Towards a Decolonization of Sexual Economic Praxis in the Caribbean

Introduction

Over the years,¹ various Caribbeanist scholars, including this author, have questioned how we can imagine Caribbean sexual-economic praxes not merely as survival strategies; expressions of heteropatriarchy; or legacies of colonial, exoticizing, and hypersexualizing oppressions; but also as embodied practices that are deeply entangled with the region’s economic fabric.² Such scholarship has analyzed the genealogy of this entanglement through histories of European colonialization of the region, when Amerindian, African, and Asian laboring bodies were sexually exploited for the benefit of the plantation economy and violated for the pleasure of the master classes in specifically gendered ways. We have also noted that it is embedded in histories and practices involving a deployment of sexuality by the colonized, enslaved, and indentured, particularly women, to purchase freedom from slavery, to escape the plantation, and to gain economic independence. Sexual economic transactions were thus in our theorizing sites of both oppression and emancipation, a paradox which, I contend, is lodged in Caribbean cultural memory and continues to inform Caribbean sexualities today.

In this essay, I am not concerned with the paradox as such or its expression in the twenty-first century, but rather the ways in which sexual-economic entanglements serve as sources of freedom and sites of emancipation, as well as grounds from which to reframe sexuality and advance struggles for sexual justice in the Caribbean. I turn the gaze away from LGBT struggles and discussions about queering the Caribbean, and toward the struggles that emerge from other liminal, marginalized spaces, namely places where Caribbean peoples organize and understand their sexual selves in relation to the economy: sex work, transactional sex, and tactical sex. This means that rather than mobilizing sexuality, as is common in queer or cultural studies preoccupied with identity formation and identity politics, here my emphasis is on everyday lived sexual practices and sexual subjectivities as they are imbricated in income generation and livelihood strategies in global-local contexts. Moreover, sexual-economic praxis is privileged here because it is still woefully under-recognized in scholarship and research and heavily marginalized in everyday life, perhaps even more so than LGBT issues, in the Caribbean today. The past decade, for example, has witnessed a surge of LGBT rights advocacy, as well as local, regional, and transnational mobilizations to change the buggery laws that affect cis and transgender women and men in Caribbean countries.³ A burgeoning body of research and scholarship accompanies this surge, including the more recent contributions by Natasha Tinsely, Jafari Allen, Andil Gosine, and Rosamund King, and new research by emerging scholars such as Krystal Ghisyawan, Preity Kumar, and Nikoli Attai.⁴ However, we have not seen the same level of attention for sexual-economic relations and subjectivities, even though many LGBT individuals are known to support themselves through sex work and to be active in (in some instances, leaders of) sex worker organizations. Scholars who set the tone for sexuality studies in the region, such as M. Jacqui Alexander, Faith Smith, Thomas Glave, and David A. Murray, take up the making and unmaking of the Caribbean citizen but focus almost exclusively on sexuality in relationship to politics, the state, and nationalism. The work of the sexual economy is, however, eclipsed. Indeed, most Caribbean scholars still seem reluctant to take up the history of sexuality’s entanglement with the economic or to accord the entanglement an ontological status in thinking through meanings and constructions of the Caribbean citizen.⁵ This means, in my view, that we are missing an important part in the conversation about Caribbean sexuality and about what sexual justice for the region might look like.

Subaltern Sexual Praxis

Under colonialism, fueled by early anthropology, a discourse on so-called deviant or mating practices in the Caribbean was established, and this today is overlayered by post-colonial Caribbean nationalisms and imaginations, which shore up specific notions about decent and respectable sexuality. Heteronormativity is one important cornerstone of that discourse, and so are notions of monogamy – especially for women – and sexual desire, where sexuality is most commonly posited as pure and uncontaminated, sutured to conceptions of love. Yet if we read from below, other practices and perspectives are evident. Mimi Sheller identifies these as subaltern counter-performances of citizenship, which map neatly onto Micheline Crichlow’s notion of Caribbean resistance that resides in liminal spaces and movements “forged through accommodation, connivances, and witting and unwitting subversions.”⁶ These recent formulations call to mind Kamau Brathwaite’s 1970s notion of a “little tradition” in the Caribbean to speak about the lived culture, habits, norms, and practices of “the folk” that are mostly taken for granted, unscrutinized, and interdependent of a formal tradition – the “Great narrative” – which dominates within and is cultivated through schools, organized religion, and state institutions.⁷ This little tradition resonates with Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic grounds” – that which lies “outside of our present mode of being/feeling/knowing as well as the multiple discourses, their regulatory systems of meaning and interpretative ‘readings'” – which lays the basis for a vantage point for a “new self-assertion.”⁸

A number of aspects of these subaltern grounds of Caribbean sexuality have repeatedly been identified by scholars, policy makers, and public intellectuals in recent years, including multiple sexual partnering, nonmonogamy/serial monogamy/informal polygamy, hetero-, homo-, and bisexual partnering, sexual initiation for boys and girls at youthful ages, sexual relations before and outside of marriage, and transactional sexual relations. Organized struggles for sex worker rights since the mid-1990s and HIV and AIDS prevention work illuminate other aspects of this little tradition, namely the significance of sexual labor in the region.⁹ Such activities and scholarship point out that the exchange of sex for money, gifts, or benefits is not inherently sexual violence, even while it is mediated by classed, gendered, and racialized relations of power. Rather it is the criminalization and stigmatization of “prostitution” upheld by normative moral orders, legal systems, and state practices that lies at the heart of the problem, producing conditions for police violence, public scorn and condemnation, unregulated brothels and sex clubs, discrimination in the health-care system, and hostile judicial systems. Moreover, most people who transact sex claim that they willingly participate in “whoring,” “picking fares,” “boopsing,” or “sex for top-up” even when they are under the age of eighteen. They may directly perform sexual labor for money, where it is explicitly work, or may exchange sexual intercourse and affection on a regular or occasional basis for money, goods, or services, such as drugs, gold, cell phones, phone cards, food, rent, hairdos, school fees, a cylinder of gas, cars, or travel. There is little concept of a “victim,” other than in the discourses on intergenerational transactional sex and sex or human trafficking. Arrangements that lie outside formal sex work tend to be defined as friendships, “sweethearting,” “sponsoring,” or “sexual favors.” Among peers, this may be expressed as an exchange, sometimes for pleasure, with the relationships defined as “foop-buddies” or as “pick-ups” in different countries in the region. And while transactional or tactical sex is very feminized, school boys or toyboys have “sugar mamas” for “bling” or sneakers, and young men strike up relationships with older professional men and ask for “a help” or a “likkle somet’ing.”¹⁰ Mark Padilla, Denise E. Brennan, and Amalia Cabezas document how sexuality and affect figure into Cuban and Dominican tourism sectors, where workers cultivate friendships and romance that lead, directly or indirectly, to an improvement in the material conditions of their lives. “Relationships with foreigners,” as Cabezas notes, “often provide unmatched economic returns.”¹¹

Significant to this mobilization of sexuality is the notion that sexual intercourse and love without some material benefit are not of great value. “Giving sweetness for sweetness” may, for example, be considered inconsequential, frivolous, disreputable, stupid, or lascivious behavior.¹² Or we can turn to “visiting unions” in which women expect and receive financial assistance from the person with whom they have a sexual relationship and often children, but do not cohabit, as well as to long-standing African-Caribbean partnering models where sexual relations that are enduring are also paid for, albeit indirectly. “Money,” Elisa Sobo observes in her study of the Jamaican body, “is properly and respectably exchanged, with a time lag,” and serves not so much to attract a partner but to maintain the relationship.¹³ While romantic love is a part and parcel of many of these arrangements, it is also widely held that “romance without finance cannot ‘fill belly.'”¹⁴ Carla Freeman’s study of entrepreneurs in Barbados illuminates that this is not exclusive to the working class, the poor, or the last century, and points out that twenty-first century middle-class “partnership marriages” are sealed around a combination of love and economics.¹⁵ She argues that “the persistent emphasis on the desire for support and material security cannot be read as an absence of romance and love but as the particular idioms through which love and romance are expressed.”¹⁶ Even when participants claim that sexual liaisons with tourists are “just for the fun of it, to enjoy lots of sex while it lasts” as male beach and resort workers are wont to do, the fact that tourist women “offer everything” means that the men expect and receive gifts, money, dinners, travel, and homes, as well as sex and affection.¹⁷ In the absence of benefits beyond the sexual, however, attraction to the tourist declines or disappears.

Most Caribbean sexual economic arrangements so far described, including sex work, take place alongside other income-generating activities – informal and formal – and more often than not on a seasonal or limited basis. They become part of a more general struggle of Caribbean peoples to “get by.” They often provide access to goods or a lifestyle that may be out of reach if a person relied exclusively on nonsexual, nonerotic activities, labor, or relationships, but rarely are they the only basis for survival or “betterment.” This necessarily points to the larger problem of the envelopment of much of the region in westernized, neoliberal development and consumption patterns, as well as the wider issue of limited formal employment opportunities, within contexts of postcolonialism and heteropatriarchy that place a disproportionate value on raced and gendered sexualities in particular ways. Nor can we overlook patriarchal capitalist depreciations and exploitations of women’s and feminized work more generally – but we must also remember that sexual economic praxis is not a product of contemporary globalization or postcolonialism.

Toward the Decolonization of Caribbean Sexuality

Not only do we need to take the grounds of Caribbean sexuality as part of the social and cultural makeup of the Caribbean, but by disavowing the subaltern counter narrative we do severe injustice to Caribbean people’s lived experiences, ideas, and morality. Such disavowal maintains an untenable dichotomy between sexual and economic spheres of existence, and heightens secrecy, shame, and illegality. It maintains laws that support discrimination of sex work and nonmonogamy (especially for women), queerness, and teenage sexual activity, while also robbing people of their dignity. Moreover, lack of acknowledgement of the tradition, rather than supporting a creative sexual imagination, upholds unrealistic and, for many, unobtainable ideals.

We need a politics of decolonization of sexuality in the Caribbean, not just around heteronormativity and LGBT identities but also, and perhaps more importantly, around sexual-economic praxis. We need to come up with Caribbean-specific definitions that are grounded in practice rather than in colonial or postcolonial hegemonic ideals of sexuality to inform our politics of resistance and struggles for social justice. As Sheller writes, “Placing sexuality at the center of our understanding of freedom and how it might be embedded and performed offers a breathtaking revision of traditional political histories of slavery and freedom.”¹⁸ It is a call to “root and reroute” that which is marked as degraded and base – the Caribbean “bass culture,” or the “vulgar” – in order to refashion the past and present and to engage with the future.¹⁹ Or, as Cecilia Green suggests, “we need to understand not only the commanding heights of the economy and its hegemonic force, but also the nooks, crannies, and living networks of the popular domestic economy and its creative potential.”²⁰

Sex workers’ organized struggles make visible some of this potential, speaking out loudly and publicly about the hypocrisies, stigmas, and discriminations that haunt Caribbean sexuality as well as about the need to recognize sexual economic relations for the social space they occupy. One of the most vivid instances of this was in 1994, when the Maxi Linder Association in Suriname held a sex workers’ rights march through the capital, chanting “No Condom, No Pussy,” with women claiming their rights to protection, good health, and respect for sexual labor.²¹

However, it would be unfair and unjust to place the burden of sexual justice work on sex workers’ shoulders. They are, after all, some of the most marginalized in our communities. Many more need to be involved in the struggle and in reframing sexuality in the region, to fight for the decriminalization of antiprostitution and buggery laws that render sex workers and queers and all others who rely on tactical sex as absent, or illegal noncitizens.²²
But would this mean, with the increasing commodification of social life we see in this globalized neoliberal era, and in the face of a persistent devaluation and hyperexploitation of women’s labor, that sex work or tactical sex will become even more prevalent, more everyday, and more important to the future of the Caribbean? Would it mean not just that, as Cynthia Enloe once wrote, the Caribbean will become nations of busboys, but that it will become nations of sex workers? That the image of the region as exotic and erotic will be promoted by tourism industries even more than it is already? Or that racialized hypersexuality in dance hall or carnival become one of the region’s primary economic mainstays?

This is not necessarily the future I have in mind. Such scenarios would reduce the diversity of the region to a monosexual culture and leave it at the beck and call of globalization, recolonizing patriarchies, and hegemonic Creole nationalisms. Struggles to change global inequalities around gender, race, and wealth need to accompany struggles for sexual justice so that it is ultimately irrelevant whether sexuality is inflected by and through economics – so that people can practice their sexuality in freedom and with respect, irrespective of how it is configured and lived. I am suggesting, then, that to claim sexuality as economically infused and integral to Caribbean ways of being would not just bolster respect for many marginalized people, especially working women, or empower them in their negotiations with the wider world, or bring them out of the realms of the criminal, the despised, and the noncitizen. It could also help us to imagine a more just future in Caribbean. And so I conclude by quoting Vivian Zelizer in The Purchase of Intimacy when she urges us to “stop agonizing over whether or not money corrupts, but instead analyze what combinations of activity and intimate relations produce happier, more just, and more productive lives.”²³ If we, Caribbeanists and feminists, are serious about sexual rights in the region, then our future work should also take on the sexual economy, explicitly and respectfully.

1. This essay is from a talk for the keynote plenary “Creating Justice: Caribbean Scholarship and Activisms” at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference, San Juan Puerto Rico, 14 November 2014. [↩]
2. See, for example, Kamala Kempadoo, “Prostitution, Marginality and Empowerment: Caribbean Women in the Sex Trade,” Beyond Law 5, no. 14 (1996); Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor (New York: Routledge, 2004); as well as Denise E. Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Mark Padilla, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Amalia Lucía Cabezas, Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Debra Curtis, Pleasures and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009); and Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). [↩]
3. See, for example, the 2014 UNAIDS report from a survey among 3,567 gay and bisexual men living in thirteen Dutch-, English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean territories. Caribbean360, “Caribbean Survey Finds Complex Web of Sexual Identity among Gays and Bisexuals,” Caribbean360, 29 October 2014, http://www.caribbean360.com/news/caribbean-survey-finds-complex-web-of-sexual-identity-among-gays-and-bisexuals#ixzz3Hcn86wrd; and the International Resource Network project Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean, http://www.caribbeanhomophobias.org/. [↩]
4. See Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke University Press, 2010); Jafari Allen, ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2011); Andil Gosine, “Sexual Desires, Rights and Regulation,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 3 (2009): http://www2.sta.uwi.edu/crgs/november2009/index.asp; and Rosamund S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2014). [↩]
5. For example, in Eudine Barriteau’s collection on “love power,” while there is a claim to a preoccupation with Caribbean feminist theorizing of “lust, loving, intimacy, and sexuality” and the nexus of political sexuality and political economy, the focus is on gendered relations of power and meanings of affect and passion within those relations of power. Eudine Barriteau, Love and Power: Caribeban Discourses on Gender (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2012). [↩]
6. Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and Michaeline A. Crichlow, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. [↩]
7. Edward K. Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). [↩]
8. Sylvia Wynter, “Afterword: ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman’,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribeban Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa New World Press, 1990), 364–5. [↩]
9. We can think of the work in the early 1990s of the Maxi Linder Association in Suriname and MODEMU in the Dominican Republic, continuing through more recently established groups such as One Love in Guyana, the Sex Work Association of Jamaica, Red Initiatives in Trinidad and Tobago, the Antiguan Resilience Collective in Antigua and Barbuda, and the regional Caribbean Sex Worker Coalition. It is also made visible through outreach and policy-oriented research undertaken by organizations that deal with sexuality more generally, such as J-Flag in Jamaica, SASOD in Guyana, the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition, and other HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the region. [↩]
10. Kamala Kempadoo, et al., “‘Whoring,”Boopsing,’ and Other Business: A Situational Analysis of Sex Work and the Sex Industry in the CARICOM” (Port-of-Spain: UNAIDS Caribbean Regional Support Team, 2010). [↩]
11. Cabezas, Economies of Desire, 117. [↩]
12. Barbara O. de Zalduondo and Jean Maxius Bernard, “Meanings and Consequences of Sexual-Economic Exchange: Gender, Poverty and Sexual Risk Behavior in Urban Haiti,” in Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, ed. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagnon (New York: Routledge, 1995). [↩]
13. Elisa Janine Sobo, One Blood: The Jamaican Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 185. [↩]
14. Ibid., 188. [↩]
15. Carla Freeman, “Neo-liberalism, Respectability, and the Romance of Flexibility in Barbados,” working paper no 40 (Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life: Emory University, 2005). [↩]
16. Ibid., 15. [↩]
17. Kempadoo et al., “‘Whoring,”Boopsing.'” [↩]
18. Sheller, Citizenship from Below, 39. [↩]
19. Crichlow, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination; and Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Also see Julian Henriques’s identification of Jamaican downtown dance and music in Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011). [↩]
20. Cecilia Green, “Caribbean Dependency Theory of the 1970s: An Historical-Materialist-Feminist Revision,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks (Kingston: Univesity of the West Indies Press, 2001), 68. [↩]
21. Dusilley Cannings et al., “It’s Good to Know: The Maxi Linder Association in Suriname,” in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Routledge, 1998). [↩]
22. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (1994); and Kamala Kempadoo, Prostitution, Sex Work and Transactional Sex in the English, Dutch and French-Speaking Caribbean: A Literature Review of Definitions, Laws and Research (PANCAP/CARICOM, 2009). [↩]
23. Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 298. [↩]