Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

4. “Force-Ripe”: Caribbean Women’s Sexual Agency

123 4 “Force-Ripe” Caribbean Women’s Sexual Agency “Force-ripe” is a colloquial English Caribbean phrase that refers to fruit picked before it is ripe and then forced to ripen early. It is also commonly used to sneer at girls who dress or behave as mature women, usually in a manner perceived as sexual. The likening of women to fruit—ripe or spoiled—is also found in other parts of the Caribbean. For instance, Judith Ortiz Cofer remembers that when she, as a teenager, resisted a white boy’s kiss, he said, “in a resentful tone: ‘I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early’—my first instance of being thought of as a fruit or vegetable —I was supposed to ripen, not just grow into womanhood like other girls.”1 “Force-ripe” is thus an appropriate phrase to use when discussing portrayals of Caribbean women’s sexual agency and the sometimes hostile reactions to that work. While the activism and creative production of Caribbean women who desire women largely insist (contrary to many others’ beliefs) that these women are part of their respective Caribbean communities, heterosexual Caribbean women tend to use different strategies in their portrayals of sexual agency. Heterosexual Caribbean women, like all women and men, are subject to strict gender codes. Yet women who have a conventional sexuality and gender presentation can take for granted their inclusion (however problematic) in their community and nation. Caribbean literature that focuses on heterosexual women’s sexual agency—including Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Heremakhonon by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe ), and The House of Six Doors by Patricia Selbert (Curaçao)—often 124 · I s l a n d B o d i e s portrays women who reject a range of Caribbean cultural expectations, including traditional gender mores. In popular music, however, the rejection of gender expectations functions within quintessential Caribbean musical forms. Caribbean “Queens” Jocelyne Béroard of zouk, Drupatee Ramgoonai of chutney, Ivy Queen of reggaeton, Alison Hinds of soca, and Rihanna of Top 40 pop music—women at the forefront of their respective musical genres—largely portray women’s sexual agency not as a battle or even a questionbutasafact.Andbecausesuch“facts”arepresentedwithinafamiliar —and danceable—form, their transgressive nature has not diminished the Queens’ popularity among Caribbean women and men. Agency figures in all of the sexual transgressions discussed in Island Bodies . But the concept takes on heightened significance for heterosexual Caribbean women because their gender identity and sexual orientation are notinherentlytransgressivewithinCaribglobalsocieties.Iuse sexual agency here to describe the activity of women voicing, advocating for, and/or pursuing control of their own sexuality or erotic pleasure on their own terms. The inclusion of pleasure is key to sexual agency because women’s sexuality is traditionally mandated to be in service of men, procreation, and the nation . Agency can take many forms, including engaging in extramarital or nonmonogamous sex, initiating sex, determining whether or not to have sex and under what circumstances, deciding what kind of sex to have, or displaying desire. As will be seen in the music and novels examined here, sometimes the goal of agency is to defy the expectations of family or culture and to discover and claim one’s own sense of self or identity. And while women’s sexual pleasure is itself not necessarily culturally proscribed, the public expression of female desire is prohibited by heteropatriarchy in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Thus, women are expected to express desire only withthemanwithwhomtheyhaveamonogamous(andpreferablymarital) relationship. Women who publicly reveal or express their sexual desires— to parents or other family or community members—risk being labeled a whore, puta, putain, jamette, slut, Marilisse, or force-ripe. I agree with critic Donette Francis (whose concept of antiromance will be returned to in this chapter’s conclusion) that “agency is not a fixed destination to which one arrives with the originating act forever completed, but rather it is a continuous series of maneuvers to be enacted and reenacted .”2 The literature and music examined in this chapter also support this view, portraying women who are in the process of becoming and who live Caribbean Women’s Sexual Agency · 125 complicated and often contradictory lives, rather than women who have resolved all of their internal and communal conflicts. This chapter focuses primarily on Caribbean gender norms and expectations rather than on stereotypes from the global North. It describes the Caribglobal cult of true oomanhood, a set of...