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.
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.
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.
Gender Visibility and Erasure offers a unique way of focusing on gender by identifying the multiple contexts in which issues of visibility, invisibility, and erasure manifest, considering who is seen and who is ignored, who has voice and who is silenced, who has agency and who is controlled.
Queer Studies and Education: An International Reader explores how the category queer, as a critical stance or set of perspectives, contributes to opportunities individually and collectively for advancing (queer) social justice within the context and concerns of schooling and education. The collection takes up this general goal by presenting a cross-section of international perspectives on queer studies in education to demonstrate commonalities, differences, uncertainties, or pluralities across a diverse range of national contexts and topics, drawing a heightened awareness of heterodominance and heteropatriarchy, and to conceptualize non-normative and non-essentialist imaginings for more inclusive educational environments. Collectively, the chapters critically engage with heteronormativity and normativity more generally as a political spectrum, over a broad range of formal and informal sites of education, and against a backdrop of critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism as the frameworks through which "achievable" social change and belonging are fostered, particularly within educational settings. Taken together, the chapters assembled in Queer Studies and Education invite researchers, scholars, educators, activists, and other cultural workers to examine the multiplicity of contemporary (international) work in queer studies and education with readers' interpretations of queer's deployment across the chapters forming the compass for which to arrive at fresh insights and forms of (queer) critical praxis.
What can football among young men in Jamaica tell us about class, wealth, age, and concepts of masculinity? William Tantam presents an ethnographic study of the impact of football on men's lives in contemporary Jamaica. He illuminates how the football field relates to social and economic inequalities, and whether playing football in a mixed group has the effect of levelling the playing field between the more and less economically wealthy.Tantam presents insights into the life histories and football biographies of individuals, the relationship between wealth, education, and class, and explores how socioeconomic inequalities are embodied and enacted. With rich ethnographic detail, he analyses how the experience of watching international football matches and the English Premier League locates groups of spectators in relation to wider movements of capital. The book features case studies of individuals who play football in Jamaica, and penetrates an under-examined area in academic discussion of sport and masculinity. This will be a valuable addition to students of anthropology, sociology, football studies, cultural studies and gender studies.
The first single-authored comprehensive introduction to major contemporary research trends, issues, and debates on the anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean. The text provides wide and historically informed coverage of key facets of Latin American and Caribbean societies and their cultural and historical development as well as the roles of power and inequality. Cymeme Howe, Visiting Assistant Professor of Cornell University writes, “The text moves well and builds over time, paying close attention to balancing both the Caribbean and Latin America as geographic regions, Spanish and non-Spanish speaking countries, and historical and contemporary issues in the field. I found the geographic breadth to be especially impressive.” Jeffrey W. Mantz of California State University, Stanislaus, notes that the contents “reflect the insights of an anthropologist who knows Latin America intimately and extensively.”
