“Cock Mouth Kill Cock”: Language, Power and Sexual Intimacy in Constructions of Caribbean Masculinities

Abstract

since Foucault's association of language and power or his connection of dominant discourse with social privilege, we have become more sensitive to the ways in which the disciplining of unruly bodies as a means of asserting one's authority and power position has incorporated control of meaning. How gendered bodies, for example, are interpreted and made legitimate to a dominant group becomes central to its assertion of power. Often, however, the very aggression in these discursive assertions or the excessive language performance betrays the slipperiness of this attempt to confer or confirm power. What Noel Cowell has referred to as exaggerated rituals1 includes exaggerated [speech] rituals, as Moji Anderson and Nadine McLean demonstrated in their article 'Straighten Up Your Argument': Language as Shibboleth of Jamaican Masculinity which appeared in the previous issue of Caribbean Quarterly.2 Yet, this very hyperbolic verbal exhibition is an attempt to mask men's anxiety about and investment in the changing norms/roles/expressions of masculinity. In this way, mouth kill cock - in other words, it is what comes out of your mouth that condemns you, or the hyperbolic statements of hyper-masculine men expose their own embrace of the very subjectivities they appear to condemn and their own discursive investments. The more public the display, the more magnified the exposure is. And the very excess in public display seems to be a strategy to camouflage heteronormative and patriarchal complicity with transgressive intimacies. Public speech rituals contrasted with private transgressive intimacies expose the contradictory and complex negotiations of masculinities in Caribbean societies. As a way to theorise the complexity of gender construction in general, and masculinities in particular, Caribbean critics have been making significant use of popular culture. 3 In this special issue, for example, sociologists Clinton Hutton and Rhoda Reddock mine popular music to demonstrate the discursive manoeuvres of the everpersistent patriarchal operatives in the construction of Caribbean masculinities, but they are also aware of the ways in which those very strategies of legitimisation announce patriarchy's undoing. Both recognise the way in which sexual intimacy and women's bodies become central discursive tropes in the construction of 'legitimate' masculinities and in the disavowal of not so much alternative, but more accurately, subjugated versions of transgressive masculinity.The possibility of deviation from gender norms is recognised by those who seek to police these vulnerable stereotypes by their implicit acknowledgment that these are constructions open to transgression. Not surprisingly, patriarchy's fear of women's (and some men's) ability to challenge gender norms is performed in the theatre of sexual intimacies. Because of the recognition of the possibilities of transgression, women's bodies and their expressions of sexual intimacy have been heavily policed by anxious men. Of equal significance is a discursive surveillance - the ways in which the language associated with women and women's bodies becomes a way of marking the feminine as a site of deviance and deficiency and as the boundary line of legitimate masculinities. In this regard, Clinton Hutton's essay begins an excavation of how this primarily patriarchal stratagem works. Hutton locates in 1990s popular street expression and dancehall music what he calls the gyalification complex. In examining the speech rimai of cursing that has elsewhere been associated with Afro-Caribbean men,4 Hutton shows how the female body is marked as a site of deviance from gender norms for some men. By marking these men as gyal, their gender designation is hegemonically repositioned so that their masculinity is brought into question. Via what Hutton calls symbolic castration, these patriarchal and hyper-masculine manoeuvres prepare the stage for violence to the body and in some cases involve making the gyal-man a passive sexual subject in a punishing aggressive sex ritual. …