SHIFTING THE GROUND BENEATH US

Abstract

Nearly three decades after the implementation of structural adjustment programmes, there are rapidly growing social and economic inequalities in the Caribbean, a situation further aggravated in Guyana by a divided and highly racialized political landscape. This essay looks at how Red Thread, a Guyanese women's organization, draws on women's caring work to ground various interventions that contest the status quo and span traditional racialized and spatialized divisions in the country. Beginning with an account of feminist rearticulations of social reproduction as critical feminist praxis, the essay grounds this conceptual frame in a discussion of the January 2005 floods that devastated Guyana's coastal communities and affected some 40 per cent of the population. It focuses specifically on how Red Thread organized with grassroots women to challenge official narratives of the floods, to make women's work visible and to come up with a list of demands that brought women together across several communities. It concludes with a discussion of the effects of the mobilization, and how it demonstrates a commitment to engaging women as a diverse collectivity through working out rather than assuming a politics of connection and affiliation.