This anthology of Caribbean feminist scholarships exposes gender relations as regimes of power and advances indigenous feminist theorizing. A particularly strong section of the book deconstructs marginality and masculinity in the Caribbean and provides ground-breaking research with policy implications. Of interest to scholars of feminist theory, gender studies, gender and development, post-colonial theory, and literary and cultural studies.
Based on examples of interventions in reproductive and sexual health, fatherhood, gender-based violence, livelihoods, and work with young men this book aims to provide a critical account of practical experience of work with men for gender equality and to share knowledge and expertise gained from programmes run by Oxfam GB and other organisations.
Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary voices, Global Masculinities and Manhood examines the concept of masculinity from the perspectives of cultures around the world. In the era of globalization, masculinity continues to be studied in a Western-centric context. Contributors to this volume, however, deconstruct the history and politics of masculinities within the contexts of the cultures from which they have been developed, examining what makes a man who he is within his own culture. Highlighting manifestations of masculinity in countries including Jamaica, Turkey, Peru, Kenya, Australia, and China, scholars from a variety of disciplines grapple with the complex politics of identity and the question of how gender is interpreted and practiced through discourse. Topics include how masculinity is affected by war and conflict, defined in relation to race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and expressed in cultural activities such as sports or the cinema. Contributors are Bryant Keith Alexander, Molefi K. Asante, Murali Balaji, Maurice Hall, Ronald L. Jackson II, Shino Konishi, Nil Mutluer, Mich Nyawalo, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Margarita Saona, and Kath Woodward.
A significant focus of the Nita Barrow Unit of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies has been on the centring of power in Caribbean scholarship on gender. This collection explores the theme of power to expose the disruptions and dangers lurking in Caribbean discourses on gender and love when these are approached from interrogating the currencies of power continuously circulating in their operations. Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender makes several major contributions. The chapters are vibrant and grounded in the complex realities of the contemporary Caribbean even as they challenge canonical thought. The authors simultaneously critique and create knowledge about the lives of women and men within the Caribbean and its diaspora. They employ a range of analytical frameworks to dissect history, international relations, philosophy, intimate partner violence, feminist thought and activism, mothering, masculinities, diasporic migration, international finance, entrepreneurship, erotica, and desire. The book ruptures the feminist silences around love, lust and living in Caribbean societies and discourses. It problematizes the intersections of love and power, love and the power of the erotic, and gender and the love of power. The volume offers a significant contribution to Caribbean thought by documenting the work of scholars who are creating a multidisciplinary language on relations of gender. Co-published with Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.
Gender Variances and Sexual Diversity in the Caribbean: Perspectives, Histories, Experiences is a collection of critical perspectives on fundamental questions of how sexual orientation and gender in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean are conceived, studied, discoursed and experienced. Bringing together and updating existing and in-progress scholarly work on minority genders and sexualities in the region, this collection seeks to provide a fresh set of lenses through which to examine the issues affecting people in the Caribbean who fall outside the traditional binary categories of heterosexual males or heterosexual females. Opening with a variety of perspectives - from the biological to the religious and historiographical - the volume explores definitions of sex and gender as well as constructions of sexuality among Commonwealth Caribbean scholars, and the ways in which the Judaeo-Christian tradition popular in the region has responded to these. Other chapters examine the socializing forces that reinforce or challenge conventional conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how these result in the constraining forces of social exclusion and discrimination that many members of the LGBTQ community in the region experience. The book ends with chapters that interrogate the normative standards of gender and sexuality that have traditionally underlain Caribbean popular culture. Additionally, there is an exploration of how anti-gay discourse in Jamaican dancehall, embedded in a language linked to the country's vernacular nationalism, has been neutralized by a coalition of local and international LGBTQ activists.
This valuable contribution to the exploration of masculinity as a gender construct and its manifestation in the Caribbean provides a fundamental resource that pays special attention to the interaction of power and sexuality in the creation of masculine identities in the region. Vital reading for policy makers and teachers and students of gender studies.
Beyond Homophobia: Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean aims to disrupt the conventional rendering of the Caribbean as uniquely and deeply homophobic by focusing on the experiences and agency of LGBTQ people in the region. Presenting a wide range of perspectives and approaches, this book grew out of presentations at two groundbreaking events on the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies: a symposium discussing LGBTQ experiences and research in Jamaica, and a conference that expanded the focus to provide a regional scope. Activists, artists and academics came together to challenge and change the narratives about LGBTQ issues in the Caribbean, exploring sexualities, gender identities and queer practices beyond the discourse of violence, as well as the stereotypes, assumptions and limitations presented by conventional norms around gender and sexuality. Beyond Homophobia combines a variety of academic disciplines with poetry and prose. Its contributions move from cyberspace to the dancehall, from literary analysis to ethnographic research, from pedagogical to methodological concerns, and from thoughts on the past to ideas about the future. The collection presents a range of perspectives on and techniques with which to interrogate notions of identity, sexualities, victimhood, agency, activism, fluidity, fixity, visibility, invisibility, class, homophobia, coming out, belonging and spirituality. By illuminating the lives, experiences, and research of and about the queer anglophone Caribbean, this volume represents a concerted attempt to move Beyond Homophobia.
This book explores the lived, embodied experiences of aging men as a counterpoint to the weary stereotypes often imposed on them. Conventionally, in Western cultures, they are seen as inevitably in decline. The book challenges these distorted images through a detailed analysis of aging men's life stories.
This book examines sexual power dynamics, long-held patriarchal values, and other harmful attitudes toward women in The Bahamas and Caribbean through the lens of media and law. Though gender politics is pushing these societies toward inclusivity, Storr, adopting a phenomenological framework, argues that, as sites of both reinforcement and resistance to misogynistic norms, future progress must focus on deconstructing the inequitable social institutions underlying unhealthy gender relations.
