Abstract
Abstract In Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), M.G. Smith documents what he calls “abnormal” sexual relations between women in female-headed households on the island. These lesbian madivines represent statistically significant “deviations” from normative patterns of kinship and residence in domestic groups, and are associated with the shapeshifting witchcraft of sukuyan and lougarou. Linking Smith’s ethnography of “mating patterns” to transactional pathways of reproductive value—blood, money, witchcraft and sexuality—I rework his ideological explanation of Carriacou lesbianism (as a “mechanism” for preserving female marital fidelity) into a feminist model of female empowerment with comparative potentialities throughout the Caribbean.
Highlights
With a high cultural value placed on female fidelity, Smith argued, women developed lesbian relationships of the madivine and zami, remaining “faithful” to their husbands while satisfying their own sexual “needs.”8 In this manner, men working away from the island for as long as ten years at a stretch could return to Carriacou with their honor—and households—intact
As Smith (1962:116) explains, “women are virtually excluded from the exchange economy of Carriacou, and depend on men for most of the money they need or receive,” they relied on their “facilities” in a range of sexual strategies that formed a moral continuum from betrothal and marriage down to commercial prostitution
For younger women in Carriacou neither engaged nor established in extraresidential mating relations, sexual strategies within the field of social and economic capital ranged from taking lovers to commercial prostitution
Summary
With a high cultural value placed on female fidelity, Smith argued, women developed lesbian relationships of the madivine and zami, remaining “faithful” to their husbands while satisfying their own sexual “needs.”8 In this manner, men working away from the island for as long as ten years at a stretch could return to Carriacou with their honor—and households—intact. Smith explains Carriacou lesbianism as a response to the pressure of male out-migration on female fidelity and sexuality.
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