite vulgar, his every sentence colored by choice expletives. She tells us his
father is in prison serving life and that his mother ran away, leaving him. He
sleeps in an abandoned house, and depends on the sympathy and kindness of
many mothers round and about. He is, she says, the leader of the group. And
dont believe, she adds, that they are following him for marbles alone. Some-
how, he gets a likl dirty girl like himself an all a dem battery ar in one a di
ol kyaar in di back, night an day! [a little dirty girl like himself, and they all
rape her in one of those old cars in back, night and day]. He is rotten, she
says; only thirteen years old, he has shown her own fifteen-year-old how to
screw a girl. She too gives him food, because she feels sorry for him, but
im bad-bad, like sore! Yu know dem kech im wid gun, an mi av fi hide im
an beg fi man no kill imtief a bad bwaai gun! [Hes very bad, like a sore!
He was caught with a gun, and I had to hide him and beg the men not to kill
himstole a bad boys gun]. So why allow her boy to mix with him? Her
answer is a surprise: She could do no better. In any case, her son too was
already spoilt, from when they used to live in the West,6 though im not so
bad!
We confirmed her opinions about the boy by engaging him and the group,
but the main point here was her resignation to this corrupting influence.
There was nothing she could or wished to do about the situation. Only thir-
teen years old, and calling himself a rude yout, who no fear no bwaai, he
gave us a lecture. School was a waste of time. Shabba Ranks, Roun Head
and a host of other DJs were not as educated as we, yet did not have to walk
up and down the streets of the ghetto claiming to be researching about boys
and girls, all the while in danger of getting hurt even with our University
cerfitikit. Di school business, he declared, is a fraud. A man av fi learn
to live from people who go trough di rough and tough. Dat no teach inna
school! [Education is a fraud. One has to learn from those who go through
rough and tough how to survive. Thats not taught in school].
Not all mothers, however, are so resigned. Many try to fight fire with fire.

Wednesday, 4 May, 4 p.m.

I first stopped at Alberts moms to remind her of our appointment any

Sunday at 4 p.m., and then headed for Ramgoat Lane, just from gut feel-
226 / Barry Chevannes

ing. I was drawn towards a thwacking sound coming from a tenement yard,
every thwack accompanied by a wail. Five persons crowded the gate looking
in, one of them one of my informants. From her I learned that a mother was
murderin di bwaai because he use im mada money go buy drug! The boy,
she said, was fourteen years old, not attending school, and now taking co-
caine. Something hit me hard, like being shot, though I have never been.
Pressing against the gate, I listened to the murderin like the others, only
I felt sick where they were being entertained. A true! Lick out im klaat!7 Lick
out di drugs, one man commented, while the four women laughed. I stood
there for what seemed like at least ten minutes, when I felt compelled to
intervene. She had dashed into the house for hot water to carry out her threat
to burn him up, to which came shouts of Dont do it! and Laad, Gad!
from the women and, from the single man, Bun im mek im stap! I opened
the gate and went inside, my informant following apprehensively. Min she
bun yu up instead!
Lady, fi Gad sake, no do it! She was coming out of the kitchen with a
battered kettle.
Who di hell yu be? Yu business wid me an mi pikni? The people at the
gate laughed, with this new twist in the drama. As I told her I came from the
University to study how boys were raised in this community, she started to
cry.
A mi parents decide how demya jangkro ya turn out!8 She was now
weeping. Mi du mi best. No faada from im a six! The boys father was
raped and killed in prison by other inmates, so another convict told her, and
she had done her best since. But because the boy had to go hustle for them to
survive, he had got mixed up with bad company and now started on drugs.
She was about to whack him again when I noticed the automobile fan belt in
her hand, and noticed too that the boys hands had been tied. I pleaded with
her not to beat him. Wiping her eyes on the already soaked collar of her
blouse (she seemed to have been crying while she flogged him), she untied his
hands. He was bleeding around the neck and shoulders, and through the
mesh vest he wore could be seen marks all over his back. The drama over, the
small gathering left.
The boy confessed to using cocaine only once, but the little bit was enough
to knock him out. For ten minutes I pleaded with her not to employ beating
as the method to get him to desist, but to seek help instead. She knew no one
she could turn to, so I suggested one of the ministers of religion in the area.
By now, other tenants were beginning to arrive home from work. She
seemed ashamed as she noticed one lady coming through the gate shaking her
head in pity. Leading me inside, she showed me pictures of herself when she
was happy and living uptown, and took at least five minutes to tell me how
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 227

her parents had disowned her when she got pregnant with the boys sister at
age sixteen, and how when after four years they had forgiven her she got
pregnant again wid dis wotlis rech! A kuda kill im! [with this worthless
wretch. I could kill him!].
She was totally frustrated and it was obvious. She told me she would have
killed herself and him, had it not been for her upbringing as a Christian, a
Seventh-Day Adventist. The boy had been caught smoking ganja six times,
and now this cocaine. Although she knew flogging would not help him in his
position, she could do nothing else but lick im and lick im! He had taken
her weeks wage, leaving them penniless, bought the cocaine and then come
home like se im a go dead! When she realized that he was only knocked out
and not going to die, that was when she began to beat him.
Realizing she actually had no money, I gave her two hundred dollars. This
made her cry again. The boy too, who had been sobbing quietly, now began
to cry loudly. Pointing out to him that he was killing his mother, I got him to
pledge that he would go to see the pastor, who could direct him where to get
help.
I started to feel the pain inside me ease. At least I was allowed to help, and
the fear that she would burn me with the hot water was gone. The kettle was
already cooling on the floor. I felt I had to ask her about her daughter. Her
story was one I had been hearing since the start of the research: The girl was
all right. She had graduated, was living with her aunt, working as a secretary
and doing more CXCs. The boy, too, was bright, even brighter than the girl.
But si we im du wid fi im brightnistek out mi money go buy drugs, bout
dem tell him se it no strang! [But see what he has done with his brightness
steal my money and buy drugs, saying that they told him it was not strong!].
Encouraging her not to give up, and reminding her to take up the problem
the following day with the pastor, I left a hurt and frustrated mother and a
bruised boy.
Kailas method of dealing with the dangers of the street was to flog her
son, Troy, in the merciless and brutal way referred to as to murder. This
was the way it was described by the basic school principal at the Parent-
Teacher Association meeting in March, when he raised as his final point of
concern the way the children, especially boys, were punished. Half mur-
dered was his term. That he found cause to raise it was an indication that
this type of punishment started from an early age. His plea that parents beat
their boys less only elicited the quiet comment from a mother, Ongl lick
kyan help some a demya bwaai ya, an yu av fi staat from early! So Mr. Jakes
kyan stay de! [Only beating can help some of these boys, and you have to
start from early. So Mr. Jakes can say all he wants].
Usually this type of beating is carried out by fathers, the strongly held
228 / Barry Chevannes

belief being that a womans licks are light and therefore not effective. One
man in a bar conversation explained that fathers had to attend to how boys
were being raised, cause di yout dem inna di ghetto ya is like legobiis [stray
animals], and that he himself bus di bwaai backside if im mix up wid di
nasty bad bwaaidem inna di community [beat the boy if he gets mixed up
with the nasty boys in the community]. This was essentially the same reason
given by Cat and Denver, two other informants, who shared the opinion that
di mada kyaan control da paat de [the mother cannot control that part].
Cat was explaining in the presence of some members of the Lucky Crew that
when he gets home from work, he receives a list of all wrongs, and all who
fi get beatn get it. When Chris objected, arguing that the responsibility for
beating lay with whoever saw the problem, Denver agreed, yes, the mother
also flogged, but the sturdy beating was fathers responsibility. Obviously,
where fathers are absent, mothers have no choice but to punish in this male
way. This could explain why Andrea felt a simple flogging with a strap would
not have been effective on Keeshas street-oriented ways, and that she had to
punch and box (slap) her.
Along with this gender role division in the type of punishment meted out
to children, especially the boys, is an implicit belief that the more wayward
and intractable the behavior, the more severe the punishment required to
correct it. Its not that mothers do not have the responsibility to punish, but
rather that heavy-duty behavior requires heavy-duty punishment.
Believing in this method, parents pay little attention to assessing its effec-
tiveness. Kaila, it turned out, had murdered the boy many times before.
She later told us that he regularly used to fight with other boys, steal money
from the tenants, and have sex with girls all over. Her method then was to
talk to him, much to the frustration of her spouse, who, of course, could not
beat him since he was not his natural father, but who had warned that the boy
would drive her to her death one day or bite off her ears, because she was
always defending him when he complained. When they broke up over Troy,
she came to her senses, she told us, and stop lettin im ruin my life. That was
when she began to murder him. She burned him once; tied him in the house
for an entire day without food; tied him on an anthill until he had sores all
over; chopped him with a plate; cut him on his fingers with a knife. And still
Troy had not changed.
She would probably have killed him, she believed, had God not inter-
vened. The very day she murdered him with the fan belt, her brother ar-
rived from the country and took him back with him to St. Ann, to tend his
cows and fashion walking sticks for tourists. He was a very stern man, a
slave driver who used to overwork her and keep her from talking to boys
when she was growing up, like he was my father, but also kind, generous
and, unlike her, still a Christian. Kaila still believed that what Troy needed
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 229

was the firm hand of a man. This was what God in his mercy had provided
in the person of her brother, and in the opportunity of a remote parish.
In a society with the highest rate of violent crime in the Commonwealth
Caribbean (Harriott 1996: 1), roughly one for every 28,000 of the popula-
tion in 1996, there are those who see the kind of violence used by Kaila and
the approval of the crowd in this case, as well as in the street fight discussed
earlier, as part of the problem. Two recent studies, Gunst 1995 and Small
1995, following the earlier one by Terry Lacey (1977), describe the political
context of Jamaicas development of a subculture of criminal violence and its
export abroad, and in doing so depict a people with an extraordinary appe-
tite for aggression and force. The ruthlessness of the posses and yardies9 is
traced to the urban ghettoes of Jamaica, where political violence is a way of
life. Understandably, the Jamaica Teachers Association adopted a resolution
calling for the total outlawing of corporal punishment in the school system,
seeing it as contributing to enforcing attitudes that accept violent social be-
havior as normal. There are of course different orders of violence, ranging
from state-approved and -supported violence to communal actions and per-
sonal fights. Some even extend the concept beyond the physical.10 While
Joetown residents would have no difficulty with this, they do hold strongly to
the traditional notion that pain and the threat of pain are effective means of
socializing children. Many speak of their own childhood and the beneficial
role of flogging in instilling in them the right values.
Thus far, we have been presenting the street in the community of Joetown
as a kind of personification of certain values and behavior shunned by all
parents, male and female, who are concerned for their children. The street
they have little or no control over, the yard they do. But we have to avoid
leaving the reader with the impression that the peoples conceptualization of
the street is all negative. This is not so. The street harbors grave dangers, from
which they strive to shield their children, particularly the girl children, but it
also provides opportunities, to which they expose them, particularly the boy
children. And they do so from early on. It is part of the process of toughening
them to survive.
Survival is an important objective of the male socialization process. It
requires first of all an ability to defend oneself against being taken advantage
of, an ability to fight. Asked the social skills she values most highly in her two
sons, Ersi replies, Being able to survive. Dong ya yu av fi firs know ow to
survive, an av manaz an everyting else combine. Odene, her fifteen-year-old
son, is a very soft and gentle boy, so soft that if she talks to him in too harsh
a tone he cries. After passing the Grade 9 Achievement Test, he began attend-
ing high school, where the boys used to prey on him, stealing his books and
school equipment. One day Ersi discovered that this soft and gentle boy had
begun carrying a knife to school. She said nothing, did nothing.
230 / Barry Chevannes

Members of the Lucky Crew accused Cat of treating his daughter, his
firstborn, rough. Yu a turn di young lady inna a bwaai, Dave added. Cat
responded:
A likl girl over deso always a beat up my likl girl. Yu know we mi do? Mi
beat ar. Mi se, Listen. Yu mek sure di nex time shi touch yu, tomp ar inna ar
yai. Cause any ow yu come ome to mi, mi gwain beat yu, cause Im not goin
to be dere all di time! Learn to fight! [A little girl from across the way always
beat up my little girl. Do you know what I did? I beat her. I said: Listen.
Make sure next time she touches you, punch her in her eye. Anyhow you
complain to me, I am going to beat you, because I wont be here all the time.
Learn to fight!].
The others, including Junie, protested that Cat was trying to make a boy
out of his daughter, one of them whispering to another, so that Cat could not
hear, that Cat was behaving that way because he had no son. All agreed that
it was more necessary for a boy to learn to defend himself. He must learn to
survive.
A second concept encoded in the word survive is the ability to hustle, to
create a living out of nothing, to beg, even steal. Our six little gamblers learn
to survive, pushing Juusis sky juice cart. For them to be so employed, they
would have had to show initiative, to suggest to Juusi that they could help.
One informant reminisced with pride that he started working at twelve years
old.
To survive also entails being able to surmount the odds. Members of the
Lucky Crew confounded us with example after example of men who made it
out of the ghetto, in support of their argument that notwithstanding the edge
that the girls received in educational opportunities, very few progressed be-
yond the level of secretary.
Where job opportunities are concerned, girls are able to get jobs more
easily, sometimes possessing fewer qualifications than their male counter-
parts, often because of good looks, but also because they do not appear
threatening. The boys, however, learn that they will never get jobs by apply-
ing for them, that their only hope lies in contactsfriends, acquaintances,
relatives, who already have a place in the world of workor in giving up-
town addresses.
These are some of the things implied in the concept of survival. In essence
it means being able to meet the necessities of life in the face of great odds.
Surviving would have no meaning if there were no struggle. Valued at a high
premium, it evokes a sense of historical tradition.
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 231

Conclusion

Based on ethnographic data collected in one of three Caribbean countries,

this chapter highlights the significant role played by the wider community in
the socialization of children, especially the male. This role is elaborated in the
personification of the Street, as against the Yard. The street, meaning all
those uncontrolled public spaces outside the security and order of the yard
(except the school and presumably the church), is characteristically male
spacethe street corner, the bar, the race-horse betting shop, the video store,
the record shop. This dichotomy seems similar to the casa/calle distinction
that prevails in Latin America (Safa 1995), where the casa is the domain of
women and the calle the domain of men. According to Safa (1995: 48), the
distinction acts as a channel for the preservation of family honor and to
ensure the patriarchal dominance over women. She goes on to point out that
the Africans in the Hispanic Caribbean never shared this tradition, and that
at no time under slavery were African women dependent on men. This obser-
vation is undoubtedly true. It does not mean, however, that the distinction
was never observed. Indeed, the distinction prevailed under the division of
labor, in which women performed domestic chores like cooking and wash-
ing, regardless of the fact that they also worked outside the home, while the
men tended to work away from the home. African Caribbean patriarchy then
took ideological forms, which devalued certain domestic activities, making
others taboo for men to perform. The creation of these domains found men
recreating and bonding outside the house environment (Brana-Shute 1979)
and socializing boy children to reproduce both the behaviors and the ratio-
nale.
It follows from the street/yard distinction that parents have less control
over the socialization of their boy child than of their girl child. The tension
between Street and Yard is, however, only one aspect of the problem. Com-
plicating the male socialization process is the perceived need, particularly in
the poorer communities, to use the Street as a training ground in male sur-
vival skills. Moreover, it is a necessary part of male sexual initiation, a point
I am unable to present in this short chapter, but which is aptly captured by an
Afro-Guyanese rule: Tie yu heifer and loose yu bull.
To a great extent, then, if one is to interpret, the Caribbean male child is
expected to be somewhat self-directed, internalizing parental values of the
Yard, but selecting from the Street values of survival, without running afoul
of society. Quite a task.
232 / Barry Chevannes

Notes

This essay is excerpted from a larger manuscript on the socialization of the

Caribbean male, and was presented at the annual meeting of the Caribbean
Studies Association in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in May 1996, with funding
support from United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Research for the
larger work was carried out with Janet Brown, director of the Caribbean
Child Development Centre, with funding from UNICEF. The field sites were
six communities in Jamaica, Dominica and Guyana.
1. These deportees are young men deported from the United States and Canada
mainly for illegal entry or drug-related crimes. The word has now taken on connota-
tions of second-rate, especially when applied to used cars from Japan.
2. The batty rider is a very short and revealing pair of shorts worn by young
women. Batty is Jamaican for the buttocks or the anus.
3. Sky juice is a cup of shaved ice saturated with syrup, the same as snow cone in
other Caribbean islands.
4. All these are derogatory terms. Marky belly refers to the stretch marks on a
womans stomach, indicating loss of nubility and attractiveness. Bun-up Face refers
to disfigurement from acid. Cemetery is perhaps the worst of all: a woman whose
womb is a burial ground for aborted fetuses. Its worse than Whore, though that is
bad enough.
5. See Chevannes 1995 (10910) for a discussion of Jamaican ideas on age status.
6. West here refers to West Kingston, an area notorious for gang violence.
7. Klaat is a very common bad word. Here the meaning is Beat him hard!
8. Demya jangkro ya [this jangkro] refers to her son. The jangkro is a buzzard.
9. Jamaican gangs are known as posses in North America, and as yardies in the
United Kingdom.
10. See the references cited by Kaljee, Stanton, Ricardo and Whitehead (1995:
374).

Bibliography

Brana-Shute, Gary. On the Corner: Male Social Life in a Paramaribo Creole Neigh-
borhood. 1979. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1989.
Brodber, Erna. A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston. Working paper no. 9.
Institute of Social and Economic Research, UWI, Mona, 1975.
Chevannes, Barry. The Phallus and the Outcast: The Symbolism of the Dreadlocks
in Jamaica. In Rastafari and Other African- Caribbean Worldviews, edited by
Barry Chevannes, 97126. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Clarke, Edith. My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected
Communities in Jamaica. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1957.
Cumper, George. The Jamaican Family: Village and Estate. Social and Economic
Studies 7, no. 1 (1958): 76108.
Durant-Gonzalez, Victoria. Role and Status of Rural Jamaican Women: Higglering
and Mothering. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1976.
 The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males / 233

Gunst, Laurie. Born Fi Dead: A Journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld.
New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Harriott, Anthony. Controlling Violence in Jamaica: Developing a Community-
Based Response. Centre for Population, Community and Social Change, UWI,
Mona, 1996.
Kaljee, Linda M., Bonita Stanton, Izabel Ricardo and Tony L. Whitehead. Urban
African American Adolescents and Their Parents: Perceptions of Violence within
and against Their Communities. Human Organization 54, no. 4 (1995): 37382.
Kerr, Madeline. Personality and Conflict in Jamaica. 1952. London: Collins, 1963.
Lacey, Terry. Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 196070: Internal Security in a Devel-
oping Country. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977.
Mintz, Sidney W. Caribbean Transformations. 1974. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1989.
Safa, Helen. The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the
Caribbean. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.
Small, Geof. Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books, 1995.
Smith, Raymond T. The Negro Family in British Guiana: Family Structure and Social
Status in the Villages. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.
Wilson, Peter J. Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro
Societies of the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
234 / Rafael Ramrez

Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico

Rafael L. Ramrez

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the articulation of power and sexuality
in the development of a masculine identity in Puerto Rico from a construc-
tionist perspective. The constructionist approach adopts the theoretical posi-
tion that the categories we use for perceiving, evaluating, and explaining the
human condition and social reality are cultural constructions. These catego-
ries, as well as the typologies derived from them, which we use in our every-
day life, are no natural facts. They are part of our subjectivity and do not
exist independently. The artificiality of cultural institutions, in opposition to
nature, its construction, diversity, and relativity, is an old theme in anthropol-
ogy (Benedict 1934; Mead 1935). Contemporary social constructionism in
the analysis of sex, gender, and sexual orientation is characterized by the
systematic identification of social and cultural processes that are articulated
with our notions of sex and gender. The focus is to consider gender and
sexuality as cultural (symbolic) constructs (Ortner and Whitehead 1981:
1). The point of departure of the essay is a critical analysis of machismo, a
category with wide acceptance for explaining masculinity and masculine ide-
ologies.

Machismo

Several decades before the term machismo became popular and widely
used, Nemesio Canales (1922), a Puerto Rican essayist and journalist, attrib-
uted to nuestro machismo the persistence of male chauvinism, authori-
tarianism, and violence against women in our society. Although Canales is
seldom quoted, his brief description of some characteristics of the macho
endures in the extensive literature on this topic. We, Puerto Rican males, are
generally described as virility obsessed, aggressive, oppressive, insecure, nar-
cissistic, and highly sexed.
The discussion of machismo became popular in the social sciences in the
mid-fifties and the sixties. Initially, it was considered a specific characteristic
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 235

of Latin American males, whose strongest and crudest manifestations were

found among the peasants, the working classes, and the poor. The original
approach, ethnocentric and class biased, to machismo was modified when
the term was incorporated into feminist discourses and everyday parlance
(Stone 1974; Lancaster 1992). Although some authors (Abad, Ramos, and
Boyce 1974; de la Cancela 1981; Padilla and Ruiz 1973) point out what they
consider positive aspects of machismovalor, responsibility, perseverance
the term is mainly associated with negative attributes and pathological traits.
A review of the literature also shows that the term has been incorporated into
a psychological discourse with a strong emphasis on individual characteris-
tics. From this perspective machismo is considered an attitudinal complex, a
constellation of traits, or a syndrome.
The literature on machismo is highly repetitive, both in the definitions of
the phenomenon and in the description of the behavior associated with it.
With few exceptions, the literature consists mainly of variations on state-
ments made during the fifties by the Mexican psychologist Mara Elvira Ber-
mdez (1955) and by J. Mayone Stycos (1955), the North American sociolo-
gist known for his research on attitudes toward contraception and birth
control in Puerto Rico. Bermdez defines machismo as a typical case of
unconscious compensation against hidden feminine tendencies in the Mexi-
can male. The initial statements of Bermdez set the trend among psycholo-
gists to discuss machismo as an intrapsychic phenomenon (de la Cancela
1981) in which the so-called cult of virility or the obsession with virility is
considered the major characteristic (Meja-Ricart 1975; Stevens 1973).
The literature on machismo is mostly descriptive and superficial. Ma-
chismo is defined as a collection of attitudes and behaviors shared by males.
Some authors pay more attention to individual psychological characteristics,
highlighting such traits as narcissism, inferiority complex, aggressiveness,
promiscuity, irresponsibility, latent homosexuality, ambivalence toward
women, difficult relations with the latter, and sexual anxiety. Consequently,
they stress the pathological and destructive aspects of machismo. Other au-
thors adopt a sociocultural perspective in which social, economic, and his-
torical factors are considered to explain male superiority, the subordination
of women, and power conflicts between men. Although the negative and
destructive aspects of machismo are included in their analyses, these authors
also discuss valor, responsibility, and perseverance, which they identify as the
positive aspects of machismo.
As noted, most people who write about machismo assume a noncritical
position and keep repeating what has been said about it during the last forty
years. The exceptions that I know are: Jos Mara Rodrguez Mndez with an
interesting essay (1971) about male social types in Spain in different histori-
cal periods; Victor R. de la Cancela, who in his doctoral dissertation gives a
236 / Rafael Ramrez

highly critical evaluation of the literature and then proposes a dialectical

view in which the interactive, interconnected, and contradictory aspects of
machismo (1981: 77) are articulated with sociohistorical contexts; and
Roger Lancaster, for whom machismo is a means of structuring power be-
tween and among men (1992: 236).
I would argue that the reproduction of the terminology and traditional
descriptions of machismo, as well as its use as an analytical category, perpetu-
ates a distorted conceptualization of masculinity. Although the ethnocentric
and class bias that prevailed in the early writings has been somewhat modi-
fied with the popular use of the term to describe male behavior in general, the
reductionist approach persists. The reductionism consists in considering men
as homogeneous subjects. Such a view largely ignores the complexity of
masculine identity and its diverse manifestations. This reductionism has be-
come a truism, an undoubted or self-evident truth, among some social sci-
ence professionals and the general public bothto the point that, for some
people, to question the machismo construct is politically incorrect.
In sum, the reports or publications about the theme of machismo, both the
popular and the academic ones, often describe us (Latin American males) as
homogeneous beings in our social representations. The acceptable way of
being a man in Latin America, how the different sectors of our societies
conceive and experience manhood, manifests a diversity that it is not recog-
nized by the machismo construct. Masculine ideologies are embedded in so-
cial relations, they are not autonomous mental projections or psychic fanta-
sies writ large (Gilmore 1990: 224). This is not, of course, to deny the
powerful presence of colonels, patriarchs, and caudillos in our countries, but
to recognize that our literature, histories, and ethnographies also highlight
that subordination, oppression, and exploitation are, and have been, a fun-
damental part of the daily life of masses of men and women throughout the
region. Although power and sexuality are major components of our mascu-
line ideologies and identities, all men are not powerful machos. The margin-
alization of men from positions of power in both the public and domestic
scenes is also common. Thus the analysis of masculine ideologies presup-
poses a discussion of what we understand by power and how power and
masculine identities are articulated.

Masculinity and Power

In opposition to the deficient literature of machismo and the reproduction of

its clichs, studies on male sexuality, masculine ideologies, and the articula-
tion of sexuality and power provide better explanations about the meanings
of manhood and the construction of masculinity. The new scholarship on
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 237

gender issues, which started in the seventies, developed new approaches to

understand the complexity of gender construction (Gilmore 1990; Illich
1982; MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Ortner and Whitehead 1981), the
uses of sexuality (Dover 1978; Foucault 1990; Herdt 1981; Keuls 1985),
gender interactions (Reiter 1975; Sanday 1981), and the relationships be-
tween males (Brandes 1981; Godelier 1986; Herdt 1982; Herzfeld 1985).
Social constructionism acknowledges that all societies establish gender
differentiations. The masculine and the feminine domains are defined by
specific attributes, tasks, and symbols. The subjects are recognized as males
or females, and are evaluated according to their compliance with gender
expectancies. The culture provides the codes to develop gender identity. The
meanings of masculinity and femininity do not constitute an objective fact or
a reality independent of the subject. What it means to be a man, or a woman,
is a cultural construction. Although gender constructions are embedded in
biological differences, they are not biologically determined. Gender con-
structions are cultural constructs. They constitute a design sustained by a
system of symbols, meanings, ascriptions, and expectancies. Masculine ide-
ologies are discursive constructions, which are dominant in societies struc-
tured on asymmetrical gender and power relations. These relations are asym-
metrical because tasks and attributes assigned to each genderprestige or
power, for exampleare not comparable, or are not assigned in the same
proportion. Asymmetrical relations are established when the masculine do-
main is privileged with the consequent subordination and devaluation of the
feminine domain. The origins, the manifestations, and the reproduction of
this sex-gender system, designed by males and sustained by male dominance,
is a major concern of feminists and other people in the human sciences.
However, the people engaged in what is generally known as gender studies
are a heterogeneous group who approach gender issues with a diversity of
perspectives, objectives, and theoretical frameworks. Among us there are
Marxists, postmodernists, constructionists, essentialists, semioticists, femi-
nists of various schools, and adherents of several strains of gay and lesbian
thought. In our heterogeneity we share the idea that power is the specific and
constitutive element of masculinity identity. As stated by Kaufman and
Pineda (1991: 13), The desire for power and control are the fundamental
part of our notion of masculinity, and also the intrinsic essence of the project
of becoming a man. Mens power is organized in an androcentric sex-gen-
der system composed of a system of binary oppositions.

MALE FEMALE
MAN WOMAN
MASCULINE FEMININE
HETEROSEXUAL HOMOSEXUAL
238 / Rafael Ramrez

This conventional and dominant power system, also known as patriarchy,

concedes privilege to masculinity and heterosexuality with the consequent
devaluation and subordination of homoerotism and everything considered
feminine. As well stated by Gayle Rubin (1975: 180), the repression of homo-
erotism in human sexuality and the concomitant oppression of those who
engage in homoerotism is part of the same system whose structure also op-
presses women. In patriarchy there is no place for different options. Alterna-
tive gender roles are not recognized, and the system forces us to define our
gender and sexuality in terms of the categories in opposition. The diverse
manifestations of gender and sexuality may be rejected or condemned, but
they cannot be ignored. As a consequence, hermaphroditism, androgyny,
homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexuality are considered deviations.
Deviants are incorporated into the perverse implantation, in Michel
Foucaults famous phrase. This androcentric sex-gender system, which is
dominant in many contemporary societies, is challenged by feminist move-
ments, feminist men, gay and lesbian groups, and by all people who believe
in establishing more egalitarian relationships between human beings. How-
ever, the consensus in the criticism and rejection of this system does not
necessarily mean that we are talking about the same thing when we say that
masculinity is a social and gender construction based on power.
Power is generally considered to be the capacity to dominate, repress,
control, and subordinate the acts and desires of others. From this perspective,
power demands obedience and presupposes the capacity to penalize those
who resist or do not obey the commands of those who have and enforce
power. According to this conceptualization, the power of some people is
based on the powerlessness of other people. A great many of these
conceptualizations about power were formulated in the context of the state,
starting from the classic definition of Max Weber: In general, we under-
stand by power the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their
own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are
participating in the action. (1958: 180). This vision of power can lead some
people to conclude that in patriarchal societies all men are powerful and all
women are equally subordinateda rather naive conclusion, since it does
not allow us to understand the complexities of the games and forces of power
that are expressed in social encounters between individuals of different gen-
ders and of the same gender. Therefore it is necessary to explain what we
mean by power when discussing its significance in the construction of mascu-
line identities. In an excellent discussion of the concept of power, Eric Wolf
(1990: 586) distinguishes four types:
One is power as the attribute of the person, as potency or capability.
. . . Speaking of power in this sense draws attention to the endowment
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 239

of persons in the play of power, but tells us little about the form and
direction of that play. The second kind of power can be understood as
the ability of an ego to impose its will on an alter, in social action, in
interpersonal relations. This draws attention to the sequences of inter-
actions and transactions among people, but it does not address the
nature of the arena in which the interactions go forward. That comes
into view more sharply when we focus on power in the third mode, as
power that controls the settings in which people may show forth their
potentialities and interact with others. . . . This definition calls attention
to the instrumentalities of power and is useful for understanding how
operating units circumscribe the actions of others within determi-
nate settings. I call this third kind of power tactical or organizational
power.
But there is still a fourth mode of power, power that not only operates
within settings or domains but that also organizes and orchestrates the
settings themselves, and that specifies the distribution and direction of
energy flows. I think that this is the kind of power that Marx addressed
in speaking about the power of capital to harness and allocate labor
power, and it forms the background of Michel Foucaults notion of
power as the ability to structure the possible field of action of others.

The concept of power I have adopted to examine gender relations and the
construction of masculinity comes from Foucault (1990), and we can call it
structural power. Foucault argues that power is not the privilege of a domi-
nant group which acts upon those who are dominated. For him, power is not
unitary, nor exclusive to an individual or group. On the contrary, Foucault
states that power is immanent, meaning that it emerges from human relations
structured on inequalities. For him, power relations are the product of the
divisions, inequalities and imbalances in social relations. He also points
out that power is omnipresentit is exerted from different positions in
social relations. The latter means that power is everywhere and is constantly
reproduced in our relationships. According to him, dominated or subordi-
nated human beings are active entities in the production and reproduction of
power relations. Power, for Foucault, comes from below. Lastly, this au-
thor says that where there is power there is also resistance, the opposition
emerges from the same relationships and it is expressed in multiple ways. In
essence, for Foucault, power contains four principal elements: (1) the multi-
plicity of relationships based on force; (2) the games that transform, rein-
force, or alter those relationships; (3) the reinforcements that they find in
each other; and (4) the strategies that are used for making them effective
(1990: 9496). In sum, structural power consists of four primary elements:
relations of force, processes, reinforcements, and strategies. When this
240 / Rafael Ramrez

conceptualization of power is applied to the study of masculinity in Puerto

Rico, several questions arise: What are the forces underlying the power of
Puerto Rican men? How are our power games played? Which strategies do
we use in order to make power forces effective? And lastly, how do we com-
pete?

Nosotros los boricuas

In Puerto Rico, as in other societies where masculine ideology is dominant, to

be a real man signifies the possession, the command, and the constant dem-
onstration of the attributes of masculinity, according to the symbols and
social idiom of the prevalent sex-gender system. To be a Puerto Rican male,
un macho completo, also means: to have all the biological traits that are
specific to males; to act according to the demeanor, symbols, and skills asso-
ciated with masculinity; and to be considered a heterosexual, a lover of
women. To be a man also signifies a continuous demonstration and ratifica-
tion of a masculinity that is always threatened by the other because social
encounters between Puerto Rican males are articulated with power, compe-
tition, and potential conflict. Although most of us have the capacity to enter
social encounters with other men based on trust, comradeship, cooperation,
loyalty, and affectivity, they occur within the context of power, and to de-
velop them we have to transcend the power games of everyday life (Ramrez
1993).
Early in our childhood we learn to demand respect. Ser hombre de respeto
or respetar y ser respetado is a basic requirement of our masculinity. Respeto
is not exclusive to males; women also offer and demand respect. For Puerto
Rican men, however, the requirement is expressed with certain specifications.
Since social encounters among men are mediated by power, under certain
circumstances power and respect become synonyms. Respect is understood
as the proper demeanor in social encounters, both in how we present our-
selves to others and how we respond to their presentations. There is a pre-
scribed order and recognition of the uniqueness of the other. In those encoun-
ters each man attributes value to himself and acknowledges the value of the
other. That value is intrinsic to the subjects immersed in a system structured
on inequality. The power structure and the social hierarchy is acknowledged,
but within that structure the participants in the social encounters stress the
dignity of each subject and demand that this dignity be acknowledged by
everyone. A social encounter based on respect does not necessarily mean
friendship or trust, although respect is not excluded in interactions between
friends or in relationships based on trust. The respect relationship is sui
generis, and it can be found in personal encounters between men situated on
the extremes of the social hierarchy. It is a relationship inherited from the
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 241

agrarian society. Respect is a demand for equal treatment for the dispossessed
and subordinated in personal and face-to-face encounters with the rich and
the powerful. The importance of respect in social encounters in Puerto Rican
society has not disappeared with modernization and industrialization. In a
more recent study Pic says: In Caimito, as in other parts of Puerto Rico,
children learn about respect very early in their lives (1989: 140). Una falta
de respeto, lack of respect, is still a grave offense in our society and one of the
causes of conflict among our men.
We also learn early in our lives to respond to physical and verbal aggres-
sion and devaluation, to defend ourselves, to demonstrate invulnerability,
self-sufficiency, courage, and control. The requirements of masculinity are
many; we find variations in those requirements according to social class,
religious affiliation, age groups, and physical and mental condition, as well
as within the family and in reference groups such as the workplace, educa-
tional institutions, neighborhoods, and peer groups. Within the context of
such variations we share a gender construction and a male subjectivity in
which sexuality and power constitute major elements of our discourses.
These discourses, although specific, are not unique to us; we also find them
in other societies.
In Puerto Rico, as in other androcentric societies, sexuality is a major
component of male ideology. The macho is expected to be proud of his sexu-
ality, to display it, and above all to practice it. The pleasures of sexuality are
an inherent element of our subjectivity. With due respect to incest prohibi-
tions (sometimes violated) and the treatment prescribed for family members,
all women, especially the young and attractive, are considered sexual objects
to be enjoyed, seduced, and penetrated. A real man pleases and satisfies his
women while he chases, punishes, repudiates, or denigrates those who do not
respond to his advances. Some turn to physical and verbal aggression. Sexual
harassment and violence are part of this orientation to conquer and seduce
women in a complex articulation of sexuality, power, and pleasure. However,
a man will not try to seduce all women, only those he considers attractive and
available. Wealth, power, class, and skin color intervene, and a man will not
approach a woman who is considered his superior in the social and color
hierarchy unless she sends him obvious signs of her availability for a sexual
encounter.
Male sexuality among us is also penetration oriented; orgasm and ejacu-
lation are expected in a complete sexual relation. The physiology and
sexuality of penetration are also articulated with power and pleasure. To
penetrate a woman, or a man, physically or symbolically, is a pleasant expe-
rience, but its most significant aspect is the articulation of penetration and
power. Penetration can be oral, anal, or vaginal, although the latter seems to
be preferred by our males. Oral penetration is generally part of the prelimi-
242 / Rafael Ramrez

nary sexual games to increase excitement, but it does not provide total satis-
faction. Masturbation, although common, is considered a substitute activity
for real sexual satisfaction when penetration is not possible.
Our masculine ideology is phallocentric, a characteristic we share with the
rest of Latin America and the Mediterranean area. Brandes says that in
Andalusia, the locus of power and will, of emotions and strength, lies within
the male genitals. Men speak as if they are impelled to act according to
opinions and desires that originate in their testicles or penis (1981: 23031).
Pitt-Rivers (1966, 1977) reported the same for the Mediterranean area. In
Sicily, according to Blok, a real man is a man with large testicles (1981:
43233). Campbell (1966: 1) made a similar statement for the Saraktasani of
Greece. For Brazil, Parker says: This emphasis on potency or creativity that
is so clear in the symbolic associations of porra can be tied, ultimately, to the
role played, not simply by the penis, but by the entire genital region, the
virilha (groin) as the locus of masculine strength and will (1991: 38).
Phallicism is an ancient cultural code (Thorn 1990). According to Van-
ggaard (1972), stone phalluses are very old in Greece, and phallic cults were
prominent in the archaic and classical periods of Greek civilization. They
also flourished in the Roman Empire and in northern Europe. In her excellent
analysis of sexual politics in ancient Athens, Keuls discusses the importance
of phallic cults in the power system she calls phallicism, a combination of
male supremacy and the cult of power and violence (1985: 13). Although
Christianity eradicated the phallic cults of antiquity (Vanggaard 1972), phal-
lic symbolism is still a prominent feature of the masculine mentality. In our
America we find it in our discourses, as exemplified by the significance the
Mexicans assign to being the chingn or the chingado, in the distinction we
make in Puerto Rico between clavar and ser clavado, and the construction
placed by North Americans on fuckers and fuckees.
In Puerto Rico the genitals are prominent in our discourses, and they are
an important component of masculine identity. The penis and the testicles are
power symbols and are highly valued, while female genitals and the anus,
objects of pleasure, are devaluated. The genitals become the locus of male
power. Our males display their genitals by fondling them in public, although
class and position in the social hierarchy influence this act. It is more com-
mon among the lower classes, because men with less power and control over
their lives tend to emphasize more the power that emerges from their genitals.
Penis size is a metaphor of power, and also a source of great anxiety for most
Puerto Rican males, especially for those who consider themselves underen-
dowed. Early in our childhood we learn to compete with other children over
the size of our penises, a competition that is continued into adulthood. While
large or small is relative and depends on who is competing, there are some
standards, and men with penises below what is considered an acceptable
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 243

minimum are categorized as underendowed. Men with large penises feel very
satisfied, and they brag about it. They also feel powerful. The discourse
about the penis is part of the system of competition between males. A man
also has cojones, balls. A male without cojones is a pendejo, an individual
who is at the mercy of others, who has no power, and who is not considered
an equal. For a Puerto Rican, pasarse por los cojones is the supreme demon-
stration of male power. All of us share this discourse, a discourse that is
prominent in conflict situations and when our masculinity is threatened. It is
a male discourse addressed mainly to other men, although sometimes it is
addressed to women. The genitals, sexuality, and power are constantly ar-
ticulated in our everyday discourses.
Competitiveness among our men can be expressed by the display of the
required attributes of masculinity and the demonstration that one has more
than the other. In contrast, it can also be expressed using devaluation games
against the other, to demonstrate that the competitor is less macho. This is
achieved by defamation mechanisms such as gossip or joking. Gossip is real
or false information disclosed with the purpose of hurting the reputation of
the other. When gossip is used, the persons referred to are not present, and
they might not be aware of the information about them that is circulating. In
joking, there are also references to people who are not present, but usually
the latter have a personal relationship with one or several participants in the
joking relationship. In joking relationships we also find the personal con-
frontation of the participants in a complex ceremonial idiom. A joking rela-
tionship requires that the participants share a relationship based on
confianza, trust. A joking relationship between strangers is never established.
It occurs in scenarios where men congregate in leisure time or even at work-
places during breaks or when the situation allows it. When the participants
occupy symmetrical positions in the Puerto Rican color-class system, anyone
can initiate the joking. In asymmetrical relationships the individual of higher
hierarchy initiates it. A clear distinction between relajo as a game and relajo
as competition is acknowledged by the participants. In the first case relajo is
a game. In the second case it is a direct encounter and confrontation in which
all the participants are engaged in a serious devaluation ritual, as described
by Lauria in his seminal paper:

The mutual fooling around, described as se relajaban uno al otro

(kidding each other) can occur as a sustained interchange, remaining at
the level of a simple game whose vocabulary is part of the ritual of
defamation and humiliation, but no one takes it seriously. At other
times, the participants may take it very seriously, yet maintain the fa-
cade of the friendly joke. For analytical purposes, two categories may
be distinguished: a simple joking game and the much more serious,
244 / Rafael Ramrez

and consequently infrequent joking contest. In the second case, the

mutual relajo becomes a joking contest, a full-blown contest of defama-
tion, a ritual of degradation whose players are aggressively engaged in
scoring points against each other, in seeing how far they can go and still
retain the superficial consensus of amiability. (1964: 61)

Each participant receives and offers threats to the others without losing his
composure, each one evaluating how much the other can stand, until the
confrontation ends. These devaluation rituals can escalate to open confron-
tation and violent encounters if the participants do not command the skills to
sustain the devaluation ritual. In these confrontations, references made to the
participants may touch on personal traits, hygiene practices, political beliefs,
the fulfillment of responsibilities, and sexuality. This type of relajo makes
frequent references to the homosexuality of the participants in the encoun-
ter. Reference to the homosexuality of another man has the effect of reducing
his masculinity and devaluating him by placing him in the arena of the non-
macho or less macho. The joking relationships between Puerto Rican males,
although common, are also expressed along class lines. They are cruder
among the lower and less educated classes, and more restrained among the
upper classes and the intelligentsia.
The argument that most Puerto Ricans males share a subjectivity in the
construction of their masculinities, and that as a consequence they find com-
mon parameters to evaluate masculine behavior, does not necessarily mean
that class differences and class power do not intervene in the representations
of masculinity. Although as a group, in contrast to women and children, men
are considered powerful and privileged, at the individual level we find a
differential access to power (Kimmel 1994). The differential access to power
and prestige is embedded in the dominant color-class system. The require-
ments of masculinity established by the dominant ideology give emphasis to
prestige, social recognition, respectability, power, control, and above all that
the man be a provider or the principal provider for his family. With the
exception of a privileged majority, the middle classes, and the most stable and
highly paid sectors of the working class, Puerto Rican men often cannot
fulfill the requirement of providing for the household or for children living
outside the household. There are three main reasons why many men cannot
be providers. Wilson (1990) points to the existence of an underclass charac-
terized by unemployment, underemployment, low wages, exclusion from the
work world, poverty, poor education, lack of skills and resources, alcohol-
ism, and substance abuse among men of productive age. The second reason
is that for decades Puerto Rican women have been incorporated into the
labor force, and it has been possible for some of them to become sole provid-
ers. The third reason is the intervention of the state in the support of women
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 245

and children with welfare and several types of economic assistance and sub-
sidies, which make women less dependent on their husbands or lovers for the
economic survival of the household. The requirement of being a provider as
a constituent element of masculinity depends on the location each man occu-
pies in the social hierarchy in Puerto Rico. At lower levels a masculine iden-
tity is retained by men who do not reproduce the work ethic of mainstream
society. For them, sexuality becomes a crucial element in the construction of
their masculinities. There is some evidence that among young men from the
underclass and lower echelons of the working classes, a masculine identity
centered on promiscuity, violence, and substance abuse is being developed,
although it is not exclusive to them. The same elements can be identified in
the construction of masculinity of young men from upper and middle strata,
if on a minor scale and more restrained. How commonplace the equation is
between violence, promiscuity, and substance abuse among Puerto Rican
men is an empirical question than can only be answered with more research
on masculine identity in our society. An example of this articulation between
masculine identity, class, and sexuality is stated by one of the informants of
Bourgois (1995: 291) in an ethnography of street culture in New York City:
I mean we dont have no money so we make up for it with women. I
mean if you going to come into a hundred thousand dollars, you going
to make it. Your friends be envying you. Now, if you dont got nothing,
but you going to have five women, you going to be self-satisfied. Its just
a thing we do.
But if you have money, you dont have to be defined through women.
Or, if youre a millionaire, maybe you just do it more discreet.
In opposition to the real menthose who possess, display, and constantly
validate all the attributes of manhoodour cultural construction of mascu-
linity also recognizes the existence of subordinated masculinities. This par-
ticular type of subordination is not totally related to the position each indi-
vidual occupies in the social hierarchy. Although wealth, social position,
color, prestige, and power are recognized as significant traits to establish
social differentiation among men in a society structured on inequality, real
men are also bound by the respeto system. What I mean is that, indepen-
dently of the position he occupies in the class structure, a man expects to be
respected according to his demeanor and proper observance of the require-
ments of masculinity. By contrast, subordinated males are devaluated, on the
margins of masculinity, and outside the system of power and respect shared
by nonsubordinated males. In Puerto Rico, subordinated men are recognized
by all the participants in social encounters, and they are treated according to
the different categories established by our social idiom, such as mongo, loco,
bobo, borrachn, cabrn, and maricn. The categories of mongo and mari-
246 / Rafael Ramrez

cn offer the best examples of the articulation of sexuality and power in the
Puerto Rican androcentric sex-gender system.
The mongo is a man without power, a man who is not seen as an equal by
other men. He is considered weak, fearful, unfit to defend his ideas or pos-
tures on any issue, and incapable of making decisions. He is regarded as
mongo because he does not act according to proper masculine behavior, such
as being brave or taking risks. His speech, his body language, and all his
demeanor send a message of weakness. He gives the impression of not having
any control over his body and his pose. He does not stand upright. When he
is walking, sitting, or standing, the mongo slants his head and drops his
shoulders. When he speaks, he does it very slowly, searching carefully for
words and occasionally stuttering. The category of mongo is so articulated in
our mentalities with lack of power that we use it to describe any situation in
which we are unable to act for lack of strength. For example, a monga is a
type of debilitating influenza. Estar esmongao means to be very tired and
weak. A flaccid penis est mongo. In sum, for us monguera is a general
condition of weakness, lack of action, and absence of power. A man who is
classified as mongo is subordinated to other men because he does not behave
like a real man. He is passive in a society where men have to be active.
In general, a maricn is a man who assumes a passive role in anal inter-
course with other men. In a society where the dominant sex-gender system
establishes that to give (dar, meter) is active and masculine, the maricn is a
man who receives (le dan, coge). Anal penetration is considered an unmascu-
line activity and a form of subordination and devaluation. Penetration is
stigmatized, and the threat of anal penetration, symbolic or real, is a signifi-
cant component of male discourses in Puerto Rican society.
Attitudes toward homosexuality in Puerto Rico are diverse. It is consid-
ered either a sin, a disease, a deviation, or a sexual orientation, according to
the ideology of each person, social group, or institution. We cannot reach
definite conclusions about the degree of acceptance or intolerance to homo-
sexuality, but the prevailing social climate tends toward its stigmatization,
and existing legislation criminalizes sexual relations between people of the
same sex. However, homoerotism is an expression of sexuality in our society.
Sexual encounters between men are part of our everyday life in their articu-
lation with pleasure, apprehension, denial, and power. The acknowledge-
ment of homoerotism is established in the binary opposition between macho
and maricn. The latter is the complete denial of masculinity. To call the
other a maricn is a major insult to a Puerto Rican male. The term is so
offensive that when a gay man wants to humiliate and devaluate another gay
man, he calls him maricn or maricona. The most unfortunate, despised, and
devaluated Puerto Rican man considers himself superior to a maricn. A
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 247

mariconera is a devaluated trait or act. Successively around the categories of

maricn, mariconada, and mariconera as nonmasculine, subordinated, and
devaluated we construct a complex articulation of masculinity and power as
the parameters to evaluate and respect other men.
Although our dominant masculine ideology establishes that a maricn is a
subordinated male, and thus the public or private accusation of homosexual-
ity is used as a devaluation threat, the relationship between men and mari-
cones is more complex than the relationship between strong men and mon-
gos. While it is uncommon for mongos to assume or be accepted in positions
of power and leadership in our society, homosexuals do achieve such posi-
tions. Color, class, and the position occupied in the social hierarchy are also
intervening variables in encounters between machos and maricones. Gay
men are found throughout the Puerto Rican social strata, and the manifesta-
tions or expressions of homosexuality are quite varied. Although coming out
in public as a gay man will jeopardize the possibility of reaching positions of
power, especially in the highly competitive and vicious milieu of electoral
politics, a discreet gay person with wealth, education, marketable skills, and/
or proper connections is not necessarily isolated from positions of power in
the different scenarios of our social structure. Assuming a gay identity does
not necessarily mean resistance to, or rejection of, the power-game plays
dictated by the dominant masculine ideology. This reality raises some inter-
esting questions about the subordination of gay people and the reproduction
of male ideology in the gay community which can only be answered by fur-
ther research on the complex articulation between masculinity, power, and
homoerotism.

Conclusions

The power and the pleasures of masculinity elude many men. There are more
losers than winners in the pursuit of being a real man. However, mens atti-
tudes toward power are contradictory. On the one hand, most Puerto Rican
males do not consider themselves powerful, but they must act as if they were,
especially in personal encounters with other men. Even the most successful
end as losers when they are old and sick and unable to display the lost sym-
bols of masculinity. To live like a man, the constant reproduction of male
discourses, the fierce competition for acceptance as a macho, the persistent
threat of devaluation to the sphere of the nonmacho, is very painful. Los
machos no lloranreal men do not crybut pain is a hidden component of
our discourses.
248 / Rafael Ramrez

References

Abad, V., J. Ramos, and E. Boyce. A Model for Delivery of Mental Health Services
to Spanish Speaking Minorities. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 44
(1974): 58495.
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Bermdez, Mara Elvira. La vida familiar del mexicano. Mexico City: Antigua
Librera Robredo, 1955.
Blok, Anton. Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour.
Man 16 (1981): 42740.
Bourgois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995.
Brandes, Stanley H. Like Wounded Stags: Male Sexual Ideology in an Andalusian
Town. In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality,
edited by Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, 21639. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981.
Buitrago Ortiz, Carlos. Esperanza: An Ethnographic Study of a Peasant Community
in Puerto Rico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973.
Campbell, J. K. Honour and the Devil. In Honor and Shame: The Values of Medi-
terranean Society, edited by J. G. Peristiany, 13970. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1966.
Canales, N. R. Nuestro machismo. La Semana, 22 July 1922.
Carrier, Joseph M. Mexican Male Bisexuality. Journal of Homosexuality 11, nos.
12 (1985): 7585.
de la Cancela, V. L. Towards a Critical Psychological Analysis of Machismo: Puerto
Ricans and Mental Health. Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1981.
Dover, K. J. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1, An
Introduction. New York: Vintage Random, 1990.
Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Godelier, Maurice. The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power Among
the New Guinea Baruya. Translated by Rupert Swyer. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Herdt, Gilbert H. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.
, ed. Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982.
Herzfeld, Michael. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Moun-
tain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Illich, Ivn. Gender. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
Kaufman, Michael, and Magaly Pineda. La paradoja del poder. Santo Domingo:
Centro de Investigacin para la Accin Feminista (CIPAF), 1991.
Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece. New York:
Harper & Row, 1985.
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 249

Kimmel, Michael S. Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the

Construction of Gender Identity. In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry
Brod and Michael Kaufman, 11941. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications,
1994.
Lancaster, Roger N. Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in
Nicaragua. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
Lauria, Anthony, Jr. Respeto, Relajo, and Interpersonal Relations in Puerto
Rico. Anthropological Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1964): 5367.
MacCormack, Carol P., and Marilyn Strathern, eds. Nature, Culture, and Gender.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York:
Morrow, 1935.
Meja-Ricart, Tirso. Observaciones sobre el machismo en la Amrica Latina.
Revista de Ciencias Sociales 19, no. 3 (1975): 35364.
Ortner, Sherry B., and Harriet Whitehead, eds. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Con-
struction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Padilla, Amado M., and Rene A. Ruiz. Latino Mental Health: A Review of Literature.
Rockville, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1973.
Parker, Richard G. Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary
Brazil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Pic, Fernando. Vivir en Caimito. Ro Piedras: Huracn, 1989.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian. Honour and Social Status. In Honor and Shame: The Values of
Mediterranean Society, edited by J. G. Peristiany. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966.
. The Fate of Shechem: or, The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of
the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Ramrez, Rafael L. Dime capitn: Reflexiones sobre la masculinidad. Ro Piedras:
Huracn, 1993.
Reiter, Rayna R., ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Re-
view Press, 1975.
Rodrguez Mndez, Jos Mara. Ensayo sobre el machismo espaol. Barcelona:
Pennsula, 1971.
Rubin, Gayle. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex. In
Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157210. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Social
Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l981.
Stevens, E. P. The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America. In Female and Male
in Latin America: Essays, edited by Ann Pescatello, 89101. Pittsburgh: Pitts-
burgh University Press, 1973.
Stone, I. F. Machismo in Washington. In Men and Masculinity, edited by Joseph H.
Pleck and Jack Sawyer, 13033. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Stycos, J. Mayone. Family and Fertility in Puerto Rico: A Study of the Lower Income
Group. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.
250 / Rafael Ramrez

Thorn, Mark. Taboo No More: The Phallus in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy. New York:
Shapolsky, 1990.
Vanggard, Thorkill. Phalls: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World. New York:
International Universities Press, 1972.
Weber, Max. Class, Status, Party. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans-
lated and edited by H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 18095. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958.
Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantages: The Inner City, the Underclass, and
Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Wolf, Eric R. Facing PowerOld Insights, New Questions. American Anthropolo-
gist 92, no. 3 (1990): 58696.
 Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico / 251

Queering Cuba
Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados

Conrad James

No homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter for men.

Samuel Feijo

Cuba en s, para m y siento mucho placer en decirlo, es un pas maricn [As far as I am
concerned, and I am quite happy to say this, Cuba is in essence a queer country].
Manuel Granados

While many texts by black Cuban writers construct Cuban masculinity as

fundamentally oppressive to women, very few concentrate on the way the
societys gender codes often victimize men. In this respect the work of
Manuel Granados (19301998) is a notable exception. Granadoss oeuvre
consists of several collections of short stories and three novels including
Adire y el tiempo roto (Adire and broken time), which won first honorable
mention in the prestigious Casa de las Amricas competition in 1967.
Through a variety of narrative strategies, his fiction contests the invariable
conflation of Cuban national identity with an unproblematic heterosexual
masculine identity and thereby creates a space for alternative masculinities
within the discourse of the revolution. Very often this involves his explora-
tion of the psychological traumas that men face as a result of their incapacity
or unwillingness to observe the social and sexual roles prescribed for them.
The discussion highlights two distinct phases in Granadoss literary ca-
reer: his writing produced within Cuba, and his writing produced in exile in
Paris. Thus I explore, among other issues, Granadoss treatment of mens
experiences of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality by concentrating
on two stories published in Cuba, El largo viaje (The long journey) from
his 1970 collection El viento en la casa-sol (Wind in the sun-house) and
Incompatibilidad de caracteres (Incompatible personalities) from the
1988 Pas de coral (Coral country). A discussion of his story Los demonios
252 / Conrad James

cantan bonito (Devils sing sweetly), written in France, brings into focus the
situation of the black homosexual whose flouting of the sexual laws of the
community results in his ostracism and subsequent expulsion from the body
politic.1

Ideal Cuban Masculinity and the Challenge of Homosexuality

The Cuban economic crisis of the 1990s was accompanied by a renewed

interest in the rewriting of the revolution, along racial and sexual lines,
that began in the 1980s. The tremendous success of one such text, Toms
Gutirrez Aleas 1993 film Fresa y chocolate, had among its effects the revi-
talization of debates on questions of Cuban machismo and homosexuality
both in Cuba and abroad. Based on Senel Pazs short story El lobo, el
bosque y el hombre nuevo (1991), the film uses the relationship between a
young revolutionary and an older homosexual as the structural device to
stage some of the tensions and anxieties concerning homosexuality that are
characteristic of postrevolutionary Cuban society.2 Quite a reductive repre-
sentation of homosexuality in Cuba, the film ends up perpetuating rather
than disavowing many societal attitudes of homophobia. From an initial
position of suspicion and unease, the sexually innocent revolutionary,
David, grows to accept and appreciate Diego despite the latters homosexu-
ality. The film is careful to emphasize that Davids masculinity is in no way
tarnished by his close relationship with Diego, and this is underlined by the
decided avoidance of physical contact between the two men until the end of
the film when they say farewell with a chaste embrace.
Some of the more scathing reviews of the film tended to construct a neces-
sary opposition between the Cuban Revolution and homosexuality. Social
antagonism towards homosexuals is therefore explained as purely a function
of Marxist ideology.3 Much has been said about the relative homophobia of
pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba, and I do not aim to reopen this discussion
here.4 However, such an argument seems to me to be as culpable of denying
the complexity of the homosexual question in Cuba as Aleas Fresa y choco-
late.
It is indisputable that Marxist ideology, especially as it relates to work and
productivity, played a significant role in informing the prejudicial attitudes
towards homosexuals during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Ho-
mosexuality, according to this ideology, was a symptom of bourgeois deca-
dence and thus was antithetical to the ideals of a society that was seeking to
eradicate exploitation and promote the personal dignity of all.5 The homo-
sexual, therefore, could not represent the revolution, and this is candidly
expressed by the Cuban poet and musicologist Samuel Feijo: No homo-
sexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter for men; of fists and not
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 253

of feathers; of courage, not trembling; of certainty, not intrigue; of creative

valor and not of sweet surprises (1965: 5). It was precisely this logic that
informed the incarceration of homosexuals in the infamous Military Units to
Aid Production (UMAP) in the early years of the revolution.
But this ideology is only partially responsible for the antipathy towards
homosexuality that exists in contemporary Cuban culture. Much of the offi-
cial discourse of the revolution is underpinned by moral rather than material
considerations. Accordingly, Che Guevaras famous conceptual ideal of the
new socialist man emphasized the need to be motivated by moral values
directed towards creating a better life for all people (Leiner 1994: 10). The
official rejection of homosexuality is made on similar moral grounds. Thus in
one of Fidel Castros early statements on the issue, he expresses skepticism as
to whether the homosexual could embody the requirements of conduct
that would enable him to be considered a true revolutionary.6 In fact, ho-
mophobia in Cuba, as in the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean, is more a func-
tion of the legacy of Judeo-Christian ideology and its concomitant anxiety to
perpetuate a patriarchal domination to which homosexuality proves a com-
plicating factor.7 To this extent I concur with Lois Smiths view concerning
the fundamental similarity of positions on questions of sexuality between the
revolution and the Church. In its glorification of monogamous heterosexual-
ity and hostility towards homosexuality, she observes, the revolution has, in
many respects, replaced the Catholic Church as traditional watchdog of
Cuban morality (1992: 188).
Perhaps the most thoroughly researched and balanced discussion of ho-
mosexuality in contemporary Cuba, Ian Lumsdens Machos, Maricones, and
Gays discusses at length the societys institutionalization of homophobia.
Lumsden suggests that most of the inmates in the infamous UMAP camps
were hetereosexual, not homosexual. What is instructive, however, is that the
incarceration of homosexuals stemmed from a conception of homosexuality
as pathological. Thus the gender identity of homosexual males constituted a
problem for those who, in the words of Samuel Feijo, were preoccupied
with revolutionary hygiene (Lumsden 1996: 66). Lumsden examines other
forms of institutionalized homophobia in Cuba, such as the restrictive labor
code of 1971 and the carte blanche given to the police to hound men who
indulged in extravagant or exhibitionist behavior (1996: 75). However,
he also understands that the attitude of homophobia in Cuba must be ex-
plored in relation to wider sexual codes that predate the revolution (1996:
28). Oppressive attitudes towards homosexuality are inextricably linked to
the construction of other gender identities, and Lumsden correctly notes the
relationship between homophobia and the subordination of women in Cu-
ban history.
Feijos doubly discriminatory attitudeagainst women and homosexual
254 / Conrad James

mentherefore derives from a deeply ingrained cultural conception of ho-

mosexuality as a negation of masculinity.8 In Lourdes Casals study of the
images of women in selected Cuban novels, she delineates some of the prin-
cipal characteristics of the archetype of Cuban hegemonic masculinity, the
macho. The image of the macho in Cuban culture, Casal reminds us, is the
image of the ideal male, of what a really masculine man should be and do
(1987: 39). Attributes of strength, courage, and self-assertion are all high-
lighted in Casals description of the ideal, but the predominant characteristic
of the macho is power, sexual power, and how he conveys this to women
(1987: 40). The corollary of this conveyance of sexual power to women is a
strong rejection of male homosexuality, and Casal notes the affront to a
mans masculinity, to his value as macho, that is signaled when he is labeled
as queer. Above all, labeling a man queer signifies his weakness and unwor-
thiness of holding power (1987: 42).
But the pervasiveness of homosexuality within Cuba ironizes the image of
a macho culture.9 Apparently, not only did the proliferation of homosexual
activity in Havana exist before the pervasive influence of the United States
began but, if we are to go by Reinaldo Arenass assertions in his autobiogra-
phy Antes que anochezca (1992; translated as Before Night Falls, 1993),
rural Cuba in the mid-twentieth century was also a site of intense consumma-
tion of homoerotic desire.10 The countryside is a site of immense sexual en-
ergy, suggests Arenas, and this energy supera todos los prejuicios, repres-
iones y castigos [overcomes all prejudice, repression, and punishment]. In
this context, machista antipathy towards homosexuality is subordinated to a
desire that, for Arenas, is propelled by the dominating force of nature:

Esa fuerza, la fuerza de la naturaleza, se impone. Creo que en el campo

son pocos los hombres que no han tenido relaciones con otros hombres;
en ellos los deseos del cuerpo estn por encima de todos los sentimien-
tos machistas que nuestros padres se encargaron de inculcarnos.

[That force, the force of Nature, dominates. In the country, I think, it is

a rare man who has not had sexual relations with another man: physi-
cal desire overpowers whatever feelings of machismo our fathers take
upon themselves to instill in us.] (1992: 40)

While exaggeration is a feature of Arenass literary style, it would be un-

wise to dismiss his depiction as untenable. Rather, his hyperbole might be
seen as indicative of the effort required, in a context of oppression and repres-
sion, to inscribe a homosexual subjectivity as central rather than marginal.11
Arenass recounting of his adulthood in Havana depicts a city defined by
rampant homosexual activity, thus completing a portrait of a national cul-
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 255

ture that, as Paul Julian Smith rightly suggests, is queerer than many English
speakers might suspect (1994: 32).
Like Arenass autobiography, many of Granadoss short stories problem-
atize official Cuban discourse not only by highlighting homosexuality as an
indispensable aspect of the national culture but by attempting to redefine the
culture as queer rather than macho. This disavowal, signaled in Granadoss
irreverent quip Cuba es un pas maricn [Cuba is a queer country], char-
acterizes the attitude expressed in the stories I discuss.

Manuel Granados: Writing within the Revolution

Granadoss relationship with the revolution is a complex one. Not only does
his early writing serve as a panegyric to the occasion as well as the process of
the revolution, but he also fought in the Sierra Maestra in the struggle against
Batista. Intellectual activity, therefore, complements rather than substitutes
for military participation. Much of his work reconstructs as well as interro-
gates aspects of his experiences as a soldier in the Hubert Matos Column.12
Despite Granadoss active participation in the formative stages of the revolu-
tion, however, his relationship with the policies and practices of the revolu-
tion were characterized, from very early, by controversy. After the 1970 pub-
lication of El viento en la casa-sol, his membership in UNEAC, the National
Union of Writers and Artists, was withdrawn. According to him, this was
part of an entire process of victimization that culminated in his being forced
to leave his job as archivist at the national film institute (ICAIC) and to
disassociate himself from all intellectual endeavors.13 This thorny relation-
ship culminated in 1991 when Granados and nine other Cuban intellectuals
signed the famous Carta de los diez (Letter from The Ten), confronting
what they saw as the oppressiveness of the government and pleading for
democracy.14 He subsequently departed for Paris. Far from being gratuitous,
the inclusion of these biographical details here is important since most of
Granadoss work both thematizes and exacerbates his vicissitudinous rela-
tionship with postrevolutionary Cuban officialdom.
In both El largo viaje and Incompatibilidad de caracteres, Grana-
doss critique of the attitude of machismo is achieved through his portrayal of
different problems of male (hetero)sexuality within the context of the revolu-
tion. Heterosexual relations are either impossible or fraught with crisis, and
these problems develop in tandem with, or are exacerbated by, conflicts con-
cerning duty to the Cuban nation. These stories not only thematize failed
heterosexuality but, more important, they contain homosexual subtexts that
Granados develops later in his work produced in exile.
El largo viaje (Granados 1970: 6171) is set in the mountains of the
Sierra Maestra at the end of 1958, at the height of the struggle against the
256 / Conrad James

Batista dictatorship, but the narrative is interspersed with flashbacks to a

more distant past. Too, the protagonist, is a soldier in charge of one of the
columns of a Batista regiment. Having set out to discover the center of opera-
tions of the soldiers in the revolutionary armylos barbudos, the bearded
menToo and his men meet with little success but take one of the barbudos
prisoner on their way back to camp. The interaction between Too and the
prisoner constitutes the principal action of the story and highlights aggres-
sion and pride as indispensable aspects of the character of the Cuban macho.
The prisoner is violently restrained but refuses to be humiliated by showing
signs of pain or by asking for mercy. Instead he treats Too with contempt.
This hurts the soldiers pride, infuriates him, and leads him to threaten the
prisoner with brutal murder:
Y si te matara?le dijo a rajatabla.Hazlocontest el prision-
ero, jugueteando con una espiga, da lo mismo all o ac.Si te apli-
cara la ley de fuga?grit. Si alzara el arma y te cosiera dejando tu
apestoso cuerpo hecho un colador . . . ? No digas que no tienes miedo.
Pero qu quieres? Que ruegue me dejes ir? Que pida me mates
ahora mismo, que llore? Bah somos basura, y te . . .

[And if I killed you? he said directly. Do it, the prisoner answered,

playing with a blade of grass, it doesnt matter one way or the other.
And if I applied the runaway rule? he shouted. If I lifted this rifle
and riddled you, turning your sickening body into a sieve . . . ? Dont tell
me youre not afraid. But, what do you want? Do you want me to beg
you to let me go? To beg you to kill me right now, to cry? To hell with
that, we are all garbage, and you . . .] (6869)

The prisoners attitude of contempt diminishes whatever self-importance

Too might have sought from his position of power but paradoxically also
precipitates a sudden diversion of his violence and vituperation away from
the prisoner towards his fellow soldiers. Consequently, Too loosens the
shackles of the prisoner and not only flees with him, amidst cries of treason,
but also hands over his machine gun to the rebel. The political symbolism is
obvious: not only does Too abandon his reactionary role in the service of the
Batista regime, the former oppressor also actively facilitates the revolu-
tionary struggle.
Through flashbacks, however, a very different picture of Too emerges.
By recalling the protagonists personal history, the text constructs a radical
split between Too the aggressive soldier and Too the insecure individual
haunted by his pastbetween the macho public figure and the private indi-
vidual perpetually tortured because of sexual impotence. His childhood
memories are dominated by the humiliation of being called marica, queer,
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 257

because of his effeminacy, and this humiliation is exacerbated by his failure

to perform sexually when he visits the prostbulo at the age of eighteen (67
68). The gap between Toos past and his present thus becomes symptomatic
of a greater schism between his public and psychosexual personae.
Through this narrative device of constant shifting between past and
present, Granados explores several important issues concerning masculinity
and gender oppression in Cuba. Firstly, it serves to highlight both a tyranni-
cal cultural insistence on the performance of masculinity and the role of key
social institutions, such as education, in reinforcing prejudicial gender stereo-
types. Thus one of Toos most painful childhood memories is of his teacher
establishing guidelines of appropriate male behaviour and of the ridicule he
subsequently suffers:

Los varones no pueden ser oos y mucho menos amanerados. Los

varones son duros, tienen que ser duros. No soporto los nios oos
. Luego Gastn gritando en el patio durante el recreo. Todo el mundo
lo oy, tambin las nias.S lo que la maestra quiso decir: Marica,
Marica!

[Men should not be spoiled and certainly not soft. Men are tough,
they have to be tough. I cant stand spoiled boys. Then there was
Gastn shouting in the playground during recess. Everyone heard him,
including the girls. I know what the teacher meant: Queer, queer!]
(62)

Here the attitude of the schoolmistress symbolizes the larger prescriptive

tenets of Cuban culture as far as masculinity is concerned, and the text ex-
plores a number of the consequences engendered by this culture of prescrip-
tion. Two of the most dominant are social marginalization and psychological
trauma. Toos marginalization by the community is marked by the ridicule
he experiences. Far more crippling are the psychological repercussions: La
vergenza fue inmensa; cay de lleno, y se incrust [The shame was im-
mense; it fell heavily and settled] (62). This shame straddles both past and
future; it is as potent in the mind of the macho soldier as in the consciousness
of the effeminate boy:

Avergonzado, mir tratando de descubrir un indicio de que los

soldados hubieran odo; Los pensamientos no se oyen. No poda
separarse de las voces infantiles y las imgenes que acompaaban:
Marica, Too es Marica!

[Ashamed, he looked for a clue to whether the soldiers had heard; You
cannot hear thoughts. He could not separate himself from the child-
258 / Conrad James

hood voices and the images that accompanied them: Queer, Too is a
queer!] (6162)

Through the demonstration of the protagonists suffering then, Granados

emphasizes the horrific effects of the normalization of gender behavior.
Foremost, however, by highlighting the radical separation between Toos
actions and his psychological state, Granados advances the thesis that ma-
chismo is simply a mask; performatively produced, it invariably becomes an
attitude that is invoked to conceal effeminate and homosexual subjectivities.
In El largo viaje Toos experiences are used to highlight various indices
of Granadoss thesis of machismo-as-mask. The first instance arises early in
the protagonists development, when machismo is deliberately invoked as a
defense. In order to stave off further ridicule he disguises the anguish it causes
him: Siempre fue oscuro y recargado, hasta encontrar la perfecta solucin:
no llorara nunca [It was always extremely dark, until he found the perfect
solution: he would never cry] (62). Machismo is thus constructed as a self-
perpetuating attitude, since in order to avoid marginalization, potential non-
conformists are forced to adopt machista personae.
Though Too is able to adopt a solution that allows him to put on a
publicly approved display of masculinity, he is unable to achieve this in the
private domain. Rather than serving as the last rite of passage to the status of
macho, his first visit to the prostbulo, the brothel, becomes an emasculatory
event. Failing to dominate the woman sexually, he becomes once more an
object of derision. Toos masculine appearance belies his sexual impotence,
and the shocked prostitute reacts with anger: Ah lstima de vejigo! No
eres . . . no es tuyo ese cuerpo! [Damn vejigo! You arent . . . that body is
not yours!] (67). Used particularly in Eastern Cuba, the word vejigo refers
to a child who interferes in adult conversation. I am grateful to Professor
Narciso Hidalgo for his clarification of this term. Like the shame of being
taunted by his childhood peers, the shame of this failed sexual encounter
straddles Toos past and present and confirms the gap between physical
appearance and psychosexual reality:
Nunca haba podido olvidarlo. Vio la habitacin, sinti el olor a per-
fume barato y la risa de la hembra cuando se alej de la puerta.

[He had never been able to forget it. He saw the room, smelled the
cheap perfume and heard the womans laugh when she went through
the door.] (62).

The prostitute articulates directly Granadoss ideas concerning the funda-

mental disguise and sexual ambiguity that machismo constitutes:
T eres un hombre y no lo eres. Soy una puta y no lo soy. Querrs ir a
algn lugar con tu mscara. Yo llegu y me desprend de la ma.
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 259

[You are a man and you arent. I am a prostitute and I am not. You want
to go somewhere wearing your mask. I came here and took mine off.]
(68)
Toos sexual impotence is not portrayed as a rarity. Rather, the text con-
structs it as something pervasive. In a tone that is at once contemptuous and
sympathetic, the prostitute remarks to Too: Sabes? hay muchos as! . . .
no te preocupes [You know something? There are many like that! . . .
Dont worry] (68). Within the context of a culture that continually seeks to
represent itself as macho, the subversive potential of a text such as this is
obvious.
The text further deconstructs the mask of machismo by calling attention
to the fear and nervousness of the other soldiers in Toos column. Marching
to their camp at night, they become extremely fearful of the dark, and this
fear is translated into violence against the rebel they have taken prisoner (64,
66). And the critique of machismo goes beyond the revelation of the weak-
ness lying behind it to a rejection of its violence and inhumanity through the
portrayal of the horrific acts of terrorism perpetrated by Batistas soldiers in
the military camps (65). The text deemphasizes whatever political purpose
might lie behind these scenes of torture by suggesting that the prime motive
is egoism and a lust for blood. Thus the jefe, the chief, gloats at his ascen-
dancy over the prisoners while they are whipped senseless (65), and the sol-
diers agonize that they cannot satisfy their own desire to kill the rebel they
have captured, since depriving the jefe of that pleasure would be sure to incur
his wrath (67).
Homosocial relations, then, are defined by authoritarianism, violence,
and fear. Toos relationship with the homosocial group is characterized by
alienation, and his constant mental journeys into the past become a means of
marking this alienation. The text constructs a comparison between the physi-
cal torture suffered by the political prisoners and the gender oppression suf-
fered by the protagonist. Toos violence against the prisoner in his charge
thus comes to be understood as an expression of anger against a culture that
presents him with the difficult choice of either wearing the uncomfortable
mask of the macho or being condemned to ridicule and ostracism. Toos
sudden decision to free the prisoner and flee with him signifies a recognition
of the commonality of oppression suffered by the twoone political, the
other sexual. The soldiers come to represent, for Too, the cause of his psy-
chological entrapment, and so the release of the prisoner is preceded by silent
vitriol against them as he conjures up of images of them in ignominious
death:
Imagin un lugar lleno de soldados muertos. Con fusiles, cananas y
cascos; unos sobre otros, en gran montaa de basuras, y gentes ca-
minando entre ellos, rindose, burlndose. Basura, basura.
260 / Conrad James

[He imagined a place filled with dead soldiers. With rifles, bandoliers,
and helmets; one on top of the other, in a great mountain of garbage,
and people walking among them laughing, mocking them. Rubbish,
rubbish.] (69)
The end of the physical journey from the mountains to the edge of the city
is also the successful culmination of the protagonists journey to self-realiza-
tion. Part of this process is his conscious recognition of a series of common-
alities between the freedom fighter and himself: their common physicality,
their common mortality, their common need to appropriate some kind of
mask:
Estupor ante vellos viriles trepando desde el ombligo; . . . Estupor ante
hombres frente a la muerte . . . Estupor de la razn y la sinrazn del
carnaval; su carnaval y el de los dems.

[Amazement before virile hairs climbing from the navel; . . . Amaze-

ment before men facing death . . . Amazement at the justice and injus-
tice of the carnival. His carnival and the others.] (70).
One of the ways of reading this text is to see the protagonists choice to
desert the army and free the rebel as a straightforward political choice to
reject an old, oppressive capitalist regime and identify with an incipient so-
cialist order that promises greater liberation. The psychic relief realized by
Too after he hands his gun to the revolutionary would then represent the
potential for progressive social action to resolve personal crises. Indeed, the
fact that El largo viaje was published in 1970, at a time of particularly
stringent censorship in Cuba, might suggest that it was read along those lines.
However, such a reading is possible only at the price of ignoring the irony
with which the text is invested. Toos moment of revolutionary support is
also the moment when he jettisons his mask of machismo and accepts the self
that lies beneath it. It is the moment when he recognizes the fundamental
hypocrisy behind the dominant image of Cuban masculinity and is simulta-
neously able to reverse it. To this extent Granados is constructing an image of
a new man whose rejection of the mask of machismo puts him at odds with
the revolutions ideal of a new socialist man, an ideal in which the display
of strength and virility are indispensable tenets. When I discuss the revised
version of this story that Granados produced in exile, even greater levels of
irony become apparent.
In Incompatibilidad de caracteres (Granados 1988: 11417), Grana-
doss exploration of the cultural hegemony of machismo takes place within
the context of a revolution in which dishonesty and hypocrisy are rife. More
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 261

important, the text depicts a society in which the codes governing masculine
behavior are just as rigid as those represented in El largo viaje.
The focus of Incompatibilidad de caracteres is a failed heterosexual
relationship. The text is written from a third-person perspective, but key
moments of the narrative consist of a conversation taking place in bed be-
tween the protagonist and his wife. Here heterosexuality is inscribed as op-
pressive; there is no sexual pleasure, the conversation represents the break-
down in communication between the two, and the marriage bed becomes a
site of frustration:
En el lecho la mujer se movi y la barrera se hizo palpable, entonces l,
con disimulo, estruj las manos hmedas de sudor en las sbanas y
quiso ser parte de la obscuridad; saba que ella tambin miraba el cielo
y ambos lo vean descender lento e inevitable sobre ellos.

[In the bed the woman moved and the barrier became palpable, then
furtively he wrung his sweaty hands on the sheets and wished to be part
of the darkness; he knew that she was also looking at the ceiling and
they both saw it descending slowly and inevitably upon them.] (114)

The unnamed protagonist is the epitome of impotence, and through his

interaction with other people as well as through stream of consciousness
techniques he is presented as a man trapped by the heterosexual culture he
lives in. Not only does his sexual relationship fail but he also fails to serve as
a model of strength for his young son, for whom this precipitates a psycho-
logical crisis: Pap, me so que alguien me pegaba y t no me defendas
[Daddy, I dreamt that someone hit me and you didnt defend me] (114).
The man refuses to assume any role as actor or decision maker in his
marital relationship, and this image of masculine weakness is emphasized
through its juxtaposition with images of female dominance. It is the woman
who initiates their conversation, presenting him with a challenge to take
some definitive step concerning their ailing relationship: Y qu vas a
hacer? [And what are you going to do?] (114). He refuses to take this
opportunity to act, however, and his lack of response is bound up with feel-
ings of fear and helplessness: No contest, estaba convencido de que una
sola palabra lo hundira an ms en el lquido fangoso, por eso se hizo el
dormido [He did not answer, he was convinced that even one word would
sink him even deeper in the mire, and so he pretended to sleep] (114).
The onus is thereby placed on the woman to resolve the crisis single-
handedly, and she seizes this opportunity to seek a legal end to the relation-
ship on grounds of incompatibilidad de caracteres:
Y t, qu hars? . . .
262 / Conrad James

Maana voy al abogado.

Por qu concepto lo pedirs?
Total . . . cuesta el mismo dinero, lo har por incompatibilidad de
caracteres.

[And you, what are you going to do? . . .

Tomorrow Ill go to the lawyer.
On what grounds will you seek it?
Everything . . . it costs the same, Ill go for incompatibility.]
(11617)

The story shifts between the private and public domains, and the failure of
the protagonist as father and husband is aggravated by his defeat in the
workplace, the site of revolutionary commitment. Through the focus on the
workplace a larger picture emerges of the gap between the moralistic ideal of
the new socialist man and the ordinary Cuban man. Simultaneously the
image of female dominance in the private space becomes more castigating in
public. The protagonist, his wife, and his friend all work in the same factory.
Having discovered that the friend is guilty of fraud, she reports him to the
authorities, but she receives no support in this from her husband, who is
terrified by her resoluteness. Not only does he fail to stop her from pursuing
her decided course of action but the tone in which she reveals to him the
extent of her determination further confirms his lack of authority in the
relationship:
l ha sido muy inteligente, pero fall; lo llevar hasta las ltimas
consecuencias. Me importa un bledo que sea tu amigo. [He has been
very smart, but he failed; I will take it to the very end. I dont give a
damn that he is your friend.] (114)
The wife is also revealed as scheming and deceitful, and the protagonists
inability to control her actions epitomizes further his incompatibility with
the expectations of machismo. This not only signifies his complete power-
lessness in his heterosexual relationship but also disqualifies him from attain-
ing respect within homosocial contexts. Thus the scandalized victim of his
wifes deceit reproaches him for his weakness:
Socio, tu mujer me embarc . . . Qu clase de hombre eres? Es o
no es tu mujer?

[Pal, your wife set me up. What kind of man are you? Is she your wife
or isnt she?] (116).
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 263

The protagonists wife is also bewildered at her inability to find in him the
socially approved attributes of masculinity. This reveals, despite her domi-
neering attitude, her socialization into expecting male dominance. Her re-
sponse to him is therefore characterized by shame, pity, and anxiety. In the
bedroom she grapples mentally with his lack of assertiveness: Cmo es un
hombre? Qu clase de hombre? [How could he be a man? What kind of
man?] (116). And in the workplace he is aware of her desperately trying to
find some suggestion that he is not as weak as he seems; that he will redeem
his failure in the private sphere with a show of bravery in public: Saba que
a pesar de eso estaba ansiosa . . . de una palabra, un paso que la obligara a
comprender que su esposo era otra cosa [He knew that, in spite of that, she
was anxious . . . for a word, a step that would force her to understand that her
husband was something else] (116).
Ultimately, however, the text does not ridicule the protagonist for failing
to sustain the mask of machismo. It is the oppressive nature of social codes
that is condemned. Thus the community is represented as an evil, predatory
force that constrains the protagonist physically and psychologically: Des-
amparado, record que desde siempre la voz de los otros fue un odioso ani-
mal maligno que acechaba y lo oblig a caminar lento, medio curvado y en
espera de un golpe en pleno rostro [Helpless, he recalled that the voice of
others was always a wicked hateful animal spying on him and forcing him to
walk slowly, bent, and awaiting a blow straight in his face] (114).
More important, he is presented as deriving from impotence a transgres-
sive kind of freedom. He escapes the bedroom mentally and recalls his child-
hood in which he did not associate with other boys or take part in masculine
diversions: cuando no correteaba junto a los dems muchachos prefera la
soledad de la impotencia y complaca en trozar ramas, ahorcar lagartijas y
volcar agua hirviendo en el hueco de las hormigas [when he did not hang
out with the other boys, he used to prefer the solitude of impotence and take
pleasure in cutting up branches, hanging lizards, and pouring boiling water
into the nests of ants] (116). He derives strength from this memory, and it is
this strength that prompts him to ask his wife what she would do about their
relationship. Memories of past transgression therefore equip him to release
himself from heterosexual entrapment.
Through the portraits of Too and the protagonist of Incompatibilidad
de caracteres, then, Granados has suggested some of the disastrous psycho-
logical consequences of the imposition of rigid models of masculinity. Both
men are forced at some point to flee from the public/masculine present to an
earlier world of private/feminine memories in order to cope with social pres-
sure. But while Too ends up rising above the constricting sociocultural
264 / Conrad James

codes, it is less certain that the protagonist of Incompatibilidad de carac-

teres manages to realize a sense of self.

Literatura de lo sucio (Dirty Literature): Writing in Exile

Granados has spoken of his works produced in exile as being representative

of his new interest in cultivating una literatura de lo sucio, a dirty litera-
ture.15 Here the candid portrayal of violent crime and detailed scenes of male
masturbation in El disparo (The shot), the construction of the Cuban
brothel as an overtly homoerotic site in La piedra fina (The smooth stone),
and the staging of explicit homosexual activity in Los demonios cantan
bonito (Devils sing sweetly) resemble closely what Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (1995:
115) has referred to as an aesthetics of lo soez, or dirty aesthetics, in the
work of the Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Snchez. This writing signals a
radical break from the aesthetics of suggestion that we have seen in
Granadoss work produced in Cuba.
Part of this process of aesthetic redirection has been the rewriting of sto-
ries previously published in Cuba. In a new version of El largo viaje, now
called Un viaje muy largo (A very long journey), for example, the latent
homosexual theme is made explicit.16 Toos failed experience with the pros-
titute is now far less important in his psychosexual formation than his inabil-
ity to ascertain cul de los dos hombres desnudos en medio de aquel fuego
de vergenza era l [which of the two naked men in the midst of that fire of
shame was he]. The presentation of his impotence in the tryst with the pros-
titute therefore serves to confirm that he was ashamed that he had played the
passive role, the role of the maricn.
The inscription of homosexuality into the text impinges directly on the
issues of national identity that are raised. Thus in the version published in
Cuba, Too is depicted as always being moved por ira irracional, by irra-
tional rage, when contemplating the rebels he captures, but in the later ver-
sion political indignation is tempered by libidinal desires. Too now contem-
plates the breadth of the rebels arms and is moved por un sentimiento
indefinido, by a vague feeling. More important, the later version confirms
the paradoxical status of both excluded other and abjected self that the
homosexual occupies in conceptions of Cuban national identity.17 The reac-
tion to Toos flight with the prisoner conflates treason to the capitalist state
with sexual degeneracy/passive homosexuality: Ya me haban dicho que
era maricndijo uno de ellos [I had already heard that he was a queer,
said one of them]. And the subsequent call to pursue the two men is charged
with both disgust and desire: Hay que buscarlos, coo, hay que
buscarlos! [We have to look for them, fuck, we have to look for them!].18
This paradox becomes even more interesting, within the context of the
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 265

heterosexist assumptions of the revolution, through the construction of the

maricn as an arbiter of the revolutionary process. This bears out Diana
Fusss contention concerning the contradictory relationship between hetero-
sexual culture and its homosexual other. For Fuss it is impossible for hetero-
sexuality to be oblivious of the close physical proximity of its terrifying
(homo)sexual other (1991: 3). When homosexuality is turned inside out,
Fuss explains, what is revealed is not the abject insides of the homosexual.
Rather the homosexual is revealed as the abject, contaminated, and expur-
gated insides of the heterosexual subject (Fuss 1991: 3). The sexually ab-
errant hero in Granadoss story is thus an indispensable unit of the national
process that marks him as despicable.
Through a similar reworking of El anteojo, a story in El viento en la
casa-sol (Granados 1970: 8185), sexual ambiguity is juxtaposed with the
disavowal of revolutionary policies. Both versions of the story begin with the
staging of a male voyeuristic gaze at an ungendered object. Here the telescope
becomes a metonym carrying multiple suggestions concerning sexuality and
ways of seeing. In both stories voyeurism leads to narcissism; the protagonist
discovers that the object of his gaze is a woman, then he shifts from looking
at her to contemplating his own genitalia before pursuing her. Though the
reworked narrative does not necessarily textualize bisexuality more explic-
itly than the one published in Cuba, what is important is its candid rejection
of the revolutions facilitation of the self-contradictory, hypocritical sexual
culture of machismo. Thus the protagonist, forced to leave his wife behind on
being mobilized by the national army, ends up sleeping with the wife of
another young man who has been forced to serve in another part of the
country.
In Los demonios cantan bonito, the issues of isolation from community,
abjection, performance, and compulsory heterosexuality which have been
discussed so far are all presented, but here both the factor of race and the
shifting of the story to the United States allow for a more involved explora-
tion of the cultural construction of homosexuality. The story depicts a Cuban
society that historically has constituted a double bind for black homosexuals;
racial insult has always been added to sexual injury. By contrast Granados
constructs, perhaps idealistically, a United States in which blacks have the
possibility of more dignity. For the protagonist, African-American musical
forms (jazz and the blues) have served antiracist agendas, but in Cuba la
rumba ha sido el mejor cmplice del amo [rumba has been the slavemasters
greatest accomplice]. More important, however, in Los demonios cantan
bonito the United States is represented as a location where the terms within
which homosexual activity takes place must be renegotiated.
Los demonios cantan bonito is not a simplistic inscription of homo-
textuality in which the good homosexual who is persecuted because of his
266 / Conrad James

sexuality finally gains liberation from heterosexist oppression.19 Here

Anselmo, the black gay protagonist, is calculating, deceptive, and vengeful,
but at the same time has a highly developed social conscience. Falsely accused
of pederasty in prerevolutionary Cuba, he suffers horrendous physical tor-
ture from righteously indignant macho policemenwho include Julin, the
father of the child he is supposed to have molestedbefore he is finally ac-
quitted. Julin and Anselmo are gratuitously allowed to meet in Miami a few
years after the revolution, and in their ensuing relationship Anselmo weaves
a plan of revenge that not only totally reverses the macho-maricn power
differential but also totally destroys Julin. This picture of Anselmo is con-
trasted with his quiet yet relentless dedication and financial supportironi-
cally through the Catholic Church, among other placesto the uplift of poor
black youth in Harlem whose bodies are constantly endangered by the risk of
venereal disease and drug abuse.
Granadoss point is that if Anselmo is a devil, it is the Cuban experience
that created him. Anselmo is rejected by the community, and the taunts, jeers,
and relentless gossip reinforce his position of exclusion. Thus he is known
not as Anselmo but as la marquesa de Santa Ana, and his supposed sexual
habits era el permanente tema de conversacin [were the permanent sub-
ject of conversation] among his female neighbors.
Homophobic prerevolutionary Cuba is disavowed forcefully. All notions
of home disappear, and the relationship between the homosexual and his
native country is defined by unreserved hatred. Anselmo describes the hatred
he feels for his country to his wife, Siban African-American female friend,
incapable of feeling sexual pleasure, to whom he eventually gets marriedas
un odio nico [a singular hatred], and thus the name Cuba is never men-
tioned. This disavowal of Cuba is exaggerated through Sibs affirmation of
her North American identity. Through Anselmos ordeal after being accused
of pederasty, the Cuban nation is presented as abdicating its duties to its
(homosexual) citizens, and so when Anselmo is finally acquitted, he discusses
the country as una gigantesca mentira [a huge lie]. The family home also
invokes painful memories in Los demonios cantan bonito. Anselmo
dresses up as a woman for a local carnival and is immediately suspected of
being a maricn. Subsequently his siblings refuse to tolerate his presence and
he is forced to leave home, a decision that his mother encourages painfully as
preferable to una tragedia de mayores proporciones [a tragedy of greater
proportions]. In the text, then, concepts of family, home, and nation all be-
come synonymous with the oppression of homosexuals.
Anselmos revenge against the supermacho Julin, his former neighbor
in Cuba, therefore becomes a way of acting out his hatred for a sexually
repressive national culture. Through this scenario Granados reiterates his
conviction that Cuba es un pas maricn as the hypermasculine Julin is
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 267

reduced to sexual passivity and emotional dependency. At the beginning,

Anselmos accusation of pederasty is occasioned when Julin finds his young
son Dominguito inserting a green pencil in his anus. Scandalized and terri-
fied, Julin beats the child cruelly, screaming: Primero te mato, antes que
maricn te mato! [I will kill you first, I will kill you before you become a
queer]. This beating is accompanied by furious disclaimers of any homo-
sexual connection in his family: A m no me puede pasarme esto! En mi
familia no hay ninguno, oiste! Ninguno! [This cannot happen to me! There
is none in my family, do you hear! None!]. Heterosexual anxiety finds conso-
lation in marking and blaming the homosexual other, so Anselmo is singled
out by Julins wife as the only possible source from which the child could
have learned the act: Tiene que haber sido l [It has to have been him]. The
subsequent persecution of Anselmo might then be seen as a massive commu-
nal expression of homosexual panic.20
In New York, Julin discovers that the excluded other, the maricn, is
also his abjected insides. Not only does he engage in homosexual activities
with Anselmo but he also experiences more sexual excitement than he ever
enjoyed with his wife Dolores in Cuba. The irony is reinforced through the
emphatic description of Julin as sexually passive and supplicatory: Qu
maricn ms maricn, si usted lo oye con eso de, dame poya, ms poya, ms
mi negrito lindo! [What a damned faggot! You should have heard him going
on about give it to me, give it to me, more my beautiful lover!]. Dominguitos
green pencil thus becomes a sign for what Granados seems to see as the
inherent homosexual desire in every Cuban man, and this is forcefully sug-
gested to Julin when Anselmo visits him as he lies dying: Basuray
mtete este lapiz verde [Garbageand stick this green pencil up your ass].
The Cuban nation is also identified with the persecuted black homosexual
body, and the irony of this is extended through Granadoss choice of the
United States as the site for the Cuban sociosexual crisis to be resolved. A
lawyer named Doctor Gaspar volunteers to defend Anselmo, pro bono,
against the charges of pederasty. When his family press him to explain his
interest in the case, his response is: Por un lado el asunto es idntico a la
historia de este pas, lo s muy bien, y por otro no soy dispuesto a estar diez
aos sin mermeladas [On one hand the case is identical to the history of this
country, I well know, and on the other I am not prepared to be without jam
for ten years].21 This is the only instance in the text in which the radical
separation between the maricn and the nation is reversed. Here Gaspar
articulates Granadoss concern that Cuban history has been one of domina-
tion by both Europe and the United States.22 This conviction coincides with
Granadoss rejection of the sexual persecution that he sees as defining the
Cuban nation. Thus, ironically, Gaspars decision to defend Anselmo is not
so much an anticommunity gesture as a nationalist one. Within the world of
268 / Conrad James

the text, then, he comes to symbolize a nationalist conscience that recognizes

the inextricable links between sexual persecution and colonialist/imperialist
domination. With the advent of the revolution, however, this conscience is
removed as Gaspar and his family abandon Cuba for the States and, in what
could be read as an act of liberation from heterosexist community, invite
Anselmo along with them.
If for Granados, therefore, prerevolutionary Cuba was a site of oppression
for the homosexual, one in which the imperialist abuse of the nation was
ironically reproduced in the nations abuse of the homosexual (maricn),
then the new socialist society holds out no possibility for homosexual libera-
tion. The Cuban nation provides no space for the negotiation of sexual iden-
tities, and it is the United Statesimperialist dominator of the prerevolu-
tionary period, political and economic enemy of the presentthat serves as
the locus for the two versions of Cuban homosexuality, the macho and the
abjected maricn, to confront each other. The subsequent ignominious death
of Julin, from drug abuse and in abject poverty, is the final metaphor used
to condemn Cuban homophobia.
Granadoss work strongly rejects essentialist concepts of identity from
both sexual and national perspectives. His stories serve as lenses through
which the complexities of male sexuality and Cuban national identity may be
read. Not only does he sensitively stage aspects of heterosexist prejudice
within the revolution, but he also locates this prejudice within a larger social
and historical context. Ultimately, the message is that compulsory hetero-
sexuality is a dangerous imposition and its consequences are multiple and
tragic.

Notes
1. Granadoss other published works include El casco (1963) and Expediente de
hombre (1988). Two new novels, El corredor de los vientos and Damin y el verano,
were completed before he died but remain unpublished. Also unpublished is his final
collection of short stories, La maravillosa papaya.
2. Winner of the 1990 Juan Rulfo Prize for the short story, El lobo, el bosque y el
hombre nuevo has enjoyed overwhelming readership both inside and outside Cuba.
3. Here I am thinking specifically of Paul Julian Smiths The Language of Straw-
berry. Also see his discussion of the film in Vision Machines.
4. See, for example, Argelles and Rich, Homosexuality, Homophobia, and
Revolution.
5. It is interesting to note that both homophobia and homosexuality have been
attributed to the influence of the bourgeoisie by several leading Cuban intellectuals
following Party lines. See, for example, Emilio Bejels interviews with Max Figueroa
Esteva and Ambrosio Fornet in Escribir en Cuba, 12328, 15568.
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 269

6. See Lockwood, Castros Cuba, Cubas Fidel.

7. For discussions on the use of Christian religious ideology to justify the oppres-
sion of homosexuals in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean cultures, see Noel,
Batty Boys in Babylon, and Lewis, Constructing the Masculine.
8. The rejection of homosexuality as femininity is, of course, not unique to Cuban
cultureor Hispanic, for that matter. Foucault has observed, for example, that this
attitude might be traced as far back as Socrates; see The Uses of Pleasure, 19.
9. Some of Roger Lancasters argument about machismo in the Nicaraguan con-
text seems relevant here. Not only is it fundamentally a means of structuring power
between men rather than between men and women, but the abjected colchn is also
necessary for holding machismo in place. See Life Is Hard, 23637.
10. For example, Oscar Montero in Julin del Casal and the Queers of Havana
discusses evidence of a thriving homosexual subculture in Havana in the nineteenth
century.
11. For a discussion of Arenass extravagance as a struggle for visibility, see Paul
Julian Smith, Vision Machines, 7376. See also David William Fosters discussion of
Arenass 1984 novella Arturo, la estrella ms brillante, a fictional account of his
friends experiences in a UMAP camp, as crucial in locating Cuban homosexuality
within a sociopolitical matrix, in Gay and Lesbian Themes, 6672.
12. Conversation with the author, Cambridge University, June 1995.
13. It is important to note that the problems that Granados had with the revolu-
tion primarily revolved around questions of race and not of sexuality. See his essay
Notes on the History of Blacks in Cuba.
14. The Carta de los diez provoked extremely harsh responses from the Cuban
government. The signatories were denounced publicly by UNEAC and the instigator,
the poet Mara Elena Cruz Varela, now living in Puerto Rico, was imprisoned for two
years. According to Smith and Padula (1996: 184), Cruz Varela was made to physi-
cally swallow some of her own writings as punishment for counterrevolutionary ac-
tivity. For a fairly detailed profile of the intellectuals involved, see El Nuevo Heraldo,
24 June 1991. See also El Pas, 12 December 1991.
15. Conversation with the author, Cambridge University, June 1995.
16. A number of these rewritten stories have been collected in a volume entitled
Los demonios cantan bonito, to be published shortly. Quotations without page num-
bers will be understood to be from this work.
17. See Arnaldo Cruz-Malavs exploration of this problematic as it relates to
Puerto Rican literature in Towards an Art of Transvestism.
18. On the relationship of disgust to desire, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and
Poetics of Transgression, 191.
19. Rafael Prez-Torres defines homotextuality as the discourse of homosexual
liberation; see The Ambiguous Outlaw.
20. On homosexual panic, see Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1921.
21. Anselmo sold cakes and sweets for a living, and the lawyer was one of his
customers.
22. See Granadoss essay Notes on the History of Blacks in Cuba.
270 / Conrad James

Bibliography

Arenas, Reinaldo. Antes que anochezca. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992.

. Before Night Falls. Translated by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Viking, 1993.
Argelles, Lourdes, and B. Ruby Rich. Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolu-
tion: Notes Toward an Understanding of Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experi-
ence. In Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by
Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 44155.
New York: New American Library, 1989.
Bejel, Emilio. Escribir en Cuba. Ro Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto
Rico, 1991.
Casal, Lourdes. Images of Women in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Cuban Novels.
Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1975. Reproduced in Cuban Studies
17 (1987): 2550.
Cruz-Malav, Arnaldo. Towards an Art of Transvestism: Colonialism and Homo-
sexuality in Puerto Rican Literature. In Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic
Writings, edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith, 13767. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995.
Feijo, Samuel. Revolucin y vicios. El Mundo, 15 April 1965, 5.
Foster, David William. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. The Uses of Pleasure. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. Translated
by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge,
1991.
Granados, Manuel. Adire y el tiempo roto. Havana: Casa de las Amricas, 1967.
. El viento en la casa-sol. Havana: Cuadernos Unin, 1970.
. Pas de coral. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1988.
. Notes on the History of Blacks in Cuba . . . and May Eleggua Be with Me.
In The Cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean, edited by Conrad James and John
Perivolaris. London: Macmillan, 2000.
. Los demonios cantan bonito. Forthcoming in 2004.
Lancaster, Roger N. Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in
Nicaragua. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
Leiner, Marvin. Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS. Boul-
der: Westview Press, 1994.
Lewis, Linden. Constructing the Masculine in the Context of the Caribbean. Paper
presented to the nineteenth annual conference of the Caribbean Studies Associa-
tion, Mrida, Mexico, 2328 May 1994.
Lockwood, Lee. Castros Cuba, Cubas Fidel. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes. Community at Its Limits: Orality, Law, Silence, and the Homo-
sexual Body in Luis Rafael Snchezs Jum. In Entiendes? Queer Readings,
Hispanic Writings, edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith, 11535.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
 Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados / 271

Lumsden, Ian. Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Montero, Oscar. Julan del Casal and the Queers of Havana. In Entiendes? Queer
Readings, Hispanic Writings, edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith,
92112. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Noel, Peter. Batty Boys in Babylon: Can Gay West Indians Survive the Boom Bye Bye
Posses? Village Voice, 12 January 1993, 2936.
Paz, Senel. El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo. Unin 1 (1991): 2535.
Prez-Torres, Rafael. The Ambiguous Outlaw: John Rechy and Complicitious
Homotexuality. In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexuali-
ties, edited by Peter Murphy, 20425. New York: New York University Press,
1994.
Rodrguez Coronel, Rogelio. La novela de la revolucin Cubana, 19591979. Ha-
vana: Letras Cubanas, 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1990.
Smith, Lois. Sexuality and Socialism in Cuba. In Cuba in Transition: Crisis and
Transformation, edited by Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk, 17791. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1992.
Smith, Lois M., and Alfred Padula. Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Smith, Paul Julian. The Language of Strawberry. Sight and Sound 4 (1994): 3133.
. Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature, and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba,
198393. London: Verso, 1996.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986.
 Gender, Sexuality,
and Historical Considerations
 10

Struggling with a Structure

Gender, Agency, and Discourse

Glyne Griffith

Generally speaking, intelligence and imagination become premium modalities

of functional existence to a people who are traditionally perceived as hewers
of wood, drawers of water and mere statistical units in the production process.
Rex Nettleford, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach

In this essay, I am concerned with examining some of the discursive strategies

employed by the wretched of the earth to make intelligence and imagina-
tion function as premium modalities of existence. Such discursive strategies
permit the downtrodden to rescue their humanity and personhood from the
threat of absolute annihilation. If, let us say, particular readings and interpre-
tations of race and gender are pressed into the service of dominant dis-
courses, how might defensive hermeneutic strategies foreground intelligence
and imagination in contradistinction to what Aim Csaire called the
thingification processes of dominant discourses? Clearly, such hermeneu-
tic strategies and modes of representation are critical if the agency of those
who would otherwise languish as mere hewers of wood and drawers of water
is to be rescued from thingification.
The first part of my title, Struggling with a Structure, is meant to signal
a concern with the ways in which narrative and other discursive structures
can either enhance or limit attempts to read through dehumanizing strategies
of domination so that one may foreground agency and humanity. Thus, one
struggles with narrative, for example, as part of the praxis of liberatory
struggle. In addition, the first part of my title has an anecdotal aspect which
will lead into the main discussion.
Several years ago when I lived in Jamaica, a Rastafari friend concluding a
conversation with me indicated that he was on his way to express his amo-
rous intentions to a woman whom he had recently met. In his own words, he
was on his way to struggle with a structure. His obvious objectification of
276 / Glyne Griffith

the womans personhood in his syntactic choice of structure was as inter-

esting as his representation of the impending encounter as a struggle. De-
spite my friends clear confidence in his own persuasive and rhetorical skills,
he expected to be challenged, to meet resistance to his amorous advances. In
addition, his choice of the term structure to represent the object of his
desire seemed to suggest the formidable otherness that he comprehended
womanhood to be. He was going to encounter resistance to the manifestation
of his will, and, rendered through his discursive lens, it was as though this
resistance lacked particular agency and subjectivity. It was, rather, an undis-
tinguished background of feminine complexity, an ontological canvas upon
which his self-assured masculine subjectivity would reassert itself and main-
tain central focus.
Somehow, though, I suspect that what my friend had perceived to be an
impending encounter with a drawer of water, if not a hewer of wood, turned
into an encounter with intelligence and imagination displayed as a premium
modality of this womans functional existence, for I do not recall him ever
mentioning the outcome of the encounter. His utter silence on the matter
might be read, if we move from the particular idiosyncrasy of this anecdote
to speak generally of weightier narratives of dominance, as a kind of silencing
of other narratives, other modalities of knowing and being in the world. The
modalities of resistance and indeed existence of which Rex Nettleford speaks
in the epigraph above are likely to operate by means of subterfuge and sub-
version, since they are typically marginalized and silenced by dominant mo-
dalities of knowing and being.
The intelligence of these putative statistical units of labor, these voiceless
subalterns, will likely invest in ways of knowing and existing that undermine
and resist conservatively established boundaries, norms, and limits. The dis-
enfranchised imagination often challenges narrative and other discursive ef-
forts to represent knowledge and truth as entirely resident within the discrete
borders of established disciplines, accessible only through sanctioned discur-
sive and disciplinary practices. Intellectually sensitive and liberatory analyses
of such intelligence and imagination thus demand disciplinary and epistemo-
logical border-crossings that explore the conceptual terrain between putative
borders and discrete polarities. Such border-crossings, exploring intelligence,
imagination, and agency where they have been said not to exist, have been
facilitated and enhanced by theoretical and critical practices that include
poststructuralism and postcolonial cultural critique. Perhaps in both these
cases we might usefully think of the prefix post- as referring less to the idea
that we have clearly moved beyond dominant structures of ordering and
knowing the world, or that we have moved beyond relations in the geopoliti-
cal world that still bear the mark of a colonial history, and instead properly
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 277

comprehend post as referring to the impossibility nowadays of thinking of

what lies after the prefix post- in any unselfconscious manner.

Poststructuralism and Metaphysics

Although poststructuralist critique has been viewed with a more than healthy
skepticism in some academic circles, both in the Caribbean and internation-
ally, it is clear that there is value in what it has revealed about knowledge, the
conditions and strategies of knowing, and the nature of truth. The destabiliz-
ing force of deconstructive analysis, for example, has reinvigorated icono-
clastic hermeneutics, so that so-called master narratives are discovered to
have always contained the condition of their own disintegration because they
have always established themselves around the loci of resistances that
threaten their desire for univocality and purity. Deconstructive analysis has
represented knowing as the ever-shifting intersection of knowing and not
knowing rather than as a domain of stability called knowledge (truth) that is
the antithesis of ignorance (falsehood). Indeed, a number of poststructur-
alisms detractors point to precisely this tendency to render every discursive
position unstable and provisional as being its most dissatisfying trait, but
arguably this tendency toward the provisional and the unstable is a signifi-
cant aspect of the methods attractiveness as a discursive weapon of the weak.
Since deconstructive analysis tends to focus attention on what is rendered
inadmissible in the so-called master narrative, on what has to remain unsaid
and outside the boundaries of a discourse so that the discourse may maintain
a conservative coherence, such analysis permits us to ask questions about the
assumptions and premises that ground a particular way of comprehending
and representing knowledge and being in the world.
One of the distinct advantages of literature is that as a discipline its prac-
tices and boundaries tend to be less easily and rigidly defined than several
other disciplines in the humanities or social sciences. Commenting on the
deconstructive possibilities in literary discourse, Gayatri Spivak notes the
significant difference between literary discourse and discourses within sev-
eral other disciplines that fall under the rubric of the humanities or the social
sciences. She argues, Whereas in other kinds of discourses there is a move
toward the final truth of a situation, literature, even within this argument,
displays that the truth of a human situation is the itinerary of not being able
to find it. In the general discourse of the humanities, there is a sort of search
for solutions, whereas in literary discourse there is a playing out of the prob-
lem as the solution (1988: 77).
This playing out of the problem as the solution undermines discursive
tendencies associated with metaphysical binarism, and what Jacques Derrida
278 / Glyne Griffith

has referred to as a logocentric metaphysics. Generally, the interplay be-

tween literature and poststructuralist critique, as well as the interplay be-
tween black diaspora literatures and the history of plantation slavery in the
so-called New World, can lead to a profound sense, as Spivak puts it, that all
conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all
origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with
frivolity (1976: xiii).
The movement away from discursive strategies that aim to find a final,
absolute truth, and toward the adoption of strategies that focus on the itin-
erary of narrative rather than its arrival at some epistemological or ontologi-
cal destination, has value for analyses within the ambit of poststructuralism
and postcoloniality. Deconstructive readings question essentialist definitions
and can facilitate the recognition of contradictory and resistant forces within
discourses predicated upon stereotype and narrative movement toward some
final truth of the human situation. Strategies of resistance to essentializing
discourses that seek their salvation in oppositional but binarist practices
such as the location of selfhood within essentialist narratives of Negritude,
Afrocentricity, or nationalism, in an attempt to counter the degradation of
personhood under colonialist or imperialist dominationare severely limit-
ing if they are not recognized as provisional stages in a continuing struggle
against the limitations of binarist structures of knowing and being.
Some modes of feminist critique have demonstrated awareness of the on-
tological cul-de-sac of an unyielding essentialism. Thus Spivak, recognizing
the fallacy of essentialist configurations within gender, argues:
My own definition of a woman is very simple: it rests on the word
man as used in the texts that provide the foundation for the corner of
the literary criticism establishment that I inhabit. You might say at this
point, defining the word woman as resting on the word man is a
reactionary position. Should I not carve out an independent definition
for myself as a woman? . . . The only way that I can see myself making
definitions is in a provisional and polemical one: I construct my defini-
tion as a woman not in terms of a womans putative essence but in terms
of words currently in use. Man is such a word in common usage.
(1988: 77)
Spivaks definition of woman, not in terms of some putative essence, but
grounded in the tension between the binarism of man and woman, de-
stabilizes any discursive essentializing of man. In short, her construction of
woman in relative rather than essentialist terms simultaneously under-
mines attempts to narrate man in essentialist rather than relativist terms.
As indicated already, one of the advantages of literature is that as a discipline
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 279

its boundaries are not too strictly defined. In addition, as Spivak suggests,
literary discourse tends to tease out the several representations of a problem
as a solution itself, rather than seek some final solution in an attempt to
arrive at discursive closure. These disciplinary characteristics are advanta-
geous on a number of levels, and I would like to illustrate what I have been
suggesting thus far by engaging in a particular reading of two selected texts.
The texts I have chosen are Hilary Beckless historical narrative Natural
Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados and Earl
Lovelaces novel The Wine of Astonishment. The focus of these texts is black
agency and gender construction in, respectively, the plantation slavery era in
Barbados and the postemancipation colonial period in Trinidad.

Narrating Gender and Agency in Hilary Beckless Natural Rebels

Both narratives struggle with the challenge of representing an historically

and ontologically degraded black Caribbean personhood and womanhood.
The challenge or struggle (recalling the first part of this essays title) that these
two narratives engage is twofold. There is the discursive challenge of locating
and foregrounding agency against a formidable hegemonic discourse that
would deny such volition and agency. In addition, there is the danger of
remaining within the conceptual trap of metaphysical binarism, simply in-
verting stereotypical polarities in the attempt to represent the agency of the
wretched of the earth. We will look at the strategies employed by each narra-
tive and try to gauge the relative efficacy of each.
Beckless historical narrative is involved in a disciplinary struggle with a
fairly conservative Caribbean historiography. His narrative must represent a
history of black female slave resistance and rebellion in Barbados against a
background of historical documentation and archival sources that are, for
the most part, not constitutive of the slave as agent and even less constitutive
of the agency of the female slave. How, then, might such a narrative retrieve
a doubly silenced voice from archival representations that retain the ideologi-
cal accretions of Enlightenment and imperialist delimitations of reason and
humanity and still remain within the disciplinary boundaries and narrative
conventions of history? How does such a narrative satisfactorily represent
black female slave resistance, drawing upon statistical documentation that
overlays that iconoclastic intelligence and imagination of which Nettleford
speaks, without losing sight of these premium modalities of black female
functional existence?
The challenge for Natural Rebels is to account historically for the survival,
development, and manifestation of black slave womens resistance strategies
in the face of a brutal and oppressive victimization in Barbadian plantation
280 / Glyne Griffith

society. The narrative might also be said to be an implicit discussion of gender

construction informed by metaphysical binarism, but more will be said of
this later. There is a contradictoriness in the narrative of Natural Rebels
which is evidenced as early as the works introduction. This contradictoriness
is a consequence of disruptive sites in the progression of the historical tale
because irony, ambivalence, and ambiguity, more conventionally associated
with literariness, inhere in the telling of the tale. The narrative reads against
itself, in a manner of speaking, as it struggles with its own structure. It is a
struggle between the discourse of a conservative historiography and a po-
lemical narrative desire to narrate black female slave agency out of the oth-
erness decreed it by a history of oppression and a conservative historiogra-
phy. In effect, this discursive struggle produces between the covers of Natural
Rebels a sort of schizophrenic narrative, a type of embattled two-ness
reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBoiss use of that phrase (1999: 1011). The text
functions as a struggle between disciplinary desire to remain within the bor-
ders of history and discursive desire to imaginatively narrate black female
agency out of the dehumanizing underbelly of plantation slave society in
Barbados. Beckless introduction presents the earliest evidence of the conflict
that will ensue:

The forces of oppression and resistance are paramount throughout, as

their dimensions emerge forcefully from the evidence. Rarely do the
data express the actual views of women, and this represents one of the
primary difficulties encountered in writing. Psycho-historical methods
and techniques have not yet taken root in Caribbean historiography,
and scholars are now acutely aware that existing methods are limited in
terms of reaching behind plantation-based data and into the daily lives
of slaves (1989: 45).

As the task of Natural Rebels is to represent the natural rebelliousness of

black slave women in Barbados and yet remain within the boundaries of
traditional historical discourse, leaning heavily on historical evidence, the
works introduction prepares the reader to read against the grain of the over-
whelmingly statistical and demographic data presented in the narrative. The
reader is challenged to reach behind plantation-based data in order to read
rebelliousness into a narrative of historical evidence that would traditionally,
because of the particular epistemological and ontological constraints inform-
ing the evidence, seek to negate narratives of resistance. In reaching behind
the statistical data to read the natural rebelliousness of slave women, the
reader is perhaps inadvertently led to ponder: Is the naturalness of this female
rebellion the product of that always already resistance that is coexistent
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 281

with the will-to-power, or is it the by-product of metaphysical binarism, an

ahistorical, asocial naturalness to be associated, within the dialectic of gen-
der, with womans otherness?
Frequently in Natural Rebels, reaching behind or reading into the putative
master narrative of historical evidence to recognize resistance demands that
the surface narrative of historical evidence be read as a continuous metaphor,
standing in, as metaphors do, for the narrative of resistance that lies sub-
merged beneath the historical data. The early sections of Natural Rebels
indicate, for example, that bell hooks, Klein, and Mannix and Cowley ac-
knowledge that it is very difficult for scholars to express in the language of
the social sciences the results of the sexual exploitation, infection, nutritional
deficiency, daily observation of death and sickness, and the physical torture
that characterized the middle passage. But all generally agree that those
women who did survive as healthy individuals possessed extraordinary abili-
ties and capacities (28).
This inference, derived from what can be said within the domain of social
science language or available historical evidence, offers a glimpse of a subtext
that is arguably twice repressedby the hegemonic discourse of those who
have the capacity to speak and represent authoritatively on the one hand, and
by disciplinary boundaries and procedures that impose additional discursive
restrictions on the other. If we assume that part of the difficulty of expressing
slave womens humanity and agency in the language of the social sciences
results from the distancing and objectification consequent on empirical and
statistical representation, is there a potential risk of narrating that humanity
and rebelliousness within the stereotypical confines of metaphysical
binarism, even as one seeks to reach behind the plantation-based data? In
other words, is the intelligence and imagination that resists mere statistical
commodification of human existence qualitatively different as a result of
gender? Part of the difficulty with which Natural Rebels seems to struggle is
the location of the source of black slave womens rebelliousness. One prob-
lem may be the narratives attempt to suggest slave womens more profound
brutalization and consequent subjugation as a result of gender, while simul-
taneously acknowledging that in the plantation fields little attention was
paid to gender difference.
In the second chapter of the text, for example, the narrative draws on
historical data and indicates not only the slavers perception of female cargo
as potentially more docile than male cargo but also the increased likelihood
of successfully induced female docility because of the potential for more ef-
fective brutalization of female cargo: Voyage reports show that women,
unlike men, experienced less policing on deckthe result of slavers percep-
tion of them as the less dangerous part of the cargo (27). In the same chap-
282 / Glyne Griffith

ter, Field Women: Beasts of Burden, we read a quotation drawn from bell
hookss work:
The traumatic experiences of African women and men aboard slave
ships were only the initial stages of an indoctrination process that
would transform the African free human being into a slave. An impor-
tant part of the slavers job was to effectively transform the African
personality aboard the ships so that it would be marketable as a doc-
ile slave. . . . African females received the brunt of this mass brutaliza-
tion and terrorization not only because they could be victimized via
their sexuality, but also because they were more likely to work inti-
mately with white families than black males. (Beckles 1989: 2728)

This would seem to suggest either a presumed predisposition to docility as a

result of being female or the slavers greater success with enforced docility
because of the female slaves arguably increased susceptibility to brutaliza-
tion as a result of her gender. We might place these observations against, say,
Bridget Breretons critique in a 1992 review of Natural Rebels, as well as
against Barbara Bushs arguments in Slave Women in Caribbean Society,
16501838 or Marietta Morrisseys in Slave Women in the New World:
Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Breretons conclusion is consonant
with the acknowledgement made by these other historians:
On the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, women slaves were mostly
field labourers, and they performed all the heaviest, most monotonous
tasks of planting, cultivation and harvesting, as well as the unskilled
jobs around the mill. Managers had no qualms about employing
women in heavy field tasks (concepts about the gentler sex had no
relevance to slaves) and gender differentiation in the field was minimal,
except for concessions made to pregnant and nursing women after the
1780s. (1992: 89)

Since these narratives seem to be in agreement that in the Caribbean

women slaves were mostly field labourers and that, as Brereton adds, so
far as field labour was concerned, the plantation regime paid little attention
to gender differentiation and, in this sense, plantation slavery was gender
blind (1992: 89), we might usefully consider whether the gender differen-
tiation so crucial to the polemic of Natural Rebels is really a consequence of
the narratives self-conscious desire to reach behind plantation-based data or
a result of the narratives own unselfconscious, binarist conceptualization of
gender.
That is to say, if the majority of female slaves in Caribbean plantation
society tended to be employed in the fields, where we are told gender differ-
entiation was minimal, might it not be more strategic for Natural Rebels to
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 283

focus its critical lens on these women who represented the majority as it
searches for the rebelliousness of Barbadian slave women? In its attempt to
reach behind plantation-based data, might the narrative not also have use-
fully attempted to reach behind patriarchys bifurcation of gender attributes
and dependence on stereotypical representations of femininity? Rather, the
narrative not only tends to seek slave womens resistance among the minority
group that worked in areas other than the fields, but it seems to focus its
examination of slave womens resistance and rebelliousness in stereotypically
gendered locales associated with domesticity and nurture.
Certainly, chapters 1 and 2 of Natural Rebels, titled Outnumbering Men:
A Demographic Survey and Field Women: Beasts of Burden, begin with
some discussion of slave womens general abuse as chattel and units of labor
in the plantation fields, but the narrative does not begin to explore and dis-
cover slave womens resistance in any significant manner until we reach those
chapters that address issues of domesticity and the plantations routine ex-
ploitation of slave womens reproductive capacity. Although it is important
to locate aspects of slave womens resistance strategies in the context of fe-
male sexuality and its abuse, it is equally important that the excavation of
these strategies of resistance not satisfy itself too quickly by resting on a
foundation of metaphysical binarism and stereotypically gendered differen-
tiation. Such would-be rebellious narratives need to avoid the ontological
fallacy embraced by Shakespeares Lady Macbeth when she implores:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up thaccess and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between
Theffect and it. Come to my womans breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on natures mischief.
(Macbeth 1.5.3747)

Did slave women need to unsex themselves to meet the cruel dehuman-
ization of slavery with equally cruel resistance strategies? Did the lack of
significant gender differentiation in the plantation fields, or resistance acts
such as infanticide make slave women less self-consciously female? Was a
stereotypical discharge of femininity the primary context in which slave
women found the opportunity for resistance? Natural Rebels would seem to
inadvertently imply as much. For example, in chapter 3, titled House
284 / Glyne Griffith

Women: The Privileged Few, the narrative recounts among other details the
story of Old Doll, a domestic slave, and her family at Newton plantation in
Barbados.
The narrative, employing evidence from the Newton plantation papers,
indicates that Old Doll and her three daughters and niece enjoyed a relatively
privileged status as household rather than field labor and that they did what
they deemed necessary to ensure, as far as possible, the continuation of such
relative privilege. We learn, for example, that a significant strategy of resis-
tance employed by Old Dolls family resided in the familys relative freedom
over its own reproductive capacity: As Dolls family consolidated its status
as housekeepers, its members also became increasingly whiter as a result of
miscegenation. Wood noted that all the girls either have or have had white
husbands, that is, men who keep them. . . . The records do not suggest that
they had any relations with slave men, but such relations seem unlikely given
the womens perceptions of elitism, authority, and self-esteem (Beckles
1989: 67).
To the extent that Doll and female members of her family used their rela-
tive positions of privilege in the plantation household to consolidate their
social status within a white, slaveholding plantocracy, we can legitimately
question their actions as acts of resistance, and yet it appears that the narra-
tive voice in Natural Rebels seeks precisely to represent their actions, includ-
ing their response to miscegenation, as bona fide acts of resistance. We are
informed that the overall image which emerges is one of womenmothers
and grandmothersstruggling to improve the intellectual and material lot of
their families against reactionary plantation policies and constraints imposed
by the wider slave system (68). Indeed, chapter 3 concludes with this obser-
vation: Based on economic and social indicators, and on their own and their
infants mortality rate, house women were part of the labor elite. Nobody
knew the true value attached to this status better than house women them-
selves, though the clue possibly lies in the fact that many would rather risk
life and limb in resistance than be sent back to the fields (70).
Here the concept of resistance has less to do with the subversion of norma-
tive stereotypes than with acquiescence to the dictates of white slaveholding
plantocratic socialization. Old Doll and her family survived, but if resistance
by slave women such as Doll and the female members of her family can be so
readily characterized as doing whatever was expedient to lighten the skin of
progeny or to avoid being returned to field labor, might we not assume that
on occasion such resistance would have been at the expense of those other
women who remained in the fields and who constituted the majority of slave
women on Newton plantation? Might we not justifiably call for a distinction,
despite the often thin line separating the two, between individualistic and
purely self-interested strategies of social and material survival, and a form of
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 285

resistance that aimed at benefiting the larger oppressed group? More impor-
tant, a narration of slave womens resistance that appears to give pride of
place to slave womens commitment to the plantocracys ideals of whiteness,
family, motherhood, and nurture, within the ontological contradictoriness of
plantation slavery, severely limits the discursive space available to the narra-
tive to represent any resistance by slave women that might have been rooted
in androgyny and infanticide, positions ideologically opposed to the plant-
ocracys idealization of womanhood and family.

Resisting the Stereotypes of Motherhood and Nurture

As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argues,

All cultures have valued motherhood, but nineteenth-century bour-
geois culture raised it to unprecedented heights of sentimentality and
thus made it especially difficult for women to tell stories about its dan-
gers and conflicts. Bourgeois idealization of mothers natural inclina-
tions for nurture and self-sacrifice virtually prohibited women from
writing realistically from a subjective stance. Or, to put it differently,
the sanctity that shrouded the conventions of motherhood virtually
dictated that women would have to embrace prescribed motherly feel-
ings when writing of their own emotions or experience. (1993: 45)
Thus a discourse that frames slave womens resistance in stereotypically
gendered terms, reading femininity as that essential otherness and opposite
of masculinity, is likely to locate female resistance at the center of patriarchal
gaze and desire, consequently losing sight of struggle and resistance occur-
ring at the periphery of such masculine-centered vision. In a brief but insight-
ful commentary on Toni Morrisons Beloved as hybrid historical text, Fox-
Genovese considers the ways in which Morrisons narrative breaks some of
the silences and bridges some of the gaps that are often insufficiently consid-
ered in typical historical readings of female slave struggle and resistance. The
focus of the narrative in Beloved is the struggle of slaves to exist and grasp for
their humanity on the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky. Sethe, one of the
novels central characters, manifests that cruel conviction that Lady Macbeth
sought unsuccessfully in Shakespeares tragedy, not for personal ambition,
but in order to continue to exist as human agent. As Fox-Genovese writes:
The figure of Sethe, standing in the woodshed, dripping with the blood of
the murdered baby girl, whose body she will not relinquish, offering her
blood-dripping nipple to the surviving infant, challenges any recognizable
image of motherhood (12).
Sethes act of infanticide is imaginatively rendered in Morrisons narrative
in an attempt to reach behind plantation-based data, recalling Beckless ad-
286 / Glyne Griffith

monishment to represent the agency and ironically the humanity of the slave
mother. Simultaneously, Morrisons sustained and intimate focus on Sethes
act of infanticide narrates the outside of the historical narrative, the un-
speakable act that a conservative historiography cannot sanction as utter-
ance within the traditional boundaries of the discipline. Fox-Genovese re-
minds us:
Beloved, the ghost of the murdered, crawling already? baby, remains
not lost, but disremembered and unaccounted for, because no one is
even looking for her. The story of her murder by her own mother, which
implicated slavery in its entirety, including the other members of the
community of slaves, was not one that anyoneblack or white, slave
or freechose to tell. So they forgot. And their forgetting, even more
than the original event, becomes a story that cannot be passed on. (1)
Thus, as the narrative struggles to utter the unspeakable, to tell its tale, it is
also struggling with its manner of telling and it is struggling with discursive
structures.
The questions that narratives are allowed to ask, the ways in which their
prevailing discourse allows them to frame their subject, will have significance
for what those narratives are finally able to say, whether the topic is Carib-
bean slave womens resistance or the plantation economys configurations of
gender. Beckless Natural Rebels implicitly recognizes that the intelligence
and imagination of which Rex Nettleford speaks in Inward Stretch, Out-
ward Reach must be privileged in order to bring the humanity and agency of
the black female slave to visibility, but the text seems insufficiently selfcon-
scious of its own discursive indebtedness to binarist conceptions of gender.
As a consequence, the narrative does not manage to fully explicate its tale of
resistance and agency even though Beckles, as an historian, is willing to em-
ploy the historical imagination. As Brereton indicates in her review of Natu-
ral Rebels,
Both Beckles and Bush suggest that the historian of Caribbean slavery
must try to transcend these difficulties [that is to say, the paucity of
hard archival evidence] by the use of historical imagination and
empathy. Beckles writes: At times it is necessary for historians to
distance themselves from documents which purport to speak for slaves
and look directly at what the slaves were in fact doing. . . . The data
deficiency can be compensated for by looking at their everyday lives.
(1992: 87)

While such hermeneutic strategies are indeed required, it is also true that
there is no looking directly at what the slaves were doing; there is no
unmediated embrace of fact and truth. Part of my argument, therefore, is that
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 287

the discursive strategy that Natural Rebels employs to excavate the ontolo-
gically subterranean agency of black, female slave life in Barbados is insuffi-
ciently aware of its own indebtedness to a stereotypically binarist reading of
gender. As a result, the narrative participates in the inadvertent othering of
the feminine, and consequently loses sight of strategies of female slave resis-
tance, rebellion, and agency that might not have been grounded in the nor-
mative femininity and dominant discourse of the plantation house, but might
have been unearthed in the unsexed, androgynous conditions demanded by
resistance in the fields and by other antimaternal resistance acts such as in-
fanticide.

Narrating Gender in Earl Lovelaces The Wine of Astonishment

Let us turn our attention now to a fictional work that also employs the
historical imagination to grapple with difficulties similar to those addressed
by Natural Rebels. Earl Lovelaces The Wine of Astonishment is a narrative
that implicitly recognizes that imperialist and patriarchal discourses are intri-
cately intertwined. Lovelaces novel is discursively consonant with narratives
such as Toni Morrisons Beloved or Caryl Phillipss Cambridge. Although the
novel takes the postemancipation period rather than the plantation slavery
period as its convenient historical moment, its discursive exploration of gen-
der construction and human agency renders it a suitable choice for compari-
son with Natural Rebels. Narrative experimentation in The Wine of Aston-
ishment attempts to subvert the discursive bifurcation of masculine and
feminine in its reading of gender, and it employs this antibinarist reading of
gender to imaginatively represent the resistance of peoples stereotypically
constituted as the passive victims of colonialism and empire. Indeed, imper-
ialisms domination of subject races constituted these peoples in terms
quite similar to patriarchys binarist rendering of woman. As Ashis Nandy
observes:
Since about the seventeenth century, the hyper-masculine over-social-
ized aspects of European personality had been gradually supplanting
the cultural traits which had become identified with femininity, child-
hood, and later on, primitivism. As part of a peasant cosmology,
these traits had been valued aspects of a culture not wedded to achieve-
ment and productivity. Now they had to be rejected as alien to main-
stream European civilization and projected on to the low cultures of
Europe and on to the new cultures European civilization encountered.
It was as part of this process that the colonies came to be seen as the
abode of people childlike and innocent on the one hand, and devious,
effeminate and passive-aggressive on the other. (1983: 3738)
288 / Glyne Griffith

In the light of Nandys observation, it is interesting to observe the dramatiza-

tion of the struggle between what he terms the hyper-masculine, over-social-
ized personality of colonial power and the passive-aggressive personality
of colonial resistance, as rendered in Lovelaces novel The Wine of Astonish-
ment.
Implicitly recognizing the limitations of binarist strategies of gender con-
struction, particularly with respect to establishing resistance narratives,
Lovelaces narrative explores gender as a continuum rather than as a struggle
between diametrical opposites. The novel attempts to offer an interdepen-
dent, interconnected representation of gender in an Afro-Trinidadian post-
emancipation context, and explores the politics of gender in terms of a dialec-
tic produced by the polarization of stereotypical masculine and feminine
traits. As a result, the logic of the narratives representation of gender sub-
verts metaphysical binarisms, and implicitly acknowledges the efficacy of a
politics of synthesis and relationality. Lovelaces narrative strategy regarding
gender avoids the pitfalls that we have observed in Natural Rebels, and thus
avoids the representation of the politics of resistance as role reversal.
Nalini Persram comments on the limitations of a gender politics that con-
templates resistance from within the cul-de-sac of binarist stereotypes and
essentialist configurations of masculinity and femininity:
[I]f woman is understood to be either inherently better or worse than
man, the political advantages to be had are very limited and generate
corresponding disadvantages. Essentialist arguments about woman as
a positive entity, one who is unlike man (indeed, conceived in direct
opposition to man) remain caught within a dualistic logic in which the
gains of one are reflected in the losses of the other. Reversing the hier-
archy upon which phallocentrism rests may be regarded as a short-term
project of emancipation: however, the new (matriarchal) order would
logically resemble the power relations through which patriarchy oper-
ated, the only exception being the existence of different subjects in the
same positions. This holds true unless, of course, one posits that womens
(natural) use of power is essentially different, although equal (at the
very least) to menswhich begs the question of why the power rela-
tions would have to be reversed in the first place (given that reversal
indicates a change of position rather than a shift in dynamic). (1994: 281)

Persrams observation helps us to further contextualize Spivaks remarks,

cited earlier, about defining woman relative to words currently in common
usage, with man being one such word. Let us now examine some of the
details of Earl Lovelaces representation of gender and agency in The Wine of
Astonishment.
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 289

The Wine of Astonishment is a literary representation of the struggle of the

Spiritual Baptist Church in colonial Trinidad against the repressive 1917
Shouters Prohibition Ordinance, which forbade the Shouter Baptist faithful
to worship in the manner of their belief. The traits associated by the English
colonizers with a peasant cosmology are represented in the narrative by the
Shouter Baptist faithful who reside in rural Bonasse. Eva, the narrator of
events, has a keen sense of herself as an individual and also possesses a strong
sense of community values. Her husband, Bee, is the pastor of the Baptist
church, and he tries his utmost to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the
old folkways of Bonasse and the new urban-oriented dispensation, sanc-
tioned by the English colonial authorities and fervently touted by a few vil-
lagers such as Ivan Morton and Mitchell. In addition, the colonial worldview
is staunchly defended and enforced in the disintegrating rural Bonasse com-
munity by automatons such as Prince, the policeman. Among those in rural
Bonasse who are most disenfranchised by the new dispensation is the stick
fighter Bolo, who represents the increasingly devalued and oppressed peasant
culture.
Bolo, with his sensitivity added to his physical prowess and decisiveness as
a stick fighter in the gayelle, personifies those traits that Ashis Nandy, for
one, argues were rejected by Eurocentric ideology and projected onto the so-
called low cultures of the colonial world. Bolo also represents a subversion of
stereotypical gender attributes founded upon the restrictiveness of binary
oppositions. Early in the narrative, Lovelace has his narrator Eva describe
Bolo:
[T]his Bolo was a special man; and not only to us, the women, to every-
body. If you have a house to build or a dead to bury, you could call him
to lend a hand, and though hes a man who fears nobody, he knows how
to laugh, and if you down to cheer you up, and he could feel sorry. (21)
Bolo internalizes stereotypical masculine and feminine attributes as a com-
plex unity rather than as mutually antagonistic principles. Indeed, it is not
really that Bolo is an alienated idealist, as Marjorie Thorpe suggests in her
introduction to the 1983 Heinemann edition of the novel, but rather that he
is a living reflection of the villages peasant cosmology, an overarching pres-
ence that embodies the villages past. As such, Bolos presence and his actions
force the village community and the Eurocentric ideologues to examine the
falsehood of ontological strategies of Blackness grounded in a discrete sepa-
ration of male and female principles, both of which Bolo embodies. The
police corporal Prince, on the other hand, exhibits the hypermasculine be-
havior that meets with the approval of the authorities whom he serves, and
thus he is one of the destabilizing forces in the village, challenging the villag-
290 / Glyne Griffith

ers peasant notions of masculinity, Africanity, and human agency. Princes

overdetermined masculinity makes him devoid of compassion. Eva says of
him:
Tall, stocky as a gru-gru tree, this policeman show no sympathy or
respect or mercy for people black like he. He was the law. The white-
man send him to do a job, and he do it, like a tank or a tractor or an
elephant gone mad, bowling over and uprooting and smashing without
human compassion or reasoning. (3536)

Eva describes Prince as an automaton, lacking compassion or reasoning

and thus lacking humanity and the capacity for agency. Consequently, when
Bolo tells the villagers that Prince must be killed, he is attempting to reestab-
lish, in village life, an equilibrium of stereotypical masculine and feminine
principles. In other words, Prince is engaged in hypermasculine behavior in
the sense outlined earlier by Nandy in his analysis of an overdetermined,
destructive masculinity. Femininity, represented as the necessary and subor-
dinate otherness of an overdetermined masculinity, is repressed in the dis-
course of the dominant group and projected onto the politically and eco-
nomically disenfranchised group. Bolo recognizes that in their response to a
repressive state power, the villagers of Bonasse have been emphasizing the
hyperfeminine traits projected onto them as subjects of empire. The villagers
react to the oppressive hypermasculinity of the colonial establishment, repre-
sented in the novel by Prince, by exhibiting behavior consistent with hyper-
femininity, epitomized by the character Primus. Such a reaction traps them in
the stereotyped otherness of metaphysical binarism, and reinforces the
establishment myth that such subject races are indeed civilizations rejects.
Bolo intuitively understands this and struggles against such destructive
logic. The village men speak of deliberations with the colonial officials, al-
though they know that this is futile. Stick fighting, that symbol of village
warriorhood, has become a caricature where the faint of heart take up hand-
kerchiefs in Buntins bar and challenge the legendary Bolo to a choreo-
graphed display of manhood. Bolo asserts his manhood, not as a deferral of
stereotypically feminine traits, but in an attempt to reestablish gender equi-
librium in the collective psyche of the village. Significantly, at the point in the
narrative where Bolo admonishes the villagers to kill Prince, the narrator Eva
provides an assessment of the village mens discomfort with Bolos sugges-
tion. Evas narrative comment highlights her own compassion and restraint
in the face of Bolos suggestion that the villagers kill Prince. It is a compassion
and restraint stereotypically associated with motherhood and nurture, but
Eva also expresses some exasperation at the villagers continued passivity,
and in consequence she gives greater resonance to the logic of Bolos position,
thus drawing closer, for example, to Sethes atypical motherhood in Beloved.
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 291

Even if not poised to kill as Sethe did, Eva seems at least willing to injure, to
maim. She ponders:
In a womans way, I could understand why these men dont know what
to say. I know as well as they that we talk to the authorities already and
that aint solve nothing and the main thing to do should be . . . I
wouldnt say kill. No not kill Prince, but at least do something to make
him feel . . . But I know this is not a easy thing for them to decide to do.
And I dont mean that they not brave. The men have to think about
more than their bravery. Because once you start against the police, you
have to continue. So I know is something they have to give proper
consideration to; but even so, I agree with Sister Ruth when she say,
But we talk to them already, and they never listen. What they expect
us to do? (38)
Evas recollection of Sister Ruths cryptic What they expect us to do?
hints at her own exasperation in the face of Corporal Princes draconian
measures and Ivan Mortons feeble representation of village interests in the
government council. Evas compassion and restraint become aligned with
Bolos recognition that assertive force is necessary. Eva agrees with Sister
Ruth that all other avenues have been exhausted, and at this point in the
narrative, there is concord between Evas association with stereotypically
feminine traits and Bolos association with stereotypically masculine traits.
Both Prince and Ivan Morton, in their eagerness to be efficient instruments
of the colonial power, repress those qualities and traits associated with nur-
ture and compassion. Ivan Mortons rejection of Eulalie, the village belle and
the woman whose femininity is characterized as complementary to Bolos
masculinity, is a symbolic rejection of village belief and tradition. Indeed,
Eulalies fascination with Ivan Morton rather than Bolo, whom she com-
plements, is narrated as a symbolic rejection of the villages complex con-
struction of gender, where masculinity and femininity are represented as
integrated, mutually enhancing characteristics rather than as antagonistic,
diametrically opposed principles. Narrative comment provided by Eva cor-
roborates such an interpretation:
Poor Eulalie. Some say she was a fool to throw way her chances with
Bolo, who she know, and go with Ivan Morton. But when I look at it,
I see that what happen with Eulalie was showing something bigger was
happening in the village right under our nose. What was happening was
that the warrior was dying in the village as the chief figure. (46)

Evas sense of the village warrior dying does not automatically assert the
notion of the warrior as male. She understands that the village warriorhood,
represented as a complex integration in each individual of stereotypically
292 / Glyne Griffith

masculine and feminine traits, has been subsumed by colonialisms binarist

representation of such traits as antagonistic and mutually exclusive prin-
ciples. The villagers in Bonasse have become the submissive, childlike group
that corroborates the hypermasculinity of characters such as Prince and Ivan
Morton. Bolo recognizes that the villages repressed masculinity necessitates
an exaggerated display of aggressive behavior.
Significantly, for his final act of violence against the villagers, Bolo chooses
Primus, who more than any other man in the village represents a hyper-
feminine passivity in contradistinction to the hypermasculine assertions of
the oppressive colonial power. Bolo intends to use the confrontation with
Primus to resurrect the villages displaced masculine traits, but the villagers
fail yet again to accept his challenge. The final confrontation between the
villagers and Bolo results not only in his death but in the death of Primuss
young daughter Muriel.
The symbolism of the dual sacrifice, male and female, suggests that a
sustained binarist separation of masculine and feminine traits, where such a
configuration establishes stereotypically gendered traits as antagonistic prin-
ciples rather than as a complex synthesis, eventually leads to disintegration of
individual and community. This dual sacrifice, which is really a composite
offering to the Spirit, is finally unworthy, because the Shouter Baptist faithful
have waited too long to resist the prohibition ordinance. As a result of sus-
tained compromise in the presence of repressive colonial demands, the
Shouter Baptist pastor Bee has engendered a disjunction between stereotyp-
ically masculine and feminine traits. Thus the final thematic emphasis of the
novel focuses upon the departure of the Spirit from the Shouter Baptist con-
gregation and its remanifestation in the steel-pan yard. The shift is from the
religious to the secular, but the Spirit is the same.
Lovelaces narrative arguably succeeds where the narrative of Natural
Rebels falters, because Lovelace implicitly recognizes the fallacy of gender
constructions grounded in binary opposites. This is not to say that The Wine
of Astonishment offers a flawless narrative which entirely escapes the hege-
monic influence of metaphysical binarism. Nevertheless, the imaginative
reaching behind historical data as well as ideological norms provides a
glimpse of ways in which narratives can renew historical data, and can rescue
human agency from calcified imagination and subordinating narrative tradi-
tions. These narrative examples suggest possible directions for interdisci-
plinarity and discursive approaches relevant to Caribbean and Black Dias-
pora studies. Hybrid narratives that problematize disciplinary fixity, issuing
not from history or sociology or ethnography or literature but simulta-
neously from all and yet specifically from none, discursive strategies that
destabilize traditional boundaries and avoid the limitations of metaphysical
binarism and positivism, are indicative of critical approaches that bespeak
 Gender, Agency, and Discourse / 293

human intelligence and imagination, offered to us as premium modalities of

functional existence.

Bibliography

Bannet, Eve Tavor. Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Fou-
cault, Lacan. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Beckles, Hilary McD. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in
Barbados. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Brereton, Bridget. Searching for the Invisible Woman. Slavery and Abolition 13,
no. 2 (1992).
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Norton, 1999.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in
the Narratives of African-American Women. Elsa Goveia Lecture, Department of
History, University of the West Indies, Mona, 1993.
Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment. London: Heinemann, 1983.
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Nettleford, Rex. Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1993.
Persram, Nalini. Politicizing the Feminine, Globalizing the Feminist. Alternatives
19 (3) (1994): 275313.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Translators preface to Of Grammatology, by Jacques
Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.
294 / Joseph C. Dorsey

11

It Hurt Very Much at the Time

Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic

Joseph C. Dorsey

A sudden chorus of cries . . . About twenty women, most of them teen-aged,

and four children, came running naked and without chains from behind
the barricade, ahead of two grinning toubob with whips . . . leering at
their nakedness, some of them rubbing their fotos.
Alex Haley, Roots

Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King
one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born
from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.
Maryse Cond, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Didnt I say this was worse than prison? For another minute we stood waiting,
looking at the door. . . . it opened and a heartbreakingly handsome cabin boy . . .
came scrambling out . . . eyes crossed by what hed been through.
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage

Most societies have somewhere in their histories a belief, practice, or point of

view of rape as a confirmation of alienation, on the one hand, and a hege-
monic register for the distribution of masculine desire, on the other. Rape,
however, is neither natural nor universal. It is an acquired deviation from
basic human instincts of sexual desire, a common display of a pathological
behavior that is learned. It is evident in societies that essentialize masculine
and feminine conduct as an active/passive polarity. Women and men are vul-
nerable to rape in any group or community that predicates gender differen-
tiation on oppositional formulas of male aggression and female docility.1
With emphasis on textual performance, this essay examines a series of
rapes that took place on the slave ship Jess Mara between December and
January of 184041. Correspondences between historical practices of sexual
violence and theoretical constructions of female identity within the orature
and literature of racialized discourses predicated on black slavery in the
Americas form core concerns. Highlighting the internal and external identi-
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 295

ties of sexual violence in slave-based societies from the perspective of patriar-

chy and the language that endorses it, this exercise supports the position that
rape constitutes a culture of its own. More specifically, it marks slave ship
rape as an introduction to the rearrangement of engendered culture associ-
ated with movement from one side of the Atlantic to the other.2 Victimiza-
tion, however, did not come without resistance. Acts and recollections of
forced sex during the middle passage encouraged the production of codepen-
dent discourses that upheld theories and practices of power through varied
conventions of communication, on the one hand, and independent counter-
discourses that rejected them, on the other.
Obviously, different views and conditions informed sexual activity differ-
ently over time. While rape for some people in certain places was taken as
standard sexual behavior, for other people, be they in the same places or in
others, it was seen as deviant. Thus, from one segmented social role to an-
other, rapeand its recollectionmust be understood polyvalently. In other
words, the experience of rape, the encoding of its memory, and the storage of
its memory, all reflect a variety of cross-textual or intertextual activities that
continuously engage each other at multiple levels of harmony, hostility, and
neutrality at the time of oral or written retrieval. In the case of the Jess
Mara, different male-dominated discourses brokered textual reconstruc-
tions of rape. The narrative structure and rhetorical figurations in the reports
of this case are mediated at various junctions of patriarchal exchange. How-
ever, these textual activities also mark the emergence of rape as a countertext
voiced by the young Africans who experienced it. Their narrative strategies
identify the unities, stabilities, weaknesses, and ruptures of internal relations
between two forms of patriarchal discourse: Spanish slavery and British abo-
litionism. Rhetorical figures create tensions that ferret out the counterdis-
cursive ties of their story. As interventions, such activity subverts male-domi-
nated readings of the text.
Links between rape and slavery in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century
were formulated on many dynamics. The socioeconomic order rendered
black slavery and sugar production inseparable. However, compared to
other tropical settings in the AmericasJamaica, Antigua, Saint Domingue
(Haiti), and Brazil, for examplesugar did not begin to dominate the colo-
nial economies of Cuba and Puerto Rico until the latter half of the 1700s. But
late agrarian development in the Spanish Caribbean collided with Great
Britains international antislave trade campaign. While it is clearly under-
stood that master-slave relations were based on mythical, discursive opposi-
tions between the Subject (Self) and the Object (Other), concerns in Madrid,
Havana, and San Juan for continued access to African captives necessitated
new constructs of slave formation.
British forces labored from the 1820s to the 1870s to stop African slave
296 / Joseph C. Dorsey

traffic to the Spanish islands and elsewhere. Against such efforts new proto-
cols of social transition, or resocialization, emerged, from African freedom,
inherent in the subjectified Self, to American bondage, imposed on the objec-
tified Other. For slave masters, sexual rearrangementshere, cultural impo-
sitions emanating from a different vision of gender relations, a vision that
redefined codes of sexual conduct for newly captured Africanswere tradi-
tional constituents of social control. While resocialization, with its constitu-
ents, signaled the slow and varied transition from African to African Ameri-
can or Creole identity throughout the history of black slavery in the Atlantic
world, in the nineteenth century old elements combined with new ones. From
logs, journals, and published memoirs we know that slave ship rape was at
once an instrument of resocialization and a kinesic or physical assertion of
masculine hegemony. However, legal protest against it was new and short-
lived, the mere by-product of a changing global order that changed little vis-
-vis the politics of race and the structures of gender relations as a social
system. Like its predecessorinscribed, canonical silencevoiced opposi-
tion to rape had no impact on the quality of human behavior.

Slavery, Patriarchy, and the Culture of Rape

Patriarchy and slavery bred violent conditions that established rape as a cul-
ture within a culture. Rape takes the form of a culture in itself in any society
(1) that condones aggressive male sexuality as natural, (2) whose legal prac-
tices suggest that sexual violence is a normal activity, (3) whose legal prac-
tices differentiate the Subject and Object of sexual violence according to race,
class, and gender, or (4) whose ethics system allows space for the promotion
of the image of heterosexual coitus based on models of violent behavior.3
Furthermore, many societies endorsed rape at one time or another as a justi-
fiable expression of bellicose behavior between distinct ethnic, racial, or na-
tional groups.
Historically, sexual violence against women occurred under one or more
of the following conditions: war; conquest and colonization; enslavement
and slavery; and/or radically segmented social structures. The first two iden-
tify external circumstances. The latter two merge external circumstances
with internal conditions. Reflecting a multiplicity of sociocultural relations
between the familiar and the unfamiliar, these categories correspond to sla-
very in the Americas. But in the course of oceanic voyages that separated
African captives from their homelands, rape was also a specific rite of pas-
sage, a forced crossing of visible and invisible frontiers which marked the
transition from external stranger (new captive) to internal stranger (creolized
slave).4 In this fashion, among others, the Atlantic was a sexual threshold.
Gerda Lerners transmillennial search for the origins of female oppression
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 297

did more than demystify patriarchy as a social edifice.5 For many, her asser-
tion that patriarchy formed the model for slavery is now a scholarly given. If
we follow her lead, slave ship rape became a liminal device that served patri-
archal interests by further separating the crosscurrents of African and Afri-
can American identity. Therefore, the act and the memory of slave ship rape
served together as reductivist instruments of patriarchal pedagogy by con-
flating boundaries that separated African constructions of race, class, and
gender, on the one hand, and cultural politics based on ethnic or national
identity, on the other.
Slavery divided gender into multiple abstractions that gave rise to many
behavioral scripts. Moving barriers between sex and class and sex and race
emphasized the plurality and elasticity of femininity in slave-based societies.
Moreover, they reinforced patriarchy as the only acceptable source of mascu-
line identity. Rapists were either members of the slaveholding class, and
therefore true patriarchswhose wealth and power stemmed from the ra-
cialization of economic controlor they were faux patriarchs and, therefore,
nonmen.6 Standing outside the slaveholding class, white nonmen (sailors,
petty traders, overseers, maroon hunters) and black nonmen slave and free
(sailors, plantation aides, et cetera) who engaged in forced sex with slave
women gained temporary access to legitimate masculinity as society defined
it. Both a discourse and a social behavior buttressed by, and rendered insepa-
rable from, conventions of oral, written, and kinesic communication, patri-
archal identity in slave-based societies shaped the prototype for bona fide
manliness.

Slavery and the Litigation of Rape

Nineteenth-century slave formations in the Spanish Caribbean were different

because colonial, national, and international relations of power underwent
radical and contradictory change. But as a social expedient and a psychologi-
cal malady, the rape of slave women remained scripted as a behavioral con-
stant. As an introduction to slave status, and a confirmation of that status,
sexual violation continued to function as a pedagogical instrument that com-
bined alienation and familiarity. What did change, nonetheless, in the con-
text of nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean slavery, was the aftermath of
rapethat is, the victims responses to it.
Eighteenth-century Spanish imperial reforms included laws simulta-
neously designed to ameliorate, reinforce, expand, and perpetuate slavery.7
The creation of the Sndico Protector de Esclavos was central to this effort. By
the early 1820s, as a result of the Spanish American wars of independence,
this court was limited to Cuba and Puerto Rico.8 The Anglo-Spanish anti
slave trade treaties of 1817 and 1835 had a great impact on the uses and
298 / Joseph C. Dorsey

abuses of the Sndico Protector. There are no studies on the sndico that cover
the short years between 1789, when it was established, and 180610, when
the wars of independence began. We have no idea how it functioned in
Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina, where slavery
was moribund prior to independencedespite the efforts of the Spanish
monarchy to plantationize nearly all its colonies by exerting greater con-
trol over the acquisition of African captives from approximately 1750 to
1810. Nor do we understand how it functioned at that same time in Cuba
and Puerto Rico, where slavery, in direct association with the rise of the
Spanish colonial sugar industry, began its rapid ascent to economic preemi-
nence. What is certain is that from the 1820s onward, slaves on both islands
made use of the court as long as slavery persisted.9 On the other hand, be-
cause the bilateral accords threatened the stability of Spanish Caribbean sla-
very at its African roots, in favor of slaves the court was largely ineffective.
Futility notwithstanding, slaves sued their masters frequently and, as a result,
left a legacy of lexical treasures. Clearly and not so clearly these gems illus-
trate many semiotic struggles against the language that defined their servi-
tude.
Despite the parity or near-parity of the basic socioeconomic structures of
slavery from one Caribbean island to the other, metropolitan overlays and
infusions influenced the forces of continuity and change in these colonial
milieuxnotwithstanding, for example, the paradigmatic opposition of
Spanish settlement versus British absenteeism. In theory at least, slaves in
Spanish America always had access to legal redress. Prior to the creation of
the Sndico Protector, Spanish codes allowed slaves to voice dissent in local
magistracies, which aired civil cases called Juicios Verbales and Juicios de Paz
y Conciliacin.10 Most civil cases began in these lower courts, and they ac-
commodated all litigants regardless of race, class, or gender. With the salient
exception of the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804, which spread
to the Spanish side of Hispaniola, Spains access to slaves was not yet encum-
bered by any form of abolitionist activity that proved structurally detrimen-
tal to the empire.11 Hence, before 1810, it is likely that verdicts favoring
slaves were contingent on individual cases. But with the rise of British aboli-
tionism, which clashed with the expansion of slavery in Cuba and Puerto
Rico, verdicts against them began to form patterns of uniformity.
In terms of how slave women expressed their opposition to rape, from
their African beginnings to the births of their Creole progeny, distinctions
between engendering processes could not have been limited to Spanish
America and non-Spanish America. They must have existed within Spanish
America before and after the de jure, but not de facto, abolition of the exter-
nal slave trade in 1820. In other words, not only did the textualization of
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 299

slave dissent form a legal tradition of institutional proportions uniquely en-

demic to slave culture in Spanish Americathus offering an important vari-
ant in the comparative development of slave ethos in the American hemi-
spherebut in the nineteenth century, in what remained of Spanish America,
the text and context of slave dissent must have undergone significant change
as well.
The reengendering of African-born slave women began at captivity in the
hinterland polities from which most of them came. Rapes probably occurred
at every stage: at the moment of capture, during the march to the coast, and
in the shoreline structures that held themcastles, forts, or barracoons. Yet,
unlike historical fiction, historical data for rape on African soillinked to
Atlantic slave traffic, but prior to crossing the oceanare lacking.12 In addi-
tion, there are phallogocentrically engineered absences in memoirs authored
by captains and crews. That is, whether on the African littoral or the high
seas, most mariners-turned-writers enunciated the act of rape with silence.
When mentioned at all, it was usually in passing, in code, or even as comic
relief.13 Thus, as a textual exercise based on historical documents read
through the lens of the captives themselves, this essay marks slave ship rape
as the beginning of resocialization for African-born slave women, whether as
victims or as witnesses.
However, we are privy to the historical voices of slave ship rape only
through the medium of legal dissent, an avenue that simply did not exist
before Great Britain internationalized its antislavery crusade at the Congress
of Vienna in 1815. Hence, the chronology is limited, and doubly so. First, it
is limited to the nineteenth-century span of British abolitionism. Second, it is
limited to the Jess Mara, because the case did not inspire the international
indignation British officialdom hoped it would. Limitations notwithstand-
ing, because engendering processes among Creole slave women began with
the reengendering of their African-born foremothers, as a textual production
the case of the Jess Mara exemplifies how many slave women narrated their
ethos vis--vis sex, gender, and resistance to the conventions and deploy-
ments of patriarchal discourse.
Given that this case owes its revelation to British politics and diplomacy
rather than to internal Spanish juridical affairs, how does it illustrate social-
ization and resocialization processesalong with social semioticsin the
Spanish Caribbean? The African girls in questionfor they were children,
not adultswere not allowed to give evidence of rape in Havana, where the
initial hearings took place. They reported the atrocities of the voyage in the
Bahamas, where additional hearings were held. However, British attempts to
include rape within the discourse of their global campaign failed. Thus the
case merits emphasis neither as a catalyst nor as a watershed in the sup-
300 / Joseph C. Dorsey

pressionist history of the slave trade. Still, British narrative interventions

constitute a serendipitous discovery that contributes to the study of texts that
identify the African origins of slave womens resistance to sexual violence.
As a narrative production, the case allies textual strategy with sociocul-
tural history. It offers evidence that the tales and memories of rape on slave
ships bound for the Spanish Caribbean were inscribed and canonized as a
culture of resistance among slave women there, by the medium of an oral
tradition that inevitably hybridized as a textual element in black Creole cul-
ture in Cuba and Puerto Rico.14 By the 1820s, these two colonies were the
only Caribbean islands in the business of African slave acquisitions almost
exclusively for internal consumption.15 No, the case of the Jess Mara did
not set a precedent for future narrations of maritime rape relative to British
abolitionist discourse. But if there is an ounce of truth to the formula that, for
every westbound slave ship the British intercepted, twenty escaped detection,
its narratives point to the origins of female slave consciousness and resis-
tance.16 And this, I assert, has direct bearing on slave representation in Span-
ish juridical texts. Within and beyond the confines of this essay, I maintain
that slave women in Cuba and Puerto Ricobe they African or Creole
encouraged each other to voice and ultimately have rendered to legal text
their opposition to sexual abuse. Ideas and behaviors associated with rape
culture spelled out an enunciatory formula that was central to the foundation
and longevity of slave-based patriarchy. But a counterculture of feminine
oraturewhose double origins, the slave ship experience and the Sndico
Protector, were mutually exclusivecontinuously challenged the theory and
practice of these ideas in the nineteenth century.17 Complaints of excessive
workloads, beatings, and insufficient clothing and nourishment outweighed
complaints of rape and other forms of sexual abuse in Spanish Caribbean
court records. But rape was voiced and textualized, nonetheless, embedded
in elaborate tropes, speakerly texts, talking books, African and neo-
African forms of signification that challenged the obfuscating facade of ju-
ridically standardized Spanish by creating obfuscating textual constructs of
their own.18
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and others have shown that the roots of black liter-
ary tradition in the United States lie in slave narratives, largely the memoirs
of slaves who escaped to freedom in the 1800s, and the oral memoirs of ex-
slaves interviewed in the 1930s.19 Comparable collections are found neither
in Latin America nor in the Caribbean. Geographic delineations become even
more critical when we consider that the majority of westbound African cap-
tives arrived and served out their lives in slaveholding polities outside the
United States, between southern Brazil and western Cuba, including the
circum-Caribbean fringes such as eastern Mexico and the Bahamas.20 How-
ever, narratology teaches us that nonliterary narratives are comparable in
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 301

textual value and structure to literary ones.21 The testimonies of slaves in

lawsuits filed against their masters in the Spanish Caribbean (or anywhere
else) make important contributions to the study of public discourse. As such,
they are worthy of the same scrutiny that text experts give to slave narratives
from the United States.

The Final Voyage of the Jess Mara

Log records for the Jess Mara allege that the Spanish-owned vessel left
Puerto Rico for Cape Verde to trade in fruits and potatoes.22 Crew members
testified that the original captain, Lorenzo Ruiz, rejected the suggestion of
First Mate Vicente Morales to turn the aged brigantine into a slaver. They
also contended that after the disagreement escalated into a rift, Ruiz disap-
peared. Morales, a Puerto Rican Creole, took the captaincy and steered from
Cape Verde to Sierra Leone, first to Sherbro, then to Gallinas to take on
slaves. Despite the proximity of British Freetown, Gallinas and Sherbro
hosted some of the most active slave trading factories on the Upper Guinea
Coast.23 Within an hours reach of its destinationPonce, Puerto Ricoa
British cruiser intercepted the vessel. Seasoned officers found it in an extraor-
dinary state of disarray. Many of the captives exhibited unusual symptoms of
trauma. Without specifying original numbers, lading papers revealed high
rates of in-transit mortality: of the 129 male and 94 female survivors, 90 were
destined for long-term hospitalization in British dominion, while others died
before intensive care was available. The ages of the captives stunned the
veteran officers. Excepting a woman of twenty-one, they ranged from ten to
fifteen years of age, eleven being the average.
The naval abolitionists escorted the Jess Mara from Ponce to Havana for
bilateral adjudication by Mixed Commissions.24 Spanish and British arbiters
condemned it, made recommendations for the prosecution of its captain and
crew, and declared the captives free. During the trial, African colinguals from
the British Admiralty and British West India Regiment interpreted for the
Gang-speaking youngsters.25 Initial briefs convinced British judges that fur-
ther hearings were needed once the liberated Africans were removed from
Spanish to British dominion, the Bahamas in this instance. Though five wit-
nessesall slave tradersswore that Morales was a mild-mannered man
who earned the devotion of his crew, the Gang children painted him in a
different light. The crews allegiance to him was rooted in his penchant for
sadistic cruelty. Furthermore, it is apparent that as a Creole rather than a
Peninsula-born subject of the Spanish Crown, he harbored a decided abhor-
rence for Spaniards. For example, each of the liberated Africans depositioned
that Morales ordered Juan Bufo, a fifteen-year-old cabin boy from Spain, to
serve him a glass of rum. When Bufo accidentally dropped the bottle, Mo-
302 / Joseph C. Dorsey

rales tortured him for two or three days, little by little breaking his limbs and
disfiguring his face with sharp instruments. He then pitched the lad over-
board, though he had not yet expired. It is unclear at what point this incident
took place between Sierra Leone and southern Puerto Rico, but it was fol-
lowed by a frenzy of rape. Resistance was futile. Eight of the deponents who
reported Bufos fate were themselves beaten and violated sexually. As the
slaver was towed into the port of Havana, Morales jumped overboard. The
Audiencia Pretorial de la Habana tried him in absentia. He was sentenced to
ten years prison in an unnamed Spanish presidio in Africaeither Ceuta or
Melilla in the Maghrib, or Fernando Poo in Equatorial Guinea. He was also
prohibited from returning to Cuba.26

The Language(s) of Slave Ship Rape

Different male-dominated discourses brokered the textual reconstruction of

the attacks. The narrative organization and principal figures of speech are
mediated at polar junctions of patriarchal exchange. Simultaneous volleys of
friendly and enemy fire discouraged the facile emergence of a countertext
voiced by the victims themselves, for they were sandwiched between the hos-
tile discursivities of Spanish and British masculinities. Thus, we seek to exca-
vate a series of subject positions interred by hegemonies that actually op-
posed each other. Our tools are narrative strategies that identify the unities,
weaknesses, and ruptures of internal relations between the discursivities of
rape, and rhetorical interventions that counter male-dominated readings of
the text.
The dispositional structure of the casethe ordering and presentation of
narrative sequencespoints to a British attempt to criminalize maritime rape
as a weapon in diplomatic wranglings with Spain. It was an effort at once
unprecedented and doomed. David Turnbull was responsible for this at-
tempt. Fearless, arrogant, and energetic, as well as shrewd, eloquent, and
thoroughly devoted to the antislavery cause, not only was he the scourge of
proslavists in Cuba, he was disliked by most of his colleagues at the British
Consulate-General in Havana.27 Perhaps for that reason his presentation of
the case was a calculated arrangement of texts that aimed, among other
things, to minimize, if not hide, his direct efforts to maximize the theme of
rape. He becomes a phantom narrator, a masterful practitioner of authorial
control by manipulating authorial distance. However, a close reading of the
text will demonstrate that the victims had something more in mind.
Turnbulls correspondence in this case is uncharacteristically limitedone
missive related directly to the ships capture, the character of the crew, and
the particulars of the Africans on board.28 Furthermore, he never calls rape
by its name, though he leaves little room for doubt. He approaches the
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 303

childrens plight with the words their case altogether is one which calls for
a peculiar degree of tenderness in the arrangements to be made for their
future disposal. He then introduces the homicides with the preface it be-
comes my duty to acquaint Your Excellency [with the fact] that several of
them have been the victims of the most revolting and atrocious crimes. Rape
is then intimated when he says, In the cabin of the Jesus Maria a series of
scenes were enacted of a still more odious and disgusting character. The
defenceless condition of the young girls of the cargo afforded them no protec-
tion against the devouring lust of the slave-captain, Vicente Morales, his
pretended passengers, and his scoundrel crew. For Turnbull, rape not only
is a fate worse than death (scenes . . . more odious and disgusting), it can
be voiced only through surrogate signifiers such as cabin, girls, and
lust, with its singular rather than plural designation (lust instead of
lusts), which labels it with uniformity. The remainder of his report consists
of customary minutiae and the occasional diatribe against the violators of
international treaties.
The location of Turnbulls inexplicit reference to rape distinguishes the
narrative structure of the letter: sexual referents form the core of his textual
performance, and all documents that follow duplicate the thematic sequences
he established. He deliberately understates his input by declining to call rape
by its name. By choosing the specificity of context over text, and by refusing
to elaborate on it by any account, he empowers it morbidly with blurring
features that resemble impressionistic subtlety. Following his subliminal
lead, subsequent functionaries also placed references to rape at the center of
the text.
The next section summarizes the speech-acts of the girls themselves. Fol-
lowing the trial and condemnation of the Jess Mara in Havana, the liber-
ated Africans were settled in the Bahamas. After additional medical examina-
tions, further hearings were slated. The original depositions of the victims,
missives and memoranda between Nassau and Havana, official reports from
Nassau and Havana to the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office in London,
and letters of protest from the British ambassador to the Spanish ministers of
state, colonial, and overseas affairs in Madrid, along with exchanges among
other diplomats, center on seven principal concerns: (1) circumstances of
captivity, (2) continued treaty violations, (3) indignation over the conduct of
Morales and his crew, (4) rape, (5) anal and vaginal torture with gunpowder,
said to rid the children of worms, (6) nonsexual torture, and (7) three homi-
cides. Throughout, rape remains at the center. The syntactic structure of each
mimics the subdued catharsis of Turnbulls perlocutionaryi.e., affective,
emotionalspeech, now distant from the remainder of the text assembly
because his voice is no longer needed. The presence of his absence guides the
production throughout.
304 / Joseph C. Dorsey

The Depositions

At the Nassau hearings on February 8, 1841, a panel of British officials

queried the girls separately. They were housed apart to prevent cross-com-
munication. The hearings overall lasted several days. Though three of the
four interpreters were women, a man was chosen for the rape reports, Tho-
mas Weatherfield, an indigenous Gang-speaking Sierra Leonean soldier
from the British West India Regiment.29 His oral translations were rendered
into written text in the third person. Testimony was recorded as follows:

#167 Tumer, an African girl about 12 years, examined, states that no

Spaniard or other person had any connexion with her.
#148 Yaddi, an African girl about 14 years of age, examined, states that
one of the sailors of the Jesus Maria had connexion with her
against her will and that she was previously a virgin.
#147 Cumba, a girl about 14 years of age, examined, states that one of
the crew of the Jesus Maria, a black man, forced her to have
connexion with him, and against her will.
#171 Mamber, a girl about 11 years of age, examined, states that one of
the crew of the Jesus Maria held her while another had connexion
with her, they were black men, she was hurt very much at the time.
#169 Mania, a girl about 13 years of age, examined, states that the
captain of the Jesus Maria held her nose and mouth to keep her
from screaming, and had connexion with her, she was hurt very much
at the time.
#140 Mattu, a girl about 15 years of age, states that a black man, one
of the crew of the Jesus Maria, held her mouth and beat her with
a rope, to have connexion with her, and she cried after the rape had
been perpetrated.
#157 Lah, a girl about 11 years of age, states that one of the sailors of
the Jesus Maria threatened to kill her if she did not allow him to
have connexion with her, and that he hurt her very much at the time.
#159 Cheta, a girl about 12 years of age, states that a white sailor on
board the Jesus Maria flogged her and had connexion with her,
that he hurt her very much, so much so that she cried.
#167 Tabbna, a girl about 14 years of age, states that the captain of the
slave vessel threatened to beat her and starve her if she did not sleep
with him, that he had connexion with her, hurt her very much, and
that she cried.
#171 Mamber; #159 Cheta; #140 Mattu; #167 Tabbna; #147 Cumba
and #168 Maballe [who did not testify] are reported by Dr. John
Richardson as being diseased with gonorrhoea.
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 305

Narrative Structure and Rhetorical Activity

Sentential malformation is of no concern, for the surface meanings are clear.

At the level of syntactic operation, the statements are presented according to
cultural and sociopolitical conditions as they correspond to each act of vio-
lence, rather than the ages of the emancipadas or the numbers assigned to
them. Sequencing is marked hierarchically with building-block intensity
from the least offensive (Tumer is not raped) to the omnipotently offensive
(two rapes perpetrated by Captain Morales, one of them in his cabin). Mo-
rales not only radiates from the center of the narrative assembly, his reappear-
ance at the end functions as a phatic, a reminder, an assurance, a signifying
device that affirms and reaffirms the authority and centrality of his perfor-
mance in the text.
Though Yaddi is the second to give testimony, she is the first to address
rape as a personal kinesic experience. She establishes African identity, virgin-
ity, and the violence of its involuntary loss as primary signifiers of cultural
and ideological representation in transit from African to Creole identity.30
These signs also establish the members of the collectivity as main rather than
secondary protagonists. In statements that follow hers, there is no need to
repeat the discursive dynamics that identified her sociocultural status prior to
anatomical rupture. Yaddi foregrounds unmarked masculinity by either
omitting or failing to recall the color, race, or ethnic identity of her attacker.
By the time Cumba introduces rape with reinforced representations of ideo-
logical masculinity, forced her . . . against her will, the black identity of her
assailant is inconsequential.
Mamber nearly revives the color determinant when she states that one of
the crew . . . held her while another had connexion with her, they were black
men. But she eclipses her own efforts by privileging the force of her determi-
nation and her physical strength. When she cites her rapists need for an
accomplice, phenotype and social category and other racialized matrices are
displaced, or at least seconded, by her will to resist. Moreover, she leads the
collectivity by encouraging subversion within Western figures of speech. She
succeedswhere Yaddi does notin asserting that connexion is a weak, if
not false, metaphor for rape. As such, it cannot facilitate the transfer of her
experience from a kinesic to a linguistic event.31 She marks the transfer by
introducing pain (= much hurt) as a literal companion to the flaccid figu-
ration of connexion. The addendum is central to her resistance because it
advances an alliance between two sets of rhetorical antagonists: the imagined
similarity of metaphoric relations, and the extensions, displacements, and
subsumptions endemic to metonymic/synecdochic relations.32
Metaphors are rhetorical figures that establish an external sense of simi-
larity between entities that have no literal or tangible basis for comparison,
306 / Joseph C. Dorsey

e.g., Love is a game or Hes a pig, or She blossomed overnight. Arti-

ficial similarity is achieved through selection, condensation, or transfer. Slave
smugglers referred to each other in private correspondence and public con-
versation as Pedro, Pierre, or Peter. Slave ships were blackbirds,
and African captives packages.33 On the other hand, metonyms identify an
internal sense of contiguity through combination, correspondence, change,
or displacement. In Washington responded unfavorably to Maurice
Bishops visit and The Spanish Crown always honors its treaties, for ex-
ample, Washington and Crown are metonyms for the governments of
the United States and Spain. A synecdoche imparts the idea of a system made
of coordinating parts. It is, therefore, an organic extension of metonymic
activity. Parts are substituted for wholes, or wholes for parts, as instanced in
the command All hands on deck! or Call the law! (hands/bodies and
law/police). Metaphors promote sameness between distant or unrelated
things. Metonyms substitute entities in close proximity, usually in the context
of habit or custom. Synecdoches identify realistic relations between cause
and effect, such as the relation between a thing and the class that contains it.34
Hence connexion, at the beginning of the rape narration, is a synecdochic
metonym that Western inscription misrepresents as a metaphor. The remain-
der of evidence demonstrates struggles for textual supremacy between the
abstract proximity of connexion as a metaphor and the material proximity
of connexion as a metonym.35 What hangs in the balance is crucial.
As Paul Ricoeur observes, the semantic impertinence of the metaphor de-
stabilizes the primary reference because the former does not describe the
latter as an existing reality.36 Informing the power and authority of ambiva-
lence, his assertion works as well as it backfires. Metaphors transfer referents
to states of imaginary reality, thus creating the possibility of new realities
(e.g., African captives become packages, i.e., someones property). In this
way, connection, as a metaphor for unmarked sexual relations, accentuates
the doubt of rape, on the one hand, and its legitimacy as a pedagogical exer-
cise within the transition of identity from free and African to slave and
creolized African, on the other. In other words, connexion decriminalizes
the act of rape, just as a package dehumanizes the humanity of the captive,
while validating or promoting the inhumanity of the captor. When Weather-
field translated the word, the emancipadas recognized it as a referent that
anesthetized the atrocities they experienced. Thus, their narrative activity
attempts to modify connexion from a rhetorical sedative to a rhetorical
stimulant. In other words, they sought to move from
(A) connection + 0 = connection
to
(B) connection + pain = rape
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 307

But connexion negotiates several identities as a code. Though repeated

many times, it is a nebulous, and therefore a poor, signifying device for its
failure to acknowledge rape as a category that marks a specific kind of coital
act, thereby throwing narrative meaning into conflict with itself. As a linguis-
tic code, it is likewise obfuscating. As a cultural code, however, it serves the
allied interests of public decorum and phallogocentric escapism. Ultimately,
then, it is an emplotment device that uses disruption with subtlety. Given that
sexual violence shapes the context and the message of the girls depositions,
connexion draws attention to the theme not only as a false metaphor but
as a euphemism. From Mamber onward, the girls articulate the presence and
the function of pain. As pain is amplified with echoed repetition, it
forces the audience to accept connexion for what it really is in this case:
rape. Pain moves connexion from its position as a weak, metaphoric
referent, with dubiousyet arrogantsemantic power, to a stronger met-
onymic referent capable of extending its function into the synecdochic mode.
As a synecdochic signifier for the thing signified, connexion propels rape
forward into the realm of representation, here, self-presentation as a neces-
sary link between the historical text and the knowledge of power that in-
forms it. Intimating a relationship of convertibility between container and
content (for example, law > policeman; workers > hands; black > mulatto;
blackbird > package; logos > phallus; patriarchy > phallocentrism; con-
nexion > rape; and pain > rape), it forces into consciousness the recognition
of the totality as a whole with constituent parts.
However, if pain refashions connexion as a metonymic satellite of
synecdoche, through repetition that results in amplification, rape becomes
rhetorically totalizing and therefore oppressive. It becomes part of a homog-
enizing process that patriarchs, as authors and patrons of the master narra-
tive, impose on texts they want to represent them. Rhetorical totalization
alters, suppresses, or eliminates all elements of diversity. It is an ideological
and metaphysical assertion of textual control bent on the unity of standard-
ization. It is therefore masculine, monologic, hegemonic, imperious, and
phallogocentric. But synecdoche undermines the authority of the master nar-
rative by removing the mask of connexion, thus revealing its pits, warts,
and festering boils.37 Connexion still contains rape, but pain takes away
its disguise.
Thus Mamber, an eleven-year-old child, asserts that pain/hurt must be
inscribed alongside connexion in order for it to operate as a full-fledged
narrative device. It not only places rape within established discourses of
Western slavery, it warns against the encroaching discourses of Western abo-
lition as well. It is appropriate that the initial participation of Captain Mo-
ralesa colorless Hispanophone Creoleis situated at the center of the nine
statements. In that position his role is contextualized with polyvalent hetero-
308 / Joseph C. Dorsey

geneity.38 Even as his penetration of the girl Mania concretizes the impor-
tance of pain as a metonym that has shifted into synecdochic gear, thus
driving a wedge between the authors of ideology and their audience, his
efforts to muffle her screams amplify pain as a kind of metatextual mantra,
an effective antiphallogocentric litany voiced to the rhythm of a dirge. More
important, as a leader whose socioeconomic standing is never marked textu-
ally beyond his creole birth, the mans psychological ability to rape is vali-
dated as a conclusion that dismisses the categorical promptings of race, class,
pigmentocratic definition. A newly arrived African captive, or any African-
born slave whose process of creolization was less than readily discernible,
was called bozal, the Spanish word for muzzle, novice, raw simpleton, or
wild animal, especially a horse or a dog.39 Taken together, these meanings
identify African people(s) as complex, homogeneous, heterogeneous, intelli-
gent, industrious, and availablethat is, quintessentially desirable as slaves.
Emphasis here is placed only on the first and the last translations of bozal,
which blend, in any event, with the others. Africansin particular those
newly separated from their language groups, on the one hand, and those who
experienced longer recuperation from the shock of captivity, the rigors of the
middle passage, and the realization of permanent separation from their natal
lineages, which is to say social death, on the other handwere known for
their self-imposed silence.40 Moraless appropriation and expansion of the
canine figuration with kinesic communication (in this instance his hands)
rather than linguistic communication (his utterances) result in an atypical
blending of racism, sexism, and counterabolitionism. He already murdered a
girl named Boyce, for fear that her cries might attract antislave trade patrols
in Caribbean waters.41 In other words, one girl already died because she
chose to invert her reflexive option from the self-expression of muzzled si-
lence to the self-expression of voice. With the covering of Manias mouth, the
text attributes to Morales a counterabolitionist gesture against preaboli-
tionist bozal choice. Hence, for the captain, considering the precedent of
Boyces behavior, Mania is not only an African-born bitch, she is an Afri-
can-born bitch whose nascent post-African history must never be told.42
Albeit Mattu was also denied the traditional reflexive choice to muzzle or not
muzzle herself, the counterdiscursive force of her narrative is enhanced with
beatings and tears.
From Tumer to Tabbna, each narrative act confirms the catalytic and poly-
valent heterogeneity of bozal identity as a figure of speech that informs
conflicting discourses by oscillating not only between metaphoric and met-
onymic/synecdochic relations, but corporal and verbal forms of communica-
tion as well. For a combined example: Manias utterance of hands against
voice is a metaphoric formula that underscores her attempt to maintain the
autonomy of unmuzzled reflexivity against the displacing, polydigital impo-
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 309

sitions of the captain, whose voice we do not hear in her narration. On the
other hand, Lahs narrative is a metonymic declaration of voice against
voice, a contiguous displacement of her wishes by those of another. Thus,
kinesic and linguistic conflict are also in evidence throughout. Furthermore,
in Lahs statement, the unnamed assailant silences her voice of dissent with
the voice of his threats.
By the time Cheta is represented, the white identity of her rapist is ab-
sorbed within a metatextual production of male hegemony and female resis-
tance to it. By this time, the dispositioning of the text effectively invalidates
race, class, color, and ethnicity as masculine prefixes. No longer introduced
with external adjectival constituents suitable for mixing and matching with
hyphens, the act of rape beyond itself cannot be marked. It becomes a culture
of its own, with predicates defined, described, and applied from within.
Cheta is flogged, raped to the point of tears, and infected with gonorrhea,
which will disfigure her face and compromise her ability to bear children.
Not only is she separated permanently from her natal lineage but, despite the
certainty of her creolization, however gradual, the venereal disease may pre-
vent her from starting a lineage of her own. For her, the Western Hemisphere
is a new world and a dead world, where sunrise and sunset are the same.
Thus, in these narratives, black and white become gray, rather than red,
brown, bisque, beige, or yellow. Spanish identity and British identity, with
their cultural overlays of Catholicism and Protestantism, invert the political
distance of shades and hues with the political distance of hegemonic mascu-
linity, however real or imagined the patriarchy of its agents.
Scripted for the end, Tabbnas testimony avoids anticlimax. In theory,
after 1820 Spain agreed to end the slave trade from Africa. In practice, it
supported it with stunning success for the next forty years. Thus Turnbulls
tense relationship with Spanish bureaucrats in Cuba was profound. Yet in the
case of the Jess Mara he blunts the sharp edge of his abolitionist discourse.
His tone toward the governor of Cuba is almost conciliatory. For the first and
only time in his stormy career as a diplomat, he attempted to answer the
question: How does one undermine an enemySpainwho by official ac-
count is an ally? His strategic civility has indirect bearing on strategies in
Tabbnas testimony. Turnbull does not mention the specific names of Spanish
subjects in this case until some time after he alludes to the acts of rape. But he
associates the crime with the incorrigible character of a Spanish Creolein
this case, a Puerto Ricanrather than a Spaniard.
Though Tabbna is not the first emancipada to refer to Moraless role in the
sex crimes, she is the only deponent to place his abuse within the confines of
a privileged physical space. Cabin is an invisible sign rendered visible
through the verbal activity of sleep. It is not only the captain who threatens
her with whippings and starvation, it is a Spanish subjectnot a Spaniard
310 / Joseph C. Dorsey

but a definitive Spanish subjectwho consummates the atrocity in his exclu-

sive quarters. And it is from these confines that he speaks. The subtext re-
configures Morales as a high Spanish officer. Hence, with the collapsing of
Spaniard and Spanish Creole onto a national uniformity of inimical
behavior, cabin constitutes the most politicized metaphor in the text. Brit-
ish abolitionist discourse has now come full circle with succor from the cod-
ing strategies of Turnbulls narrative and the troping activity of African
voices. Spain denounces the slave trade in its treaties, but from the privacy of
the captains cabin, Tabbna tells us otherwise.

Abolitionism and Masculinity: Plus a change . . .

Narrative resistance takes the shape of double dissent against two ideological
extremes: patriarchy and the act of sexual molestation vis--vis the culture of
slavery, and patriarchy and the reporting of sexual molestation vis--vis the
politics of abolition. Two master narratives, one Spanish and slavist, the
other, British and antislavist, determine who gets to do what to whom and
who gets to say what to whom about it. Reading the separations and con-
junctions of these multiple fronts presents a host of analytical challenges, for
the girls oppose them all. We have already observed that some of them con-
tested the use of connexion as a euphemism. To label rape a connection
means little without pain. In this section, discursive constructions of patriar-
chy are observed in the deployment of Thomas Weatherfield to interpret for
the girls.
British authorities restricted the use of women interpreters to nonsexual
testimony. The choice is important because it allies the intrinsic sexism of
patriarchy with the changing dimensions of racism and imperialism in the
wake of rising abolitionist ideas and the polyvalent and ambivalent practices
that characterized them. The amalgam is effortless, and it suggests yet an-
other motive for Turnbulls self-imposed distance from the text. He was a
nationalist, but with a genuine Afrophilic twist. He recognized the cultural
and ideological flaws that caused the British antislave trade machine to
malfunction. Thus, he experienced ongoing difficulties with his countrymen
in Cuba, whether they were transients serving the British government as dip-
lomats, as he was, or permanent residents subject to the laws of Spain.43
Perhaps his avoidance of the word rape, his squeamishness about render-
ing its signifying specificity to text, was his way of grappling with practices of
patriarchy among Spaniards and fellow Britons alike.
Why was a man selected to interpret for the emancipadas when women
with identical language skills were available? The choice suggests that British
abolitionists placed African national, ethnic, or linguistic identity before gen-
der. This suggestion, however, evades the pervasiveness of male mediation
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 311

and the need to undermine its fixity with mobility. Conventions of racialized
patriarchy dictated that only a man could broker the sexual construction of
political discourse between black women and white men. In other words,
given the track record of interracial sexual relations in all Caribbean plant-
ocracies, including the British colonies, on the one hand, and the budding of
new gender-based contradictions within the rising discourse of Victorian
culture, on the other, sociopolitical decorum dictated that only men could
speak to men on matters of heterosexual coitusno matter how much the
proprietary authors of the master narrative promoted, demanded, and can-
onized the exclusive practice of heterosexual coitus itself.
These conflations of discursive conflict propel Weatherfield into a twilight
world of intertextual sexuality. There he must disguise the certainty of his
masculinity in order to rescue history from the uncertainty of its feminized
accounts. Operating at opposing levels of masculinity, he is abstracted tem-
porarily as a semiotic ambisexual, an ad hoc queer, an intermittent castrato.
Tzvetan Todorov refers to the temporary state of interpretation as symbolic
association, a necessary metamorphosis that allows the interpreter to assimi-
late the strangeness he or she has been commissioned to mediate.44 As the
receiver of coded messages from females, who were also newly emancipated
slaves, Weatherfield himself was coded with the nonmanhood of faux femi-
ninity. As a native speaker of Gang he is relegated to a subordinated position
as the receiver of first-person narratives, stereotyped in juridical discourse
(and others) as an inferior, emotional, and less reliable narrative form.45 As
such, it is intrinsically feminine and therefore dubiously historical. But each
time he addressed the British tribunal, he did so as a free(d) British subject,
delivering messages decoded in the dominant discourse of empire. With the
logic and reliability of third-person narration, he recovers his masculinity
recurringly from the fracture of engendered compromise. More important,
by decoding the girls messages in the third person, he reinforces the tyranni-
cal myth of historical objectivity and its metaphysical essence.

Deictic Crisis

The rhetorical activity of this narrative assembly pluralizes public and pri-
vate identity. The dominance of male mediation opens narrative fissures that
necessitate multiple readings of the text. These apertures are polyvalent rep-
resentations of sociocultural shifts based on rapid cultural transitions, not
only from African to Creole identity, but from pro- to antislavery politics as
well. Thus the rape hearings constitute multiple struggles for narrative au-
thority. As discursive spaces of continuous displacement and substitution,
they interrogate established systems of exchangesystems poorly or am-
biguously defined by the orders and protocols of male mediation. Narrative
312 / Joseph C. Dorsey

brokerage becomes a source of counterdiscursive contempt for the girls. For

them, the symbolic spatiotemporality of Weatherfields semiotic ambisexual-
ity is neither credible nor acceptable. His presence marks their absence. They
did not have to read Dante to realize that two or more entities cannot occupy
the same physical space at the same time. Hence, they endeavor to silence his
voice with theirs. As a linguistic mediator, their compatriottheir homeboy,
if you willcannot subsume their subjectivity as first-person narrators while
simultaneously subsuming his own noncommitment as an outside narrator.
As a third-person speaker who moves into the phenomenological world of
first-person speakers, he is an intruder, an interloper who seeks to discredit
the validity of their voices by commandeering their narrative responsibility.
Theirs is thus a deixis in crisis.
Deictics are words and expressions whose reference is dependent on the
circumstances of the utterance. They are situational and contextual coordi-
nates that point to time (now, then, last night, next week) and place (here,
there, this house, that school) and person (mine, yours, this girl, those men).
The hearing in Nassau obviously modified the spatiality, temporality, and
personality of the rape scenario from ship to courtroom, from January to
February, and from the first person to the third person. Fortunately and
unfortunately, these deictic pairs cannot be duplicated. We hope and perhaps
assume that the girls were never raped again, and that they never again saw
the inside of a slave ship. Hence we welcome the distinctions inherent within
the spatial deixis and the temporal deixis. In other words, the reader greets,
with a sense of relief, the passage of time from January to February, and the
passage of space from the Jess Mara to an antislavery-oriented courtroom.
But the narrative reconstruction of the kinesic events robbed the girls of their
personal deixis. The Nassau hearings result in a speech situation that is bio-
graphical rather than autobiographical. Thus they attempt to reclaim the
autobiographical privilege of their personal deictic space. They succeed by
establishing a pervasive authorial presence that removes the deictic or coor-
dinated situational interference of phallogocentric mediation. Certainly
Weatherfield disappears as the girls assert their self-representation by ad-
dressing their audiences of local arbiters, distant rapists, and distant metro-
politan bureaucrats as the objects/targets/receivers of subjectifying tropes
that turn the tables on two basic constructions of racialized patriarchy: one
slavist and colonialist, the other abolitionist and colonialist. They too
learned to command delicate systems of code play, empowering themselves in
textual triumph.
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 313

Finding Les mots pour le dire

The Faux Phallus of Penile Patriarchy: A Backgrounding of Race

Expeditions to Africa did more than free slave ship crews from the poverty
that defined their subaltern existence in western Europe and the Americas.46
They included opportunities to engage in unchecked cost-effective sex. Slave
ship rape was a perfectly focused distortion of a seignorial fantasy that few
sailors could have realized on dry land. It afforded them occasions to move
from the Object position of subaltern manhood (faux femininity or the mas-
culinity of nonmanhood) to the Subject position of patriarchy. Thus the slave
ship was a medium of moving confinement that represented temporary hege-
mony. It was an inverted threshold of retreat, a floating comfort zone of
short-term relief from the impositions of masculine subalternity.
In limited ways, within limited blocks of time (albeit large blocks), the
decks and holds of slave ships supplied crews with the phallic content to fill
the socially subordinated foundations of their penile specificity.47 Rape is an
act of violence that accentuates the concept of women as property. Though
rape has always ignored racial, national, and economic variants, for the so-
cially disadvantaged perpetrator it is a symbolic ritual that transforms the
penile reality of subalternity into the phallic fiction of patriarchy. Slave ship
rape was more than an operative or mechanism of social control; for black
nonmen and white nonmen it was an exaggerated act of self-aggrandizement
that created the illusion of proprietorship.

Victimization and Resistance: A Foregrounding of Race

Obviously rape is many things. Among them it is a semiotic that manifests
itself in two principal systems of language: kinesic communication and lin-
guistic communication. While linguistic signs often accompany the kinesics
of sexual violation, their role in the act in progress, though important, re-
mains secondary. As a subsequent act of recollection, whether by oral or
written account, the linguistic manifestation of rape assumes a primary posi-
tion. Within contexts that place the protocols of enslavement, slavery, and
emancipation in close proximity, this essay has attempted to identify textual
structures that suggest ways in which certain rape victims found the reins of
psychological control through the postrape process of linguistic reconstruc-
tion, despite efforts to suppress their authorial privilege. With the exception
of Cumba, the third of nine emancipadas queried in the case, the word
rape is not mentioned. Instead, the kinesic act of sexual violenceitself a
particular kind of physical code or languageis mediated ideologically and
reproduced linguistically as a connexion. Rather than decoding the mean-
ing of the physical act, connexion recodes it as a buffer.
314 / Joseph C. Dorsey

Operating equally as a false metonym and as a bland metaphor, it sedates

the message of rape by subsuming the precision of its violence under the
broad rubric of sex as a generic, unmarked, invariable event. Under these
circumstances, connexion without pain is as a code that blocks the de-
coding of rape as the message. Pain navigates the text as a conductor, a
contact-signifier, a rhetorical broker linking different productions of power,
as instanced in deictic struggles between first- and third-person narrators. It
is only with pain, as an authentic metonymicand ultimately synec-
dochicattribute that connection can take its proper position as a verbal
formula that counters the prescripted conflation of slavery, patriarchy, and
sexual violence. In other words, rape as the message is made complete by
rearranging the sign.48 Therefore, these mediations of female orature are less
mediated than they appear.
The narrative succeeds in relocating acts of sexual abuse within the exter-
nal dynamics of abolitionist politics and the internal dynamics of slave resis-
tance, problematizing both as subject to the restrictions of phallogocentric
discourse. Susan Brownmiller recognizes this duality of opposition when she
observes that the sexual exploitation of slave women was an evil and a given
that abolitionists understood all too well. But for all their sympathy and
empathy, they could not bring themselves to call the act by its name.49 To
overcome these multiple problemsa series of individual speech events fac-
ing opposition from two master narratives, one Spanish and slavist, the other
British and antislavistthe voices of the emancipadas must merge. By merg-
ing, the depositional segments lose their controlling monologic contours.
Each voice makes a contribution to a larger dialogue, a conversation, a
speech event that foregrounds the culture of rape, not as an independent
discourse of semiotic struggle, but as a semiotic struggle against overlapping
discourses. Reconstructed as a collectivity of formidable rhetorical energy,
they display various layers of textuality and meaning. Polyvalent readings of
these layers uncover spaces of interlocking tension between determinacy and
indeterminacy in the ever-changing production of language as social history.
In this manner, the narrative as a whole becomes a counternarrative that
interrogates discursive spaces between shifting and conflicting practices of
patriarchy.

Notes

1. Dianne Herman, Rape Culture, in Women: A Feminist Perspective, ed. Jo

Freeman, 3d ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1984).
2. A patriarchy is a society organized around the supremacy of men as heads of
families or clans. As a male-centered social construction, it is nearly synonymous with
phallocentrism. Both stress male dominance, though phallocentrism emphasizes less
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 315

paternity than symbolic sexuality. The term phal[logo]centrism combines phal-

lus, the form-approximate symbol of male authority, power, and absolute control,
and logos, the basic principle of order and reason that gives meaning to discourse.
As a linguistic term, logos is the presence, the meaning, the idea, and the intention that
reside behind the text. Thus phallogocentrism implies that masculine biases are en-
demic to language conventions. See Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, eds., The Co-
lumbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 17273, 22425. I would add that Saussurean distinctions
should be drawn between language use and language structure, the former being more
flexible than the latter.
3. These points are modified from Hermans essay cited in note 1. For discussions
that distinguish militaristic rape from civilian rape, with important summaries of
sexual violence in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, see Claudia Card, Rape as a
Weapon of War, Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996). On slavery and rape in the United States,
see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American
Autobiography, 17601865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), chap. 6 (see
references to Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Piquet); Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave
(New York: Avon, 1991); and Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women,
and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), chap. 5. For Brazil, Cuba, and the
British Caribbean, see Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugars Secrets: Race and the Erotics of
Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 19598;
Verena Martnez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A
Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), 12830; Robert Edgar Conrad, A Master Abuses His Slave
Girl: A Court Case in 1884, in Children of Gods Fire: A Documentary History of
Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 27381; and
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 16501838 (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1990), 30. Bush notes that laws in the Leewards in 1798 and
Jamaica in 1826 criminalized rape of slave women. Records do not indicate if they
were effective or if they were ever implemented.
4. This line of reasoning follows Ann Laura Stolers application of Foucauldian
thought to discursive shifts that marked transitions from mercantilistic to capitalistic
imperialism. See her critical study Race and the Education of Desire (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995).
5. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986). The theme of patriarchy remains critical in womens studies, especially in
terms of the impact of Freudian thought on language and literature. For deconstruc-
tive approaches to Freuds paternal symbolic order, see Teresa Brennan, ed., Between
Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), part 3. Opposing notions
of historical closure, these essays read against Freudian/formalist duality, thereby
placing patriarchy and slavery in a living dominion of dead white men.
6. Regarding nonslaveholding men, black and white, I emphasize that my refer-
ences to them as nonmen are figurative, suggesting neither effeminacy nor homosexu-
ality literally. Certain social constructions of masculinity as nonmasculine and there-
fore feminine correspond comfortably with what Spivak calls the heterogeneity of
316 / Joseph C. Dorsey

colonial power. See Angela McRobbie, Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview with

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Block 10 (1985): 13. Albeit both behavioral cul-
turesmale homosexuality and effeminacyare cited in published historical litera-
ture, there is less evidence in historical documentation (archival sources) than in his-
torical novels (creative fiction). Though undoubtedly extant, neither seemed worthy
of serious legaland therefore archivalattention until after the abolition of slavery,
unless homosexual acts of sodomy involved free men, regardless of color. This is
borne out by annual data on judicial matters in nineteenth-century Cuba, such as
Joaqun Calveton, Discurso Pronunciado el 2 de enero de 1869 en la apertura de la
Real Audiencia de la Habana (Havana, 1869). In the statistical appendices of this
report for the year 1868, three cases of sodomyall homosexual and voluntary
were litigated, compared to forty-two cases of heterosexual rape, subdivided into five
categories. Covering a twenty-year period, I used these same high court records to
identify the ideological foundations of an abstracted homosexual identity associated
with Asian contract workers in western and central Cuba; see my paper Foucauldian
Coolies: Chinese Identity as an Interim Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, de-
livered at the twenty-first congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Chi-
cago, September 1998. For references to male homosexuality in postemancipation
Cuba, see Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality,
18861912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995), 83, 1078. For ex-
amples of male homosexuality, effeminacy, and transvestism in historical novels
about slavery, see Maryse Cond, Segu (New York: Viking, 1988), and Francisco
Zambrana, El negro Francisco (Havana: P. Fernndez, 1948). For homosexualized
readings in cultural studies and literary criticism based on an anthropological theory
advanced by Claude Levy-Strauss, see Kutzinski, 16668, 178, and Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990), 4045.
7. Discussions of these reforms are found in many books on nineteenth-century
Spanish Caribbean history. See, for example, Martnez-Alier.
8. On the contrived dysfunction of sndicos protectores in Cuba and Puerto Rico
in the Age of Abolition, see Joseph Dorsey, Women without History: Slavery, Juris-
prudence, and the International Politics of Partus Sequitur Ventrem in the Spanish
Caribbean, Journal of Caribbean History 28, no. 2, 1996. For its place in legal
theory, see Luis de la Rosa Martnez, Lexicn Histrico-Documental de Puerto Rico,
18121899 (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe,
1986), 107. For rape legislation vis--vis slave status in Spanish American slave-
holding societies, see Federico Castejn, Manuel Maran, Len Medina, et al., eds.,
Leyes penales de Espaa (Madrid: Instituto Editorial Reus, 1882/1936), and Joaqun
Escriche et al., eds. Diccionario Razonado de Legislacin y Jurisprudencia (Paris and
Mexico: Bouret, 1888).
9. See, for example, Benjamn Nistal Moret, Catorce querellas de esclavos de
Manat, 18691873, Sin Nombre 6, no. 2 (1973).
10. Rosa Martnez, 72.
11. As long as access to African captives was unencumbered, judges made an effort
to hear slave-based litigation with some degree of impartiality, if a verdict in favor of
the slaves freedom hung in the balance. Because the sndicos protectores in Cuba and
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 317

Puerto Rico operated during the age of international politics against the African slave
trade, slave plaintiffs usually lost court cases when manumission was at stake. See
Dorsey, Women without History.
12. Historical novels with references to rape between initial captivity and the
middle passage include Alex Haley, Roots (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976) and
Lino Novs Calvo, El Negrero (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1933). On documented evi-
dence of rape in Africa in the context of internal slavery and its internal traffic, see
Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
13. Bountiful slave-ship memoirs are underexploited by scholars with interdisci-
plinary concerns in history, linguistics, literary criticism, and the social/behavioral
sciences. Two particular works make fine, albeit unsettling, starting points: Daniel
Mannix with Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade,
15181865 (New York: Viking, 1962), and George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and
Slaving (Salem, Mass.: Marine Research Society, 1927).
14. For a conceptual overview of African resocialization in the Americas, see
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Through an African Feminist Theoretical Lens: Viewing
Caribbean Womens History Cross-Culturally, in Engendering History: Caribbean
Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara
Bailey (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995).
15. By almost exclusively I refer to Cubas short-lived position as an entrepot for
the reexport of African captives to Texas in the 1830s.
16. For the duration of the British antislave trade movement, the ratio of slave
ships captured varied from one in three to one in twenty. See, for example, David
Ross, The Career of Domingo Martnez in the Bight of Benin, 18331864, Journal
of African History 6 (1965). While patrols captured one ship in five between 1808
and 1867, they succeeded in rescuing only one in sixteen captives from slavery. See
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 9799.
17. On protest against rape through juridical and nonjuridical orature at the inter-
American level of slavery, see Mara de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The Life of
a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), 2526, and Joseph Dorsey, Rape and the Avoidance of Rape in the United
States and the Spanish Caribbean, a paper presented at the Caribbean Studies Asso-
ciation conference, Panama, May 1999. Considering differences in population distri-
bution by race and class between the two islands, more narratives of this type will be
found in Cuba, as the following tables suggest. In Boletn Histrico de Puerto Rico,
14 vols. (San Juan: Cantero Fernndez, 191426), 4:332, Puerto Rican census figures
show the steady minority of slaves in the nineteenth century:

Free Blacks Total

Year and Whites Slaves Population

1834 315,262 41,818 357,080

1846 391,874 51,216 443,090
1860 541,445 41,736 583,181
318 / Joseph C. Dorsey

For comparable years, Cubas black population, slave and free, was larger; see
Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros esclavos (Havana: Bimestre
Cubana, 1916), 32122:
Year Slaves Free Blacks
1830 310,978 112,365
1846 323,759 149,226
1860 367,758 209,407

In 1855, whites accounted for 56.8 percent of the Cuban population, according to
Ortiz, 305. In 1860, according to the Boletn Histrico, vol. 4, whites in Puerto Rico
outnumbered free blacks and slaves by 17,688 persons.
18. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-Ameri-
can Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
19. Ibid.
20. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1969), 8889.
21. For a succinct history of narratology, see Marie-Laure Ryan and Ernst van
Alphen, Narratology, in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Ap-
proaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1993), 11213. Also see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtins
influence on narratological trends is clearly in evidence. In this essay, references to
polyvalent texts and polyvalent interpretations reflect his theory of polyvocal utter-
ance.
22. This was a cover, and a thin one at that. Spanish tariffs would have made the
cost of Portuguese West African foodstuffs prohibitive in the Caribbean. More impor-
tant, British diplomats had known about Ruizs illegal slave trading activities since
1834. Unless noted otherwise, all references to the Jess Mara come from the Parlia-
mentary Papers, vol. 22, Palmerston to Aston, May 11, 1841, with three enclosures;
Palmerston to Aston, May 25, 1841, with eight enclosures; Aberdeen to Aston, Octo-
ber 6, 1842; and vol. 23, Aberdeen to Aston, October 17, 1842, with two enclosures;
Kennedy and Dalrymple to Aberdeen, February 16, 1843, with four enclosures. In
vol. 22 the eighth enclosure of Palmerston to Aston, May 25, 1841, contains the
depositions of nineteen of the captives, including those of the rape victims discussed
here.
23. With the exception of sailorswho were consistently a multinational, hetero-
geneous lotSpaniards, not Creoles, handled the slave trade to Cuba and Puerto Rico
from end to end. To my knowledge, Vicente Morales was the first and last native-born
Puerto Rican to captain a slave ship.
24. The Court of the Mixed Commissions tried vessels, not captains and crews.
British members had no authority to participate in the adjudication of non-British
subjects. Criminal proceedings against Spanish subjects were left to Spanish courts if
they chose to prosecute. For summaries of the Havana branch of the Mixed Court and
the plight of the emancipados freed by it, see Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 319

Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1970), 2930, and Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 7071. For detailed discussions, see Luis Martnez-Fernn-
dez, Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in
Nineteenth-Century Havana (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1998), and Christopher
Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833
1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
25. We still do not know who the Gang were or are. Perhaps they disappeared as
a group because of the slave trade or, as a result of diminishing numbers, were ab-
sorbed by a larger polity. They ranked with the Yoruba, the Ibo, and the Congolese as
the most numerically represented in the slave trade to Cuba in the nineteenth century.
Using eighteenth-century French sources that identified them as Canga or Misr-
ables, Curtin, 185, suggests that they came from Cape Mesurado, near Monrovia.
Using five distinct sources, Ortiz also had difficulty pinpointing their origins. He
concluded, however, that their homeland was near Cape Palmas, which places them
close to the border of the Ivory Coast. This is most unlikely because, for the duration
of the Atlantic slave trade, the Ivory Coast was the most marginal participant of all
present-day nations that represented the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa. Some of
his sources indicate that they were subjugated by the Manding or some other Mande-
speaking nation, and thus expendable as slaves for overseas export. He also names
fifteen Gang subgroups from Cuban slave trade records. They included the gang-
gombuju, who were also called gang-mandinga. None of this explains why all
British antislave records show Sierra Leonean ports (except Freetown) as embarka-
tion sites for vessels laden with Gang captives. See his Hampa, 3637. Using other
works by Ortiz, Fanny Rushing concludes that gang, in the slave trade to Cuba,
referred to any of the following Sierra Leonean groups: the Gola, Kissi, Kono, Kran,
Toma, and Vai. See her Cabildos de Nacin, Sociedades de la Raza de Color:
Afrocuban Participation in Slave Emancipation and Cuban Independence, 1865
1895 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992), 22324. Some of the groups Rush-
ing names were Islamic, most notably the Vaithough it is not certain whether the
branch based at the Gallinas River, which hosted Cuban slave traders in the 1830s
and 1840s, had yet Islamized. However, neither gang nor canga appears in any
of the references I have read on Sierra Leonean and Liberian history in the nineteenth
century. Nor is the name familiar to any employee in the diplomatic service of Liberia
or Sierra Leone at the United Nations or in Washington, D.C. More confusing is the
fact that the word gang, since the sixteenth century, has referred to men with
healing/magical powers in the Congo region, several thousand miles southeast of
Sierra Leone; see John K. Thorntons The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transi-
tion, 16411718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983). In addition, in the Afro-
Cuban cult practice of Palo Mayombe, gang refers to cooking vessels and charms
used to prepare potions. Albeit believers begin ceremonies and incantations with the
Arabic greeting All praise to Allah, Islam had no representation in the Congo
regionin stark contrast to Sierra Leone, where jihad politics and slave trading often
converged. Though linked with traditional Congolese beliefs, Palo Mayombe
emerged in Cuba from the amalgamation of several African traditions. For discus-
320 / Joseph C. Dorsey

sions of ethnogenesis and the Atlantic slave trade, see Eltis, passim. These factors
encumber the possibility of making cultural statements about the Gang of the Jess
Mara. They were from Sierra Leone, nonetheless. British naval records indicate that
thousands of Gang per annum were gathered and transshipped from Gallinas,
Sherbro, and other Sierra Leonean ports. The majority of slaves on the Cuban schoo-
ner Amistad were newly arrived Gang, though Cinque was Manding; see Howard
Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). According
to Laird W. Bergad et al., the Gang accounted for 16 percent of the African slave
trade to Cuba between 1790 and 1880, and if we add Manding captives, who were
often mixed among them, the figure increases to 25 percent; see The Cuban Slave
Market, 17901880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72.
26. His persona-non-grata status could not have lasted very long. Often British
diplomats spotted him on the streets of Havana shortly after his trial. For Spanish
responses to Moraless conduct, see Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC), Reales
Cdulas y Ordenes, leg. 164 # 396, 1841, and Gobierno Superior Civil, leg. 33176,
1842. For his trial and condemnation, see ANC, Miscelnea, leg. 535 # AD. For
British responses to the Spanish prohibition of references to rape during Mixed Court
proceedings in Havana, see Archivo Histrico Nacional (Madrid), Estado, leg. 8020/
45 # 19.
27. See references to Turnbulls conflicts with codiplomats in Robert L. Paquette,
Sugar Is Made with Blood (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
On his political relations with Anglophone Antilleans enslaved in Cuba, see Dorsey,
Women without History.
28. Turnbull returned to the theme of the Jess Mara later, to address the theft of
supplies, especially blankets, that occurred on the British ship to which the eman-
cipados and emancipadas had been transferred. See FO 84/347. The thefts, attributed
to British soldiers and mariners, took place while the vessel was still in Havana.
Turnbull was particularly annoyed because the blankets were meant for liberated
Africans who were critically ill from the voyage.
29. For the West India Regiment, see Peter M. Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Mili-
tary Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York: Garland, 1993).
30. Here representation refers to cultural codes within relations of power with
respect to the extent to which speech or writing can represent a given reality. After
Yaddi, it was not necessary to establish whether or not the remaining girls were
virgins. Our lack of knowledge concerning who the Gang were (or are) manifests
itself critically here. Did they come from an acephalous society, a cluster of small,
autonomous city-states, or a centralized state? What were their community obliga-
tions according to their age-sets? Was clitoridectomy practiced? What was the suit-
able age for marriage? Was virginity a prerequisite for betrothal? What were the
socioquantitative limits of polygyny? On the other hand, it is apparent that they were
not Islamic, though they had some sort of relationship (patron-client?) with the
Manding and the Vai, who, for the most part, were. Thus, to what extent did jihad
account for their spectacular numbers in the slave trade? How many were retained for
local use? All of them testified that white men assisted black men in the destruction of
their villages. This indicates that they came from an area not far from the coast,
 Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic / 321

suggesting further that their capture was not a haphazard by-product of warring
among African nations. It was contrived, based on pacts between European buyers
and African suppliers. Who were the suppliers? If they were Sherbro chieftains, Afri-
can Creole merchants, or Muslim merchants and jihadistssuch as the Manding,
Fula, and VaiGang concentrations could have been located in both Sierra Leone
and Liberia.
31. From literary and linguistics experts I anticipate resistance to my assertion that
connexion is a metaphor, however false. Further, I wholly disagree with standard
definitions of metaphors as substitutes and metonyms as displacements. The former
displace as much as the latter substitute.
32. All rhetorical definitions, and other linguistic and literary references in this
exercise, come from Makaryk, from Childers and Hentzi, and from glossaries pro-
vided in Holquist, in Elizabeth Groszs Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New
York: Routledge, 1990), and in Stephen Bonnycastles In Search of Authority (Peter-
borough, Ont.: Broadview, 1996).
33. See, for example, James Smith, The Winter of 1840 in St. Croix, with an
Excursion to Tortola and St. Thomas (New York: privately published, 1840), as well
as numerous letters confiscated by the British Navy included in the Parliamentary
Papers series on the slave trade.
34. John Bull and Uncle Sam are metaphors for the governments of Great Britain
and the United States. Tulips, the Eiffel Tower, the palenquera (black female street
vendors from Palenquea district in Cartagena, Colombia), the coqu (a tiny singing
frog indigenous to Puerto Rico that can survive but will not sing elsewhere), and
Cantnflas are national (or regional) metonyms for the Netherlands, France, Colom-
bia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. These metonyms also function as synecdoches.
35. In the nineteenth century, the noun connexion in English referred to nonspe-
cific sexual intercourse, from a Latin portmanteau that meant to bind. Spanish-
speakers used connexion/connection in the same English context, but as a verb
instead of a substantive, or more appropriately, as a verb without need of auxiliary,
i.e., conocer, to know or to be familiar with, versus to have connection with
(have + connection = coitus). In either language to know, in the sexual sense, dates
back to the conception of Ishmael, Abraham took Hagar and knew her, which,
among other things, leaves the question of Hagars volition to guesswork. Thus con-
nexion is a container that holds two kinds of basic sexual activity: voluntary and
involuntary. The synecdochic quality of connexion in this essay is reflected in an
eighteenth-century observation about rhetorical relations (Gilbert D. Chaitin in
Makaryk, 590): metaphor = similarity / metonymy = correspondence / synecdoche =
connection.
36. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Cre-
ation of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 1978).
37. Ian Balfour, Synecdoche, in Makaryk, 63839.
38. Pluralistic value and heterogeneity are basic to Bakhtins theory of dialogism.
He maintains that no discourse exists in isolation, that many conflicting voices engage
equally in dialogue, privileging the dominance of no single linguistic registeri.e.,
there is no such thing as a monologue.
322 / Joseph C. Dorsey

39. I remain discomfited by the extent to which many historians continue to use
the word bozal without qualifying its appearance in italicized form.
40. In January of 1979, I asked Alex Haley if Kunta Kintes initial silence in Mary-
land was deliberate in the television adaptation of Roots. He assured me it was not.
A low production budget prevented the search for Mande-speakers. It thus seems to
me that a linguistic minus resulted in a linguistic plus. Except to narrate his thoughts
to the audience, we never hear Kunta Kinte speak on this side of the Atlantic until he
has been here for some time. This effectively imparts the idea of a muzzled silence self-
imposed.
41. The Audiencia Pretorial tried and sentenced Morales for the murders of Boyce,
another African, and Juan Bufo. The disappearance of the original captain, Lorenzo
Ruiz, proved inconsequential.
42. The association between slave women and the female canine referent dates
back to the nineteenth century at least. See, for example, any edition of Cirilo Villa-
verdes Cecilia Valds.
43. For life-threatening difficulties he encountered with British slaveholders who
moved to Cuba, see Dorsey, Women without History.
44. Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca: Cornell, 1982), 3940.
45. On the alleged weakness of first-person narration, Marie-Laure Ryan in Mak-
aryk, 600601, asserts, First-person narrators are prisoners of an identity, bound to
a fixed point of view. Their knowledge is limited to what is available to a single human
consciousness. Third-person narrators have unlimited knowledge, access to other
minds, and the ability to shift their point of view. . . . the question who speaks is
rarely relevant.
46. On class, the recruitment of slave ship crews, abuses perpetrated against them
by their captains, and their mortality rates, see Curtin, 28286, and Mannix and
Cowley, passim.
47. For an analysis of phallic function in the context of Freudian/Lacanian re-
search, see all essays for The Phallus Issue in Differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (1992).
48. For opposition to the idea of rape victims publicizing their experiences as a
form of personal healing and prevention, see Rene Herberle, Deconstructive Strat-
egies and the Movement against Sexual Violence, Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996). The
Gang of the Jess Mara were depositioned in sessions closed to the public.
49. Brownmiller, 165.
 Contributors

Violet Eudine Barriteau has been head of the Cave Hill (Barbados) campuss
unit of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies of the University of
the West Indies since 1993. Her publications include The Political Economy
of Gender in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean (2001) and, as coeditor,
Stronger, Surer, Bolder: Ruth Nita Barrow: Social Change and International
Development (2001). Her research focuses on feminist theorizing of post-
colonial states relations with women, and on gender and public policy.

Carolle Charles is associate professor of sociology at Baruch College of the

City University of New York. She has worked in the area of immigrant racial
formation and has published extensively on issues of gender and Haitian
concerns.

Barry Chevannes is professor of social anthropology at the Mona (Jamaica)

campus of the University of the West Indies. He is currently dean of the
Faculty of Social Sciences. His publications include Rastafari: Roots and
Ideology (1994) and Learning to Be a Man (2001).

Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler teaches in the sociology department, is director of

Womens and Gender Studies, and is codirector of the Race/Gender Resource
Center at Bucknell University. Her research and teaching areas are feminism
in Latin America and the Caribbean, and gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity,
and Latinas/-os in the United States. Her publications include, as coauthor,
Documentos del Feminismo en Puerto Rico: Facsmiles de la Historia (vol. 1,
2001).

Joseph C. Dorsey is associate professor of history and African American

studies at Purdue University. His research interests include comparative lit-
erature and cultural studies, with a concentration on Africa, Latin America,
and the Caribbean. His work on race, class, gender, and national identity has
appeared in such journals as Slavery and Abolition, Latin American Perspec-
tives, the Journal of Caribbean History, and the West Africa Review. He is the
author of Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition (UPF, 2003).
324 / Contributors

Glyne Griffith is associate professor of English at Bucknell University, where

he teaches Caribbean literature and cultural studies. His publications include
Deconstruction, Imperialism, and the West Indian Novel (1996) and Carib-
bean Cultural Identities (2001). He is presently completing a book on Henry
Swanzy and the BBC Caribbean Voices program.

Conrad James teaches Latin American literature and film studies at the Uni-
versity of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He has published widely on
Afro-Cuban literature and has just completed a book on sexuality and na-
tionhood in Afro-Cuban culture.

Linden Lewis is associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University. He

has published widely on issues of labor, the state, race, gender, and culture in
the Caribbean, including essays in Gendered Realities, edited by Patricia
Mohammed (2002), and in Caribbean Charisma, edited by Anton Allahar
(2001). He is currently completing a book on Caribbean masculinity.

Patricia Mohammed is senior lecturer at the St. Augustine (Trinidad)

campuss Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West
Indies. She has written extensively in the fields of womens and gender studies
for more than twenty years. She is the author of Gender Negotiations among
Indians in Trinidad (2001), coauthor of Caribbean Women at the Crossroads
(1999), coeditor of Gender in Caribbean Development (1998), and editor of
Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought (2002).

Rafael Ramrez is professor emeritus of anthropology and senior researcher

at the HIV/AIDS Research and Education Center of the University of Puerto
Rico, Rio Piedras. He is the author of What It Means to Be a Man: Reflec-
tions on Puerto Rican Masculinity (1999).

Hilbourne Watson is professor of international relations at Bucknell Univer-

sity. He specializes in international political economy, international relations
theory, and political theory. He has edited The Caribbean in the Global Po-
litical Economy (1994). His most recent writings on the racial and political
implications of globalization have appeared in Alternatives and Latin Ameri-
can Perspectives.
 Index
Aesthetic, 130; of calypso, 137
Agency, 275; and subjectivity, 276; black
female slave, 280
Ambisexuality, 311, 312
Androcentric societies, 241
Androgyny, 285, 287
Anti-feminist ideology, 148
Bahamas, 300, 303
Barbados, 45, 53, 61, 63, 65, 68, 86, 1089,
114, 121, 284
Barrow, Christine, 4, 6
Beckles, Hilary, 27980, 28586
Bisexuality, 10, 265. See also Sexuality
Body, 170, 174, 177, 184; sexual meaning
of the, 178, 183; the persecuted black ho-
mosexual, 267
Brereton, Bridget, 38, 40, 132, 139, 165n.20,
282, 286, 317n.14
Caribbean culture, 13
Caribbean Diaspora, 12
Caribbean male, 108
Caribbean social reality, 3
Caribbean womens movement, 3637. See
also Feminist movement; Feminist groups
Csaire, Aim, 275
Creole aesthetic, 129, 162. See also Aesthetic
Cuba, 15, 53, 69, 7780, 82, 84, 86, 111
12, 123n.3, 251, 253, 260, 26466, 297
98, 300, 302, 30910, 316n.8, 317n.17,
318n.23
Cuban society, 110, 112; homosexuality in,
268, 269n.11 (see also Homosexuality);
and man, 267; sociosexual crisis in, 267
Cultural hegemony, 2; meaning of, 11; signi-
fication of, 2
Culture, 23; black Creole, 300; form, 13; of
domination, 4
Discourse on women, 176. See also Womens
consciousness; Womens oppression;
Womens resistance; Womens sexuality
Domestic violence, 210
Dominant power system, 238. See also Power
Dominican Republic, 11516, 118
Edmondson, Belinda, 6
Enlightenment, 26, 32, 3435, 37, 279
Female docility, 281, 294
Female oppression, 296
Female slave consciousness, 300
Female and slave resistance, 287 (see also
Womens resistance)
Feminine domain, 237
Femininity, 3, 16, 9697, 122, 138, 14246,
159, 163, 204, 208, 283, 285; Indian, 159;
normative, 287; versus masculinity, 152
Feminism: lesbian feminism, 191; and
lesbianism, 202; liberal, 58; socialist, 55
Feminist activism, 205; and activists, 204,
206; analysis of, 2627
Feminist discourse, 120, 235; critique of, 278
Feminist groups, 182, 206
Feminist movements, 238
Feminist organizations, 204
Feminist struggles, 170
Feminists, 5, 2056, 209, 237; Caribbean,
28; and men, 238; Postmodern, 2728,
53, 55, 5859, 86; Third World, 169
Gay men, 110; gay and lesbian thought, 237
Gender, 57, 30, 5859, 66, 8283, 8687,
94, 173; blueprint, 16; codes, 251; con-
struct, 80; construction, 16, 136, 209, 237,
278, 280, 287; conventions, 7, 18, 95;
dialectic of, 281; difference, 224, 237, 281,
28283, 294; discourse on, 17, 54, 58; and
division of labor, 182, 184; equality, 15,
123; equilibrium, 290; global discourse on,
82, 121; globalization of discourse on, 78;
326 / Index
Gendercontinued
hierarchy, 16970, 178, 18384; identity, 3,
25, 31, 34, 4647, 56, 139, 151, 163, 237,
253; ideology, 2834, 4647; inequality,
115, 183; issues, 27, 58, 169, 237; justice,
28, 32, 38, 46; material relations of, 40;
matrix of, 209; mythology, 141, 155;
myths, 16; norms, 190; oppression, 169
170, 183, 259 (masculinity and, 257); poli-
tics of, 181, 288; power, 15, 56, 59, 67, 69,
72, 7678; relations of, 25, 36, 38, 48n.6;
representation of, 288; social relations of,
29, 61; socialization, 205; studies, 4; sys-
tems, 15, 2527, 2931, 33, 38, 40, 43, 45,
48, 64, 140; transformation, 15
Gender and agency, 288; and sexuality, 2, 8,
11, 1314, 134, 136, 139, 141, 238
Gender analysis, 7, 29, 47, 106; methodolo-
gies of, 27
Gender analytical model, 15, 26
Gender-based contradictions, 311
Gender relations, 2, 6, 15, 2829, 34, 58, 66,
71, 95, 98, 115, 12122, 134, 14445,
149, 151, 161, 164, 176, 184, 239, 296;
hierarchy of, 182; restructuring of, 87
Gender roles, 176, 183, 209; alternative, 238;
divisions of, 215
Gender and sexuality, 2, 8, 11, 1314, 134,
136, 139, 141, 238
Gendered beings, 4
Gendered locales, 283
Gendered subjectivity, 27
Global capitalism, 61; and restructuring, 54
Globalization, 53; and global change, 53
Haiti, 16972, 174, 176, 17880, 18284
Haitian Revolution, 298
Haitian women, 169
Hall, Stuart, 11617, 120
Hegemonic discourses, 170; on sexual poli-
tics, 183
Hegemonic masculinity, 254, 309; and mas-
culine hegemony, 296
Hegemonic power, 101
Hermaphroditism, 238
Heteromasculinity, 200
Heteronormativity, 208
Heterosexist community, 268
Heterosexist oppression, 266
Heterosexual, 11011, 203, 240; anxiety, 267;
construction, 201; culture, 261, 265; en-
counters, 170; entrapment, 263; masculine
identity, 251; normative structure, 191;
normalcy, 209; matrix, 191, 197, 204;
relations, 255; relationships, 261, 262
Heterosexuality, 4, 10, 17, 114, 19091,
196, 204, 20910, 255; compulsory, 198,
251, 265, 268; and the nuclear family,
205; monogamous, 253
Homosexual: connections, 267; coitus, 296;
desire, 267; identification, 111; identity,
316n.6; liberation, 268; men, 196; panic,
267, 269n.20; relations, 203; relation-
ships, 210; subculture, 269n.10; subjec-
tivity, 254, 258
Homosexual activity, 114, 196, 26465, 267;
in Havana, 254; in Puerto Rico, 17
Homosexuality, 31, 79, 81, 10910, 11315,
196, 205, 207, 210, 218, 238, 244, 247;
Cuban Revolution and, 252; cultural con-
struction of, 265; and effeminacy, 316n.6;
latent, 235; as negation of masculinity,
254; in Puerto Rico, 246; rejection of, 253
Homosexuals, 80, 11213, 207; black,
252, 265; incarceration of, 253; oppres-
sion of, 266, 269n.7; site of oppression
for, 268
Homophobia, 31, 108, 111, 113, 2056, 266;
Cuban, 268; in Cuba, 253; and homosexu-
ality, 268n.5; institutionalization of, 253
Homoerotic desire, 254, 264
Homoeroticism, 238, 24647
Homosocial: contexts, 262; relations, 259
Homotextuality, 265
Hyperfeminine traits, 290
Hypermasculine, 119, 266, 289; assertions,
292; behavior, 290
Hypermasculinity, 290
Interracial sexual relations, 311
Jamaica, 45, 10810, 11214, 12223n.2, 132
James, C.L.R., 3, 119
Jineterismo, 8285
Lamming, George, 9, 95, 119
Language of sexuality, 8. See also Sexuality
Lesbianism, 79, 81
Lesbian identity, 190, 191, 197, 210
Lesbians, 80, 11314, 19091, 196201,
2048, 210
Lesbian sex, 203

Lesbophobia, 206
Liberalism, 61. See also Feminism, liberal
Lovelace, Earl, 28788, 292
Macho, 241, 243, 24647, 25455, 259;
Cuban, 256; non-, 244; public figure, 256;
powerful, 236
Machismo, 234, 236, 25860, 262; Cuban,
252; mask of, 263; sexual culture of, 265
Male: chauvinism, 234; discourses, 246;
dominance, 184, 263, 294, 314n.2; domi-
nated discourses, 302; domination, 103;
ideology, 241; sexual inadequacy, 154;
subjectivity, 241
Male marginalization thesis, 28, 48n.3
Manhood, 6, 236, 245, 290; rights of 150;
subaltern, 313
Marginalization, 45, 31, 47, 79, 80, 111; of
men, 36, 105
Maricn, 24546; definition of, 247
Martinique, 179
Masculine: behavior, 244; desire, 294; dis-
course, 117; domain, 237; identity, 96,
234, 23637, 238, 242, 245, 297; ideolo-
gies, 234, 236237, 240, 242; mentality,
242; Puerto Rican, 17; pride, 143; subject,
197; subjectivity, 276; subalternity, 313;
weakness, 261
Masculinities, 155, 159, 302
Masculinity, 34, 6, 8, 10, 1516, 47, 5558,
6061, 76, 7981, 94, 9697, 99, 1023, Performance of masculinity, 120, 257. See
107, 110, 11416, 122, 133, 140, 151,
159, 162, 236, 24344, 285, 297, 311;
aggressive, 138, 155; attributes of, 263;
black, 155; code of, 196; constructed,
108; Cuban, 18, 251, 260; cricket and,
119; destructive, 290; discourse on, 16;
elements of, 245; fantasies of, 143; and
femininity, 102, 120, 132, 13536, 169,
237 (construction of, 197); framework of,
200; hegemonic, 55, 57, 68, 77, 103, 108
9, 112, 11415; and heterosexuality, 238;
Indian, 155; margins of, 245; metaphor
of, 115, 117; narrative of, 118; notion of,
237, 290; of nonmanhood, 313; nonmen,
315n.6; requirements of masculinity, 241;
rigid models of, 263; study of, 240; subor-
dinated forms of, 108, 115; types of, 18;
working class, 138; wounded, 36
Men: and the state, 28; subordinated, 245
Mens studies, 6
Index / 327
Misogyny, 8, 76
Misogynist, 56
Miller, Errol, 2628, 1046
Modernity, 27, 3536, 57
Nationalism, 6769, 72, 76, 78, 80, 8283;
and masculinity, 118 (see also Masculinity)
Neoliberalism, 63, 65, 85, 87 (see also Lib-
eralism)
Padula, Alfred, 15, 53
Patriarch, 185n.8, 297, 307
Patriarchal: contract, 162; culture, 80; dom-
inance, 82; domination, 102, 108, 253;
discourse, 287, 295, 299; divisions, 106;
exchange, 295, 302; gaze, 285; identity,
297; ideology, 78, 84; norms, 159; order,
83, pedagogy, 297; power, 67, 102, 1078;
practice, 32; privilege, 102; rule, 102; soci-
eties, 103, 238; standards, 103; state, 82;
strategy, 78; structure, 77, 99; system, 103
Patriarchy, 15, 19, 5556, 58, 7677, 80,
8283, 99, 1016, 108, 148, 178,231,
238, 297, 309; and slavery, 296, 315n.5;
and the act of sexual molestation, 310;
perspectives of, 295; racialized, 31112;
slave-based, 300
Patriarchys bifurcation of gender, 283. See
also Gender
Patriarchys binarist reading of woman, 287
also Masculinity
Performativity, 9596
Perversion, 190
Phallocentrism, 242, 307, 312, 314, 314n.2;
anti-, 308
Politics: of the body, 16 (see also Body); of
race, 296
Popular culture, 3, 13, 15
Postcolonial cultural critique, 276
Postmodern feminist theorizing, 58, 86
Postmodernism, 61
Postmodernists, 237
Power, 54, 59, 1013, 105, 108, 120, 162
63, 174, 23840, 24243; authoritarian
forms of, 185n.2; disparities of, 106; exer-
cise of, 97; fissures of, 197; locus of, 242;
locus of male power, 242; masculine, 197;
and masculine identities, 236; metaphor
of, 242; and pleasure, 241; the production
of, 53; and sexuality, 17, 234, 236; social
328 / Index
Powercontinued
matrix of, 98; structural, 239; structure,
240; system, 242; over women, 116
Power relations, 16, 37, 103, 121, 178, 184,
237, 297
Puerto Rican males, 117, 245, 247
Puerto Rico, 109, 11618, 19092, 198, 200,
2023, 205, 20910, 234, 24042, 297 Sex/gender: ideology, 176; system, 18384,
98, 300302, 316n.8, 317n.11, 318n.23,
321n.34
Race and sexuality, 8
Rape, 29496, 299, 300, 303, 305, 307, 313;
heterosexual, 316n.6; and slavery, 295; sce-
nario, 312; slave ship, 29697, 299, 313
Reddock, Rhoda, 56
Reengendering, 299
Relations of domination, 26, 28. See also
Power relations
Reproductive freedom, 209
Resocialization, 296, 299. See also Social-
ization
Rohlehr, Gordon, 129, 131, 134, 136, 138,
141, 148, 151, 154, 15758
Same-sex relations, 203
Sexual: abuse, 300, 314; act, 204; activity,
295; aggression, 192, 196; ambiguity, 258;
anxiety, 235; autonomy, 78; behavior,
295; beings, 197; conduct, 296; desire, 294;
difference, 195; encounters, 177, 246; en-
ergy, 254; exploitation, 314; harassment, 5,
241; hierarchy, 195; identity, 13, 85, 110,
200, 268; impotence, 256, 25859; initia-
tion, 231; norms, 176, 183, 190; objects,
176; orientation, 10, 16, 114, 210, 234,
246; passivity, 267; pathology, 11; persecu-
tion, 26768; politics, 16970, 177, 182 Women and Development Studies Project, 4
83, 242; power, 176, 254; practices, 11,
179, 183, 190; prowess, 176; relations,
171, 174, 179, 190, 241, 246; roles, 251;
symbols, 183; violation, 297, 313; violence,
19, 29596, 300, 314
Sexual relationships, 138, 198; consensual,
209; between women, 197, 204
Sexualities, 203, 208; unthinkable, 197
Sexuality, 23, 710, 12, 16, 7880, 8283, Womens reproductive capacity, 283
13536, 139, 148, 154, 163, 173, 17680,
182, 184, 205, 236, 238, 24345, 283;
acceptable, 200; aggressive male, 296;
categories of, 183; codes of, 191; cultural
assumptions of, 196; expressions of, 158;
issues of, 170; normative assumptions
about, 192; and popular culture, 78;
and power, 241, 246; representation of,
17475; and ways of seeing, 265
Sexually active, 218, 224
23738, 240, 246
Smith, Lois, 15, 53
Social identity, 73, 122, 221
Socialization, 1, 12, 17, 21516, 221, 223,
231, 299
Socializing agents, 221
Social reality, 11
Social reproduction, 17
Social relations, 7, 13, 26, 53, 59, 66, 81,
101; of gender, 62; of production, 55
Social power, 73; of capital, 66
Socialist sexuality, 79, 8081
Sodomy, 17, 19295, 2034, 209; acts of,
316n.6; anti-, 2035
State power, 59, 61, 64
Status of women, 5
St. Lucia, 116, 121
St. Vincent, 109
Subordinate men, 101; marginalized or, 102
Transgendered identity, 5
Transsexuality, 10, 238
Transvestism, 238, 316n.6
Transvestites, 10, 2078
Trinidad, 53, 69, 7375, 108, 114, 116, 121
22, 12931, 13537, 14041, 147, 152
55, 157, 161, 289
Womanhood, 279; and family, 285
Women and Development Unit, 4
Women and the state, 28
Women in the Caribbean Project, 4
Womens bodies, 169
Womens consciousness, 169
Womens oppression, 169
Womens resistance, 285. See also Female
slave resistance
Womens sexuality, 7, 208. See also Sexuality
Yelvington, Kevin, 15, 6869, 7375