Gender in the Caribbean

Abstract

European contact initiated centuries of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean, and also transformed the region’s islands, coasts, and waterways into one of the most polyglot regions in the world. Imperial powers jostled for control of the coastal territory that borders the Caribbean Sea, from Florida and Louisiana to Guatemala, Guyana, and Suriname. Beginning in the 17th century, the arc of islands nestled in the heart of the Caribbean Sea—from the vast and rugged territories of Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti to the stamp-sized islands of Barbados, St. Thomas, and Guadeloupe—became the “jewels” of European empires in America. Waves of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, and English colonists flooded to the Caribbean Basin, lured by the promise of fantastic riches. After decimating and enslaving indigenous Amerindians, they forcibly transported millions of Africans to labor as chattel slaves. The region’s ethnic, racial, and religious diversity was born out of these free and forced migrations. Feminist scholars have long recognized slavery’s indelible mark on Caribbean history. For decades, they have studied enslaved women from a variety of angles. While work produced in the 1970s and 1980s sought to recover women’s lived experiences, the 1990s marked a pivotal turning point when gender replaced women. Using gender as a lens to study the power dynamics between men and women has broadened our understanding of how cultural beliefs about the sexed body shaped colonial regimes. Scholars of the Caribbean were among the first to employ an intersectional approach in their analyses by considering how evolving definitions of racial difference were mapped onto the gendered and sexualized bodies of women of African descent. As their work shows, conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality were mutually constitutive. However, this rich body of scholarship has also demonstrated that efforts by imperial and colonial officials, as well as colonists, to affix rigid gendered and racialized identities onto the Caribbean’s diverse populations were contested. These “modern” categories of identity proved to be unstable signifiers of power. Enslaved people exhibited their own understandings of gender and challenged their status as bonded laborers. Coercive and consensual interracial sex created large heterogeneous populations that resisted fixed racial and gender hierarchies. Since the 1980s, scholars of women and gender, in particular, have attended to this complex interplay among gender, race, ethnicity, legal status, and religion. Yet, on the whole, the field continues to implicitly equate “gender” with femininity: only recently have a handful of scholars begun to consider the constructions of masculinity. Further studies of masculinity would allow for a more comparative approach to gender. Similarly, work on sexuality assumes sexual desires, behaviors, and intimacies to be heteronormative. In the future, queer theory could be employed to disrupt and challenge implicit assumptions about sexual orientation and desire. In conclusion, opportunities abound for new work, which melds a longstanding interest in women, race, and slavery with newer theoretical and methodological approaches to gender, sexuality, and colonialism.