No Sex Please, We’re Feminists: Sexual Silences in Caribbean Gender and Development Studies

The last five years have seen increasing scholarly attention to Caribbean sexualities with the publication of landmark texts by several Caribbean scholars. ¹ Similarly, there are thriving regional networks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and scholars engaged in a sustained and visible programme of advocacy, activism, and transformation of Caribbean societies. For example, the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality (ECADE) was established in 2017 as a regional hub for Eastern Caribbean LGBT organizations and arose out of the leadership of St Lucian LGBT organization United and Strong. United and Strong founded the annual Caribbean Women and Sexual Diversity conference in 2013. I experienced this conference as a joy-filled, erotic space for the leadership development of primarily, though not exclusively, queer women activists (both transgender and cisgender) as well as nonbinary persons with an unrelentingly feminist politics rooted in Caribbean legacies of feminism. In this context, is there any validity to speaking of sexual silences in Caribbean feminisms? Does not naming silence at this time suggest ignorance of the established and emerging scholarship on sexualities as well as the complex realities on the ground? Have not all the silences been broken, if ever they could have been categorically said to exist?

Kamala Kempadoo, in this special issue, calls attention to the abundance of queer/LGBT activism and sexuality studies scholarship in order to highlight other areas where sexual silences still exist, complicit with injustices and inequities for many Caribbean people. In this essay, I confront sexual silences in Caribbean gender and development studies. The assertion of historical and perhaps even contemporary silences in gender and development studies and praxis is not an attempt to invalidate or to draw artificial lines between, on the one hand, the work of scholars and activists working on sexualities and sexual citizenship, literary, and cultural studies scholars and, on the other hand, that of those whose work is foundational to the establishment of gender and development studies in the region. My intention, instead, is to tell one story about the politics and praxis of feminist knowledge production in the region in order to provide insights into the processes of knowledge production from a particular group of Anglophone Caribbean feminists central to the establishment of gender and development studies at the University of the West Indies. This story demonstrates how contexts and constraints help to determine what kinds of knowledge are produced. It also demonstrates how the feminists’ priorities determined the kinds of questions they asked and those they did not. I see the rationale for this storying of the history of feminist knowledge production in the English-speaking Caribbean academy in the understanding that knowledge is never innocent. As Jacqui Alexander reminds us, the legislative success of women’s and feminist organizing against gender-based and sexual violence in Trinidad and Tobago brought with it state knowledge of women’s same-gender sexual relations as criminal. ²

Drawing on interviews with activist-scholars who played key roles in the establishment of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies/Institute for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS/IGDS) in 1993, the Women and Development Unit (WAND) and the Women in the Caribbean Project (WICP) (1979–83) ³ , it seeks to show the process of coming into consciousness of a particular group of feminists, reminding us that what is presented as established knowledge at a particular historical moment is really the confluence of negotiations, learning and unlearning, and political navigations. These three institutional sites – CGDS/IGDS, WAND, and WICP – are central to the development and institutionalization of gender studies in the English-speaking Caribbean. ⁴

My concern about sexual silences in Caribbean feminisms and gender and development studies is neither new nor unique. Caribbean feminist legal scholar and activist Tracy Robinson demonstrates how the law simultaneously produces and erases gendered power relations and how this is linked to sexed bodies. ⁵ Her analysis opens up discussion on the linkages among sex, sexed bodies, sexuality, and gender. Nonetheless, Robinson also asks “whether, as a politics, Caribbean feminism has been unwilling or unable to divest itself of heterosexual precepts.” ⁶ Her question highlights the uncomfortable fact that despite Caribbean feminist contributions to theorizing sexuality, Caribbean social science feminist work has in many ways remained silent on these very questions and staunchly heteronormative. ⁷ Indeed, a recurring theme about sexuality in Caribbean societies in general and Caribbean feminist scholarship in particular is the question of silence. Red Thread Women’s Development Programme of Guyana identifies the need to challenge “the silences around sexuality that exist in Guyanese societies and institutions,” ⁸ literary scholar Evelyn O’Callaghan argues that traditionally within Caribbean literature female sexuality is “shrouded in secrecy and shame,” ⁹ and Faith Smith notes that even though Caribbean feminist scholarship “has laid the groundwork for much recent scholarship on sexuality” it is not without its own elisions on the matter. ¹⁰ Barriteau observes that there has been no attempt by Caribbean feminists of her generation to interrogate questions of love, sexuality, and sexual relations as “possible contributing factors to the unequal relations of domination that women experience in wider society as well as intimate spaces.” ¹¹ Just as Michelle Cave and Joan French highlight sexual freedom as a human right, argue that control of women’s sexuality is a key technique of patriarchal power, and theorize Caribbean women’s same-sex sexual practice as potentially liberatory and threatening to gendered asymmetries of power, they also lament that the issue of Caribbean women’s same-sex sexual practices has been “muted” within Caribbean feminism. ¹² In short, Caribbean feminist theorizing of sexuality is concomitant with Caribbean feminist silence on sexuality. Indeed, women’s and feminist organizing in the English-speaking Caribbean and organizing around sexual rights and identities have generally remained separate, ¹³ though this has changed significantly in the last decade. ¹⁴

It has been argued that the CGDS has institutionalized the study of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean. ¹⁵ While questions of sexuality can never be entirely separated from questions of gender, to argue that the CGDS was the “institutional home” of Caribbean sexuality studies is to be too generous and to underestimate the extent to which questions of sexuality appear and disappear in much Caribbean feminist work. For example, Chevannes’s 1993 literature review demonstrates the extent to which there had been very little study of Caribbean sexuality with early anthropological efforts that sought largely to explain the pathology of black Caribbean life through focus on the family, fertility, and mating. Caribbean feminist scholarship would take time to address these gaps in the literature. ¹⁶ Caribbean feminist work on sexuality has addressed questions of sexual labor and the international political economy of sex, ¹⁷ reproduction, family planning and motherhood, ¹⁸ HIV and AIDS, and violence against women. ¹⁹ Studies of Caribbean culture, particularly of the Jamaican dancehall, have also focused on questions of Caribbean women’s (hetero)sexuality. ²⁰ More recently, questions of sexuality and citizenship have been examined. ²¹ Caribbean sexuality studies has emerged as a distinct area of inquiry is evidenced by two surveys of the field, ²² recent anthologies, ²³ and the explosion of scholarship published in the area in the last five years which destabilizes the implicit heteronormativity characteristic of the early work. ²⁴

In reflecting on their intellectual lives and scholarship, many of the scholars and activists interviewed readily admit failing to subject the question of sexuality to the same kind of scrutiny with which they examine other areas of women’s lives. I use silences in the following specific ways, drawing on the complex, contradictory, and multilayered narratives of the feminist scholar-activists whom I interviewed:

• An understanding of sexuality as private and therefore outside of academic scrutiny;
• Heteronormativity within Caribbean feminist discourse which forecloses on the theorizing and problematizing of heterosexuality itself and renders non-normative sexuality invisible;
• Strategic silences around sexuality used to preserve class-based respectability and to counter racialized and sexualized constructions of women;
• The perception that sexuality emerges more centrally within the literary than within social science or development work;
• The use of “gender” to signal a distancing from “sex”;
• They way in which the development discourse permits discussion of sexuality only in very specific, pathological, and instrumental ways such as in relation to public health, population control, reproductive health, and violence; and
• The personal and institutional risk and lack of freedom to write about sexuality as well as the (perceived) lack of conceptual and theoretical models at the time.

Caribbean feminist scholarship developed within the framework of women in development. Gender and development studies as a discipline in the Caribbean must be seen therefore as sharing a trajectory with the woman in development, women and development, and gender and development approaches of Western feminist development theory and practice. The implications of linking development with questions of gender must be examined to discover in what ways this coupling has framed and delineated, and even limited, what could and could not be analyzed. ²⁵ Knowledge is discursive and embedded in larger social processes. Women’s uncomfortable relationship to development and contradictory relationship with the state influence the kinds of questions which can be asked within a development framework – in effect delineating what can be known. Development still continues to determine the extent to which knowledge about women in the Caribbean is considered relevant. ²⁶

A gender and development discourse presupposes the foregrounding of economic questions and privileges improvement in the material relations of gender as the barometer of progress. It also presupposes a certain pathology of women’s lives where they are acted upon by government policy, economic crisis, the international division of labor even as their agency is also made visible. It simultaneously erases and produces (hetero)sexuality by promoting normative notions of men and women as partners. ²⁷ This silence around sexuality appears as an unexamined heteronormativity and facilitates the willingness of Caribbean state managers to acknowledge questions of gender equality but to insist that “gender” does not include questions of sexuality and sexual rights and freedoms.

Even a cursory glance at Sistren, a key Jamaican feminist magazine published in the 1980s and 1990s, reveals that regardless of whether an issue was dedicated to women and sustainable development, ²⁸ housing, ²⁹ women and politics, ³⁰ or women and the environment, ³¹ there is some treatment of women’s embodiment and bodily integrity or sexual health including articles on cervical cancer, HIV and AIDS, and violence against women. Further, in their special issues on sexual violence and women, sexuality, and health, these topics come into central focus. ³² Yet these areas of foci reflect what Patricia Mohammed refers to as the “clinical ways” in which Caribbean feminists dealt with sexuality at the time, which, I argue, are linked to the legitimizing framework of development in producing knowledge about women’s lives in the Global South. ³³

Questions of women’s same-gender desire were raised within the Caribbean women’s movement but were considered to be from “outside”: “The constant introduction of a problem of ‘lesbianism’ for instance seems highly contrived in the Caribbean context at the moment to me. It isn’t that there are no lesbians, nor am I trivializing concerns which lesbian women may have as individuals or as a group. But in my view homophobia is simply not an issue which has emerged directly out of the concerns of Caribbean women at the moment.” ³⁴ I suggest that questions of sexuality were outside in two ways: they were perceived as an imposition of dominant Western feminism, but they were also outside of the disciplinary boundaries of gender and development studies and outside of questions of “development” which were linked to economic progress and not to liberation.

Joycelin Massiah, who spearheaded the first major research project on Caribbean women by Caribbean researchers, identifies development as the primary concern at the time:

The concern was so much with development. It was development. I think they have to be careful with the sexuality thing because then they get bogged down with it and people start interpreting what they are saying in the wrong way and then [trails off] Tarnishing everything else. You know? So I think that they … you are describing whatever it is you mean by that and then move on but if you do that in isolation from the development thing [trails off]. ³⁵

Massiah contends that the silence on questions of sexuality in the earlier work is attributable to the focus on development at the time. Further, she suggests that a focus on sexuality could ultimately distract from what she views as the more important issue of development. If questions of sexuality are to be addressed, they should not be addressed in isolation from development. Massiah could be interpreted here as rejecting an individualized and privatized framing of sexuality, and as insisting that sexuality must be understood at its intersections with economic systems. Massiah’s comments also highlight the fact that sexuality may be elided because it is felt to be private and natural and therefore outside of analytical scrutiny. Here, her analysis resonates with that of Barriteau, who argues that an understanding of sexuality as private fails to allow for an examination of how sexuality is a part of the political economy of gender. ³⁶ On the other hand, Massiah could be interpreted as reasserting the primacy and importance of an economistic development focus and as dismissing sexuality as unnecessary distraction with the potential to “tarnish everything else,” which suggests a reassertion of sexuality as taboo or dirty. It could also suggest that inclusion of sexuality is risky in that it could compromise and jeopardize other feminist claims.

The WICP identified “relationships with males” as one of five issues which cut across the project outcomes of the individual researchers. Under this issue, two main facets were highlighted. The first was that men control women’s freedom of movement and social life in order to reduce women’s sexual and social activity with other men. The second was that marriage constituted a major restriction on their freedom; freedom is “the major area in which marriage had blocked their aspirations.” ³⁷ Women also highlighted their need for economic independence in order to ensure a more favorable position in relation to men. The WICP analysis is unreflectingly heteronormative. It fails to subject these “gender negotiations” within heterosexual relationships to significant analysis. The result is that while the WICP anticipates later work which centers questions of sex and sexuality in understanding asymmetrical relations of gender, this analysis is muted within a heteronormative and economistic gender and development discourse.

Barriteau highlights the fact that the sexual silences in Caribbean feminisms mean that both heterosexuality and non-normative sexualities were unexamined:

It is obvious that we haven’t addressed [sexuality] explicitly. Me too, sex and sexuality, I think it has been like side-bar, it has been alluded to.

I think it had something to with the way the discourse emerged, in that in the Caribbean you were looking to correct … there wasn’t a sense that … I may be on dangerous grounds but again let me just try … There wasn’t a sense that we were talking about every dimension of our lives. There was a sense as if like you’re looking to correct these things, these little things out there outside of you and your sexuality and your sexual practices were very privatized. … Certainly in my case I wanted to take on the areas that they thought didn’t have anything to do with women. … Wanting to show them that that women could talk about the economy but anything you say about the economy directly affects women. And never reflecting on where, beyond the personal things, the conversations with women about their lives and their men and those kinds of things, never reflecting on the connection until very lately with the work on politicized sexuality. ³⁸

Barriteau identifies that questions of sexuality were considered private: “There was a sense as if like you’re looking to correct these things these little things out there outside of you and your sexuality and your sexual practices were very privatized.” Because they were considered private, they fell outside of the kinds of questions which Caribbean feminists were exploring. She makes it clear that the understanding was not that all aspects of women’s lives would be examined: “There wasn’t a sense that we were talking about every dimension of our lives.” In terms of identifying her own academic interest in the political economy of gender, she was strategically interested in those aspects of life which people misconstrued as being outside of women’s domain: “Certainly in my case I wanted to take on the areas that I thought they think didn’t have anything to do with women.” The sexual, personal, and intimate had been mapped onto women in an unproblematic way and relegated to the private and devalued sphere of emotion and the feminine. Women, however, were thought to sit outside of the economy and economic relations and it was on this idea that Barriteau placed her attention. Only later in her academic career did she begin to recognize the connections between the two spheres:

However I continue to believe economic autonomy is of fundamental importance to women’s well being, our daily lives. I think my love power project tries to establish continuities between these two sites and that it is entirely correct we paid insufficient attention to sexuality, however I think it would be a mistake to minimize continuing attention to issues of women’s economic autonomy and that whatever women’s sexualities, economic autonomy is central to women’s well being. ³⁹

Barriteau insists that even though questions of sexuality were not fully explored in the literature, there was an awareness of these issues among Caribbean women and within the women’s movement: “There is certainly understanding in the women’s movement and among women in the women’s movement and Caribbean women generally that Caribbean women are very sexual, some are bisexual, some are lesbian.” ⁴⁰ Barriteau accepts the criticism of the heteronormativity that pervades much Caribbean feminist work of this period and insists that this implicit heteronormativity ensured that sexuality itself remained inadequately problematized: “Even heterosexual relations weren’t examined. So it’s unexamined sexuality of any persuasion.” ⁴¹ Ultimately, she argues that while there is a need for sexuality to be interrogated, it must not be treated as either private or divorced from questions of economic autonomy.

Mohammed, too, asserts that the understanding of sexuality as private, something not to be discussed publicly except in “clinical” ways, helps to account for sexual silences in gender and development studies scholarship:

You ever notice Naipaul don’t write about sex? He writes about it in very allusive ways. And when somebody asked him. He say how can I write about it what would my mother say. So there’s a certain reticence in the way you would discuss your sex life, the openness of sex and sexuality. It was still … certainly of my generation, my group of women. I don’t think we were open. Maybe other women were and have been, eh? But certainly mine it would not have been easy discussing details of theirs or anybody’s sex life. That was private. There is a certain way in which privacy was maintained over one’s life and thing. We deal with it in clinical ways, so rape, incest, abuse, sexual assault. ⁴²

Her narrative, as well as that of the other interviewees, suggests that to address sexuality in research would have first meant coming to terms with it personally. It is impossible to read this narrative and not consider the personal and professional risks of researching sexuality for Caribbean scholars. As Tracy Robinson articulates, “We worry that bringing ourselves into our text is simply too risky and will be our undoing in our unstable professional locations.” ⁴³ If Mohammed is correct, that in order for Caribbean feminists to research sexuality they would have had to first break the silence in their private lives, then to do sexuality research from this location is to write yourself into the text and so expose yourself to risk. This analysis from Mohammed is particularly telling, as sexuality is central to her arguments in her foundational text Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad.

Peggy Antrobus names class as a key reason why Caribbean feminists of her generation were unable to fully address questions of sexuality. She insists that while working-class women named sexuality as the source of their empowerment, middle-class women like herself were unable to confront these questions:

Things have changed so dramatically. I mean in ’75 nobody talked about violence against women. You know? So you have to get to a certain level of consciousness and a certain level of freedom and a certain level of confidence, even a certain age, before you can tackle some of those questions. Now violence against women is kind of standard. But at the beginning of the decade it wasn’t there. The whole issue of sexuality was never discussed. It’s only now being discussed. And that is because, I think, of what’s happening in North America. That I would definitely credit to them. But I think we are not ready to tackle it yet in the Caribbean. So homophobia is a major problem. And I think it’s really unfortunate that we can’t [examine] our sexuality because I also believe that that is a source of power for women. I remember, again, here’s another example, theory coming out of practice. Workshop with [redacted], I think again it might be in my book, talking about empowerment, a new word. So they’re talking to working-class women. What are their sources of empowerment? And they’re talking about spirituality and sexuality. Working-class women! And they’re not talking about having sex and they’re not talking about the church, they’re not talking about religion, they’re talking about spirituality. They say religion is oppressive, sexual activity can be oppressive. They’re talking about something completely different and we don’t deal with it. … But you see you pinpoint it and you talk about it but it never gets into the literature. And then young women, like yourself, say, how come this woman never deal with it? But it was dealt with by working-class women that were telling us … and we weren’t ready to deal with it. But I think that we’re not really going to do the work we need to do until we can to talk about it. ⁴⁴

Antrobus acknowledges that questions of sexuality emerge in people’s daily lives. However, she insists that class constraints on middle-class women’s lives at the time did not permit them to address these questions. The lack of readiness to deal with sexuality is understood as not only personal but societal and global. She argues that such questions are emerging, and feminist discourse now is seen as part of an international openness to such questions driven largely by developments in North America. She welcomes this focus on questions of sexuality and ties them to feminist social justice goals. Again, sexuality is placed outside: in this case, it is outside of middle-class respectability and instead is a discourse driven by the Global North. The women-led Caribbean LGBT activist organizations working to make the region more inclusive are beyond her imagination.

Antrobus’s comments also reflect the extent to which feminism in the Caribbean was viewed as work which a relatively privileged group of women did on behalf of less privileged women: “what emerged was a black working-class female subaltern on whose behalf claims needed to be made.” ⁴⁵ This accounts for certain elisions in both Caribbean feminist theory and practice. ⁴⁶ Sexuality can therefore be presented as a something that it is easier to address for working-class women than for middle-class women. This preserves a distinction between the working-class mothers who development programs sought to engage and the professional women working in those programs.

The edited collection Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women confirms what Antrobus says about the way in which social class limits women’s willingness to address sexuality. ⁴⁷ This volume collects women’s scribal and oral traditions as well as literature and theorizing. Carolyn Cooper argues that the oral testimonies given by working-class women are personal and intimate whereas the written testimonies provided by the middle-class members of Sistren are more guarded specifically on questions of sex and sexuality: “Yu no si se fi dem stuori no persanali diil tu dat wid no man an uman bizniz; no likl ruudnis. Bot mii naa se dem fient-a-haat bikaazn dem naa tel piipl de huol a fi dem personal an praivit bizniz – laik di ada laiyanhaat gyal dem!” ⁴⁸ The working-class sistren speak openly about their pregnancies, relationships, and sexual experiences. The middle-class sistren write their testimonies in English and reveal little about their “personal an praivit bizniz.” The intersection of notions of respectability, social class, and appropriate femininity coalesce to render sexuality taboo for some feminists.

Silence on sexuality emerges as strategic in that it counters the racialized and sexualized reductionist rendering of Afro-Caribbean women’s sexuality as excessive and bestial and of Indo-Caribbean women’s sexuality as cast in orientalizing terms. This silence meant women remained respectable – and the development discourse allowed for this silence. Research from the Caribbean also demonstrates that a woman’s respectability is staked on her sexual behavior. ⁴⁹ The Caribbean middle-class women’s movement remained particularly silent on questions of sex that were not related to reproduction, violence, and sexual health. Questions of power and pleasure have only recently taken up in the scholarship, though they, of course, have much longer, richer histories in popular culture.

WICP researcher and former Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action coordinator Margaret Gill automatically interprets my question about the treatment sexuality in Caribbean feminism to refer to non-normative sexualities and specifically to an accusation of feminist neglect of acknowledging homophobia:

If on a particular issue, there is a tremendous harm being done to a group of humanity and you are silent then the people could criticize you for it. I get a strong feeling that there was a far greater acceptance of homosexuality and lesbianism in the Caribbean before now. Barbados, when I was growing up you always hear about homosexuality, always hear about the gold coast in Barbados, St. James. You see homosexuals walking ’bout in town. People laughed. But they also belonged in communities, they belonged in families. They didn’t used to get kill off. They didn’t used to get pelt, get stoned. Beat up in bars. I get a strong feeling there was a far greater … I don’t know if the word is acceptance. Toleration. I use toleration. Toleration is the better word. Because the people who were doing the accepting feel they had the power, right? So it’s tolerating.

I get a feeling now that there’s danger to owning to those identities now that didn’t happen before. And if there is danger and if we’re not speaking out now that’s when you could criticise the Caribbean feminists. … I just get the feeling and I could be absolutely wrong but from looking at the literature I get the feeling that there’s a lot more danger now to being homosexual or a lesbian than there was in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s. And it is [because of] the perceived lack of danger on the part feminists that that did not raise its head. I don’t think that anybody could criticise Caribbean feminists of the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s of perceiving harm to groups of people and just saying, “We ain gine do nutten about it!” We were struggling in relation to work, in relation to the family in relation to education, women were struggling on all kinds of fronts. ⁵⁰

She outlines that feminist work in both scholarship and activism examines many different aspects of women’s lives. To criticize Caribbean feminists on only one issue may be to simultaneously deny the depth and breadth of their struggles. Further, she argues, homophobia is a more pressing issue now because society has become more violent and intolerant toward non-normative sexualities and gender identities. Her analysis resonates with other Caribbean feminists, such as Antrobus, who insist that temporality is important to understanding the elisions in Caribbean feminist thought. Her argument that feminist activists would not perceive injustice and decide, “We ain gine do nutten about it!” is undercut by the existence of homophobia and transphobia within contemporary women’s organizing and the ways in which some women’s organizations in the region have argued that LGBT rights cannibalize the policy space for articulating women’s rights.

Mohammed’s Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–47 takes the sites of domesticity and sexuality as its central focus. Nonetheless she indicates that there was a lack of freedom to write freely about sexuality, particularly homosexuality. Mohammed tells me:

I think it’s the freedom to write about sexuality. There’s another reason I think, [redacted]. I did do it in a way in Gender Negotiations. A whole chapter of that book is on sex and in fact on sexuality. And sexuality is the kernel of it. I am saying that it is through their sexuality they were able to free themselves. So in my Gender Negotiations I do take it on but I don’t deal with homosexuality I deal almost with a heterosexual norm. I remember once I started that research I started to talk about male homosexuality under indentureship. And the possibility that with the high proportion of men there must have been. And I presented to a class. I was talking to a class giving the ideas. I got attacked by the men in class. They didn’t want to hear. And I think the signals were there that you didn’t go in. Some areas were taboo still. You know, we could have ignored them, I admit. ⁵¹

Homosexuality as a topic of scholarly research was taboo. In a sense, so too was sexuality broadly. A discourse on gender permitted, as Gerda Lerner argued in 1986, ⁵² for some feminists to distance themselves from sex, as Mohammed comments:

I can’t remember any of us actually confronting the issues of sex and sexuality head on. I think we dealt with what we saw as gender issues. It wasn’t that we weren’t aware of it, in a sense I think we recognized that the question of control of female sexuality was at the root of what was troubling for us. But maybe we framed it differently and I think we didn’t have the language to address it. If I think of all the papers I wrote. Why is it that I didn’t sit down and write like Eudine is writing now, a paper that confronts sexuality so much? ⁵³ And Eudine and I have both talked about this. Why it took us so long to write about this, to see it as important to us. ⁵⁴

Mohammed’s separation of gender issues from sex and sexuality underscores the way in which gender as a concept and as deployed by some feminists may be bleached of its association with questions of sex and sexuality.

O’Callaghan argues that writers who have left the Caribbean are the ones who “dare to treat such issues in their work.” If this were true at the time of writing, it certainly is no longer the case. Donnette Francis argues that fiction provides the means by which “interior lives and sexual dynamics” can be explored and connected to feminist theorizing. ⁵⁵ Mohammed makes a similar point about the usefulness of the literary modes:

I personally have always felt that literature. The literary modes of presenting things are far more powerful and I saw it being done in literature. I didn’t have the skill to do it. … Maybe for us, almost unconscious that I felt other people were tackling. The last thing is that the taboo extended to [pauses] there really wasn’t an area such as queer theory. So writing about it wouldn’t have given us the theoretical ground to deal with it. ⁵⁶

Here Mohammed highlights the lack of theoretical and conceptual resources at the time as well as the limitations of seeking to render human sexuality in all its complexity, power, and contradictions through the disciplinary limits of gender and development studies. Literature, she argues, is better equipped for the task. Despite the fact that “sexual silences were prevalent in the majority of Caribbean writings until the 1990s,” ⁵⁷ it is to the work of Caribbean women writers which we must turn for alternative visions of sexual freedom. ⁵⁸ Nonfiction works such as those by M. Jacqui Alexander, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Wekker stand out as exceptions to reticence on sexuality. ⁵⁹

Interviewees, however, asserted that just because they were not researching sexuality or were researching it in limited ways (heteronormative, pathological) does not mean that consciousness-raising around sexuality and erotic autonomy did not take place within women’s and feminist groups. “Even though we didn’t write about it we were actually freeing ourselves of it, you know. We didn’t confront it on paper. But that was the struggle, that was the goal,” Mohammed asserts. Antrobus mentions sexuality as a source of power as knowledge shared by her within working-class women.

Research requires institutional and financial support. Rhoda Reddock identifies sexuality as one of her early research interests, however, she notes that there was very little funding to do the kind of work required: “One of the earliest research projects I wanted to do when I got the position as Head was research on sexuality. In fact, at the time we didn’t even have an office. I remember a colleague told me he got a grant and I said, ‘You know, we really have no support facilities.’ So we really did not have any income to do the research.” ⁶⁰ Funding and other resource constraints inhibited her ability to do this kind of research, but it still formed an integral part of her teaching:

In our teaching this was an issue we always addressed. So in my teaching on feminist theory, in my teaching on sex, gender, and society which was a course that I developed which used to be taught at Mona and which is still taught here. The whole issue of sexualities was a significant component of that course. Even in that book on masculinities, I think that was one of the first papers published in the region on the issue of what I call transgressive sexualities. ⁶¹

Concern about HIV and AIDS created the opportunity where funding was available for research on sexuality:

We taught on sexualities but it was difficult for us to research it because the funds were not available. When the HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged I saw that as the opportunity for us to begin to research sexuality. In 2003 we started a research project on gender, sexuality, and the implications for HIV. ⁶² When we did the first call a lot of abstracts came in that had no mention of sexuality or no mention of gender. We sent them back to the people or we rejected them. That was what had happened in the whole HIV discourse at the time. People were able to jump over the sex part and get to the HIV. ⁶³

Of course, researching sexuality in the context of HIV creates elisions of its own. But what is interesting here is the extent to which sex remained taboo even for researchers, who as Reddock puts it “were able to jump over the sex part and get to the HIV.” When funding became available, it did so in the context of HIV and AIDS as a public health issue.

The reasons for the silences on sexuality are many and multilayered. They relate to questions of academic freedom, risk and funding, social class and respectability, and value judgements about what the most pressing issues for women were at the time and which were private and which were worthy of academic study. They also reveal the coproduction of knowledge and power. Feminist analysis reveals how international policy promotes heterosexual partnerships as a development tool. By promoting an ideal of heterosexual partnerships where women are income earners and men who share in the caring work, caring work continues to be privatized in service of a market-dominated economic model. ⁶⁴ Far from “development” eliding questions of sexuality, development policy seeks to frame and orient sexuality. Sexuality is therefore revealed to be very much as public as the economy. Increasing activism around sexual freedom in the region and globally means that questions of sexuality have become increasingly important to Caribbean feminism. Greater awareness of as well as opposition to the sexual and citizenship rights of the Caribbean’s LGBT people is part of twenty-first-century gender consciousness. As the disciplinary boundaries of gender and development studies are pushed against from multiple and sometimes conflicting directions, sexual silences will no doubt continue to be broken in complex, creative, and complicated ways.

1. I am thinking here of recent books by Angelique Nixon, Rosamund King, and Lyndon Kamal Gill, as well as recent doctoral theses by Nikolai Attai and Krystal Ghisyawan. Krystal Ghisyawan, “Queering Cartographies of Caribbean Sexuality and Citizenship: Mapping Female Same-Sex Desire, Identities and Belonging in Trinidad” (PhD diss., University of the West Indies, 2016); Lyndon Kamaal Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), https://muse.jhu.edu/; and Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), https://muse.jhu.edu/.[↑]
2. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 133–52.[↑]
3. All interviewees are named and cited here with their written consent. I am grateful for the trust and confidence placed in me in agreeing to be interviewed, cited, and named. This work would not have been possible without the support of the scholars and activists. [↑]
4. The empirical base for my claims is limited to scholars and activists who were central to the establishment and administration of the WAND and the IGDS at the University of the West Indies as well as the landmark WICP carried out by the Institute for Social and Economic Research. For further discussion of the establishment of gender and development studies at the University of the West Indies, please see Massiah, Joycelin, Elsa Leo-Rhynie, and Barbara Bailey, The UWI Gender Journey: Recollections and Reflections (University of the West Indies Press: Kingston, 2016).[↑]
5. Tracy Robinson, “Fictions of Citizenship, Bodies without Sex: The Production and Effacement of Gender in Law,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism no. 7 (2000).[↑]
6. Tracy Robinson, “A Loving Freedom: A Caribbean Feminist Ethic,” Small Axe 11, no. 3 (2007): 127.[↑]
7. Ibid., 127; Faith Smith, “Introduction: Sexing the Citizen,” in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, ed. Faith Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 8.[↑]
8. Red Thread Women’s Development Programme, “‘Givin’ Lil’ Bit Fuh Lil’ Bit’: Women and Sex Work in Guyana,” in Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, ed. Kamala Kempadoo (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).[↑]
9. Evelyn O’Callaghan cited in Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, “Macocotte: An Exploration of Same-Sex Friendship in Selected Caribbean Novels,” in Smith, Sex and the Citizen, 229.[↑]
10. Smith, “Introduction: Sexing the Citizen,” 8.[↑]
11. Violet Eudine Barriteau, “Theorizing Sexuality and Power in Caribbean Gender Relations,” in Sexuality, Gender and Power: Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Anna G. Jonasdottir, Valerie Bryson, and Kathleen B. Jones (New York: Routlege, 2011), 78.[↑]
12. D. Michelle Cave and Joan French, “Sexual Choice as a Human Right Issue,” paper presented at the critical perspective on Human Rights in Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, 1995, http://www.lolapress.org/artenglish/cavee5.htm.[↑]
13. Jasbir Kaur Puar, “Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad: Modern Bodies, National Queers” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 55.[↑]
14. Tracy Robinson, interview by author, 11 May 2011.[↑]
15. Lyndon Kamaal Gill, “Transfiguring Trinidad and Tobago: Queer Cultural Production, Erotic Subjectivity and the Praxis of Black Queer Anthropology” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010), 53.[↑]
16. Barry Chevannes, “Sexual Behaviour of Jamaicans: A Literature Review,” Social and Economic Studies 42, no. 1 (1993): 1–45.[↑]
17. Kamala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labour (London: Routledge, 2004); and Sun, Sex and Gold.[↑]
18. Patricia Mohammed and Althea Perkins, Caribbean Women at the Crossroads: The Paradox of Motherhood among Women of Barbados, St Lucia and Dominica (Kingston: Canoe Press, 1999).[↑]
19. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean; Mohammed and Perkins, Caribbean Women at the Crossroads; and Dorothy Roberts et al., eds., Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008).[↑]
20. Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Donna Hope, Inna Di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006).[↑]
21. Alexander, “Redrafting Morality,” 133–52; Robinson, “Fictions of Citizenship,” 1–27; Tracy Robinson, “Beyond the Bill of Rights: Sexing the Citizen,” in Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean, ed. Eudine Barriteau (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003), 231–61; and Robinson, “Gender, Feminism and Constitutional Reform in the Caribbean,” 592–625.[↑]
22. See Kamala Kempadoo, “Caribbean Sexuality: Mapping the Field,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 3 (2009): http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/november2009/journals/Kempadoo.pdf.[↑]
23. Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley, eds., Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose and Essays (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010).[↑]
24. See Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (2015); Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell, The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists (California: Stanford, 2014); and Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2014).[↑]
25. Alissa Trotz, “Going Global? Transnationality, Women/Gender Studies and Lessons from the Caribbean,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 1 (April 2007), http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/abstracts/AlissaTrotz_Going_Global_pm%20_2.pdf.[↑]
26. For example, the 2009 edition of Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean contains a section on women and development which does not go beyond the parameters of early gender and development discourse. See A. Lynn Bolles, “Women and Development,” in Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean, ed. Richard S. Hillman and Thomas J. D’Agostino (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009), 257–87.[↑]
27. Kate Bedford, Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality and the Reformed World Bank (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).[↑]
28. “Women and Sustainable Development,” special issue, Sistren 17 (1995).[↑]
29. “Housing,” special issue, Sistren 11 (1989).[↑]
30. “Women and Politics,” special issue, Sistren 10 (1988).[↑]
31. “Women and the Environment,” special issue, Sistren 14 (1992).[↑]
32. “Sexual Violence,” special issue, Sistren9 (1987); and “Women, Sexuality and Health,” special issue, Sistren 12, no. 2 and 3 (1991).[↑]
33. Patricia Mohammed, interview by author, 2 November 2010.[↑]
34. Mohammed, “The Journey from Laventille to St. Ann’s, Part 1: Reflections on Cafra’s Biennial General Meeting and Caribbean Feminism,” 22.[↑]
35. Joycelin Massiah, interview by author, 18 August 2010.[↑]
36. Eudine Barriteau, interview by author, 30 September 2010. See also Violet Eudine Barriteau, “Theorizing Sexuality and Power in Caribbean Gender Relations,” in Sexuality, Gender and Power: Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Anna G. Jonasdottir, Valerie Bryson, and Kathleen B. Jones (New York: Routlege, 2011).[↑]
37. Patricia Anderson, “Conclusion: Women in the Caribbean,” Social and Economic Studies 35, no. 2 (1986): 309.[↑]
38. Eudine Barriteau, interview by author, 30 September 2010.[↑]
39. Eudine Barriteau, email correspondence, 2 October 2010.[↑]
40. Eudine Barriteau, interview by author, 30 September 2010.[↑]
41. Patricia Mohammed, interview by author, 2 November, 2010.[↑]
42. Ibid.[↑]
43. Robinson, “A Loving Freedom,” 121.[↑]
44. Peggy Antrobus, interview by author, 14 September 2010.[↑]
45. Michelle Rowley, “Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Feminist Advocacy,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2010).[↑]
46. Eudine Barriteau, “Postmodernist Feminist Theorizing and Development Policy and Practice in the Anglophone Caribbean: The Barbados Case,” in Feminism/Postmodernism/Development, ed. Marianne H. Marchand and Jane L. Parpart (New York: Routledge, 1995), 143.[↑]
47. Honor Ford-Smith, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, [1986] 2005).[↑]
48. Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 94. My translation reads: Their stories do not personally deal with “man and woman business.” But I am not saying that they are faint of heart because they did not talk about all their personal and private business like the other lionheart gals.[↑]
49. Christine Barrow, “Reputation and Ranking in a Barbadian Society,” in Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings, ed. Christine Barrow and Rhoda Reddock (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001), 204.[↑]
50. Magaret Gill, interview by author, 3 September 2010.[↑]
51. Patricia Mohammed, interview by author, 2 November 2010.[↑]
52. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).[↑]
53. The reference here is to Professor V. Eudine Barriteau, the current principal of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, and her work on politicized sexuality.[↑]
54. Patricia Mohammed, interview by author, 2 November 2010.[↑]
55. Donette Francis, “Novel Insights: Sex Work, Secrets, and Depression in Angie Cruz’s Soledad,” in Smith, Sex and the Citizen, 71; Patricia Mohammed, interview by author, 2 November 2010; and Evelyn O’Callaghan, “Caribbean Migrations: Negotiating Borders,” in Smith, Sex and the Citizen, 130.[↑]
56. Ibid.[↑]
57. Alison Donell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (New York: Routledge, 2006), 183.[↑]
58. Evelyn O’Callaghan, “Form, Genre and the Thematics of Community in Caribbean’s Women Writing,” Shibboleths: A Journal of Comparative Theory and Society 2, no. 2 (2008): 107–17.[↑]
59. Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1982); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).[↑]
60. Rhoda Reddock, interview by author, 3 November 2010.[↑]
61. The reference here is to Wesley Crichlow’s article in Caribbean Masculinities, edited by Rhoda Reddock. Wesley Crichlow, “History, (Re)Memory, Testimony and Biomythography: Charting a Buller Man’s Trinidadian Past,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses, ed. Rhoda Reddock (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 185–222.[↑]
62. An edited collection came out of this research initiative. See Roberts et al., Sex, Power and Taboo.[↑]
63. Rhoda Reddock, interview by author, 3 November 2010.[↑]
64. Bedford, Developing Partnerships.[↑]