Casting the first stone!: Policing of Homo/Sexuality in Jamaican Popular Culture

Abstract

The paper explores and intervenes against homophobia in the specificities of its manifestation in Jamaican popular and official culture. It leads to an acknowledgement of the verbal, emotional and physical violence of Jamaican homophobia, and a denial that there is any comparative evidential basis that this is its distinguishing feature internationally. The paper locates the distinctiveness of Jamaican homophobia; the peculiar convergence in the public virulence of the anti-homosexuality of both the religious and the secular popular, as well as of official culture; the unique, near obsessive, anti-homosexuality of the dancehall/ragga deejay genre; the societal violence-proneness and a tendency towards lawlessness. The paper argues for a departure from the condemnatory stance that characterizes challenges to Jamaica’s homophobia and, instead, identifies five homophobic imperatives – religious fundamentalism, heterosexual naturalism, legalism, cultural nationalism and child-protection – which are held to drive the discriminatory discourses and practices. The paper seeks to initiate the analysis of these imperatives as the basis of a necessary conversation between progressives and homophobes towards the production of a less oppressive cultural and socio-legal atmosphere in Jamaica.