Caribbean Gender Studies

The nature of identities in terms of gender, ethnicity, culture and nation has been the subject of significant academic debate, particularly in postcolonial and feminist studies. In order to address the ways in which the contemporary generation of Trinidadian women of Indian descent negotiate issues surrounding identity, it is necessary to interrogate the terms of this debate and redefine key concepts in ways, it is hoped, that may help to expand its scope, as social categories such as “race” and ethnicity, among others, are continually negotiated and contested under new theoretical shifts in postcolonial theory and poststructuralist theory which emphasise fluidity rather than fixity. This paper reviews ways of understanding the female Indian experience in terms of “diaspora”, “ethnicity”, “hybridity” and “hyphenated identities”. It seeks to show that essentialist conceptions of gendered and ethnicised identity are non-productive and that ultimately, the identification of oneself as...

This paper examined the conflict, gender relations and health of women in two low income communities in Jamaica. To provide a contextual framework, crime and domestic violence were examined at the macro-level. The national data showed that although most types of crime were on ...

While there has been an exciting growth in scholarship on dancehall culture, primarily in the fields of cultural and literary studies as they relate to Jamaica, more attention needs to be given to its configuration in other geographical locations and other popular culture arenas. This article explores dancehall culture from a geographic site, in Toronto, which, despite its large Caribbean population, is often a mere footnote in larger diasporic studies. Moving beyond the proclivity of viewing dancehall culture and music from a purely patriarchal misogynistic viewpoint, the article focuses on the redemptive and empowering possibilities that this popular Black expressive form holds. It underscores how dancehall culture and music challenge hegemonic scripts predicated on stereotypes of Black women’s sexuality. Despite the contradictions inherent in the music and the performance of female artists such as Lady Saw and Tanya Stephens, dancehall culture evokes women as active agents who ar...

My article examines depictions of Chinese women in Victor Chang’s stories (“A Summer’s Tale,” “Light in the Shop” and “Mr. Chin’s Property”), Kerry Young’s novel, Pao (2011), and Herbert de Lisser’s cultural and literary interwar magazine Planters’ Punch (1922-45) to argue that racial and socio-economic battles in colonial and post-independence Jamaica were waged on Chinese women. In official accounts of Jamaican history and culture, Chinese women are largely invisible and their significance has been set into relief by the works of Chinese-Caribbean writers like Kerry Young and Victor Chang. An important exception was the presence of Chinese women in Planters’ Punch, where de Lisser fashioned Chinese women as part of the myth of Jamaica as a lush tourist spot, thereby promoting the interests of the country’s multiethnic business class. Chang and Young contest this myth through inclusive fictional narratives that address racial and sexual violence wreaked upon Chinese women. 


Jamaica's music operates as a global cultural force, moving beyond borders to bring messages to its fans and supporters.  The article connects Reggae and celebrations of Jamaican music to the celebration of Black History Month in the USA.  Using the career of the late Toots Hibbert as a case in point, Hope highlights the diversity of Jamaica's Reggae music product and its relationship to genres like Dancehall.

Reggae Ambassadors has the look of an anthology of short articles from a glossy French music magazine. It does not purport to be a scholarly study. However, as France has produced some of the best reggae journalism of recent times, this is not necessarily a bad thing. This book, like the much-missed French fanzines Natty Dread and Ragga, displays a relatively high standard of music journalism (as does the companion video documentary released in conjunction with it). It consists of thirty-four...

Transatlantic Topographies weaves together three themes that have enjoyed increasing currency in recent scholarship: travel, colonialism, and space. Ileana rodríguez surveys representations of American (specifically caribbean and central and south American) space from the colonial era to the present. she draws upon a range of sources, including the writings of the earliest european voyagers to the Americas, later travel narratives, contemporary fiction, and tourism literature. Her aim is to document successive transformations in the discursive rendering of American space, from visions of wilderness to pastoral landscapes to vistas of adventure and exploration to prospects of economic development. Her account foregrounds the role of incomprehension and misunderstanding – the confusion generated by the proliferation of unfamiliar geographies, peoples, and languages. the encounter with America, she argues, precipitated the breakdown and reinvention of existing european forms of knowled...

The study of Caribbean men is by no means new. However, the emergence of men and masculinities studies in the Caribbean, or what Rhoda Reddock refers (2004) to as the study of men as "gendered beings," can be located within a larger body of gender and sexuality studies research produced within the last three decades. This Caribbean Review of Gender Studies special issue on Vulnerability, Persistence and Destabilization of Dominant Masculinities represents a series of critical conversations intended to track a range of concerns related to gender, sexuality, men and masculinities in the Caribbean. This issue has been in the making for a very long-time and indeed persistence pays off. The study of Caribbean men and masculinities is an interdisciplinary research field focusing on non-western masculinities studies. The current special issue reflects the diverse sub-themes that have characterised men and masculinities research in the Caribbean to date.

This division of our communities and allegiances is a typically colonial strategy. It not only breaks up our movements and the force of our resistances, but breaks those bodies that are marginalized on multiple fronts, making them disappear. —Proma Tagore Over the past ten years there has been remarkable growth in studies on sexuality in the Caribbean. One of the most underrepresented areas of these analyses, however, remains the intersection between queerness and Indo-Caribbean women. In general, much of the scholarship concerning Indo-Caribbean women remains tied to indentureship.

When Professor N’Dri Assie-Lumumba asked me to reflect on what ‘ubuntu’ might mean in the context of education in the Caribbean, the first thing that came to mind was an image of pit latrines in impoverished primary schools in poor countries. In this essay, I argue that the continuing problem of pit latrines in these schools symbolizes the failure to solve the problem of poverty, neglect and inadequate provision of education services for people at the bottom rungs of Caribbean and other decolonising societies. I ask what implications the ‘ubuntu’ concept chosen for the 2015 CIES conference would have for reforming education in a direction that combines global reform, ethics and good sense. Educators rarely consider toilets when they are thinking about what is needed to reform the system. But talking about toilets draws attention to the entrenched inequity that persists in education systems across the globe – an inequity that forces many schools and young people to remain at the base...

Caribbean sexuality is both hypervisible and obscured. That is, it is celebrated in popular culture as an important ingredient in Caribbean social life and flaunted to attract tourists to the region, yet is shrouded in double entendre, secrecy and shame. In this article, I present a review of the main trends in studies of Caribbean sexuality, arguing that while there are few exclusive studies on the subject there is much we can draw upon for insights into Caribbean sexual relations, sexual expressions and sexual identities. Drawing from published as well as “grey” materials, this article points out that Caribbean sexuality is often perceived and analysed as linked to force and (domestic) violence against women and children, sexually transmitted infections (i.e. HIV and AIDS), and economic imperatives. It is also widely accepted as attached to heterosexuality and gendered imbalances of power, as well as to men’s sexual agency. Studies of same-sex relations, transactional sex, prostit...

The study of Caribbean men is by no means new. However, the emergence of men and masculinities studies in the Caribbean, or what Rhoda Reddock refers (2004) to as the study of men as “gendered beings,” can be located within a larger body of gender and sexuality studies research produced within the last three decades. This Caribbean Review of Gender Studies special issue on Vulnerability, Persistence and Destabilization of Dominant Masculinities represents a series of critical conversations intended to track a range of concerns related to gender, sexuality, men and masculinities in the Caribbean. This issue has been in the making for a very long-time and indeed persistence pays off. The study of Caribbean men and masculinities is an interdisciplinary research field focusing on non-western masculinities studies. The current special issue reflects the diverse sub-themes that have characterised men and masculinities research in the Caribbean to date. Wesley Crichlow, Halimah A.F. DeShon...

The paper explores the centrality of the plantation in contemporary political realities in Jamaica. This examination is undertaken by looking back in history, in order to make a more Caribbean-centred sense of the present and future. The paper argues that the constitution upholds and legally seals, to a certain extent, the inherited colonial baggage that has to be tackled. If enslavement and colonialism were established to dehumanise and oppress groups of people on the basis of skin colour for profit, then the most natural human response to enslavement would be to struggle, resist, fight and survive. The conflict created spatial cross fires and tensions among the transplanted people which, since formal independence, have made attempts at integration and consensus exceedingly difficult to achieve. The historical contradictions of this experience and its contemporary manifestations have perpetuated seemingly irreconcilable distortions, contradictions and fragmentations. Taking a cue f...

Kamala Das problematizes the categories of masculine and feminine , voices about and against stereotypical representations of women and above all versifies the hearts-felt desires, lust, love and dreams confined within the mind and body of the body signified as 'female'. Quite at par with the societal and familial structure of the time, she or any women in her poems is the object of stereotypical representation and ' grandmother' ('My

The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (CRGS) is inviting proposals for Guest Editorship for upcoming Special Issues.

Selected Guest Editors will direct the entire Special Issue process, including preparing and publicising the Call for Papers, managing the peer review process and curating submissions such as interviews and personal testimonies, as well as poetry, art and photo and video essays for the Gender Dialogues section.

You will work along with the journal’s editorial assistant who will provide administrative support towards publication. We invite you to submit proposals that contribute to feminist scholarship and theorising of gender relations in the Caribbean. We suggest but do not limit Guest Editors to the
following themes:

    Gender and Covid-19
    Gender and Climate Change
    Caribbean Feminisms
    Gender and Migration
    Gender Mainstreaming, CEDAW and the SDGs
    Future of Feminisms - Beijing +25 and beyond
    Reproductive Justice
    Geographies of Violence
    Teaching Feminisms
    Gender and Science

Submit: June through to December 2021
Email: igds.crgs@sta.uwi.edu

Since the arrival of enslaved Africans to the British colony of Virginia in the early 17th century, the spaces of Black men have been policed. Templates characterizing Black males as violent, dangerous, and sexually potent were fully developed by the 18th century and reflected in laws, practices, and systems designed to control their movement. This article applies lenses of social identity and gender to examine contemporary constructs of and practices toward Black men, tracing them back to their historical precursors. The authors contend that fear-based templates continue to be evoked in 21st century America to control the movement and space of Black men through systems and structures which criminalize, terrorize, and economically and educationally disadvantage them. A major impetus for the development of these systems and structures has been the construction of