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30 Chapter 2 Globalizing Nevis Radical Shifts from Subsistence to Consumerism Ruthie recounts how as a girl growing up in the 1980s, she used to arrange to meet her paramour in a dark pasture or in an alley late in the evening long after her great-grandmother, with whom she lived, had gone to bed.This is not too dissimilar from what I learned from girls comingof -age today. For instance, girls participating in the focus groups at various schools explained a number of ways that their peers secretly arranged to meet with their boyfriends.Vickie, a fifteen-year-old at Lynn Jeffers, leaned forward over the tape recorder, lowered her voice, and remarked,“Nevisian girls can be very sneaky.”With the other girls listening,Vicki described how girls have a number of ways to “get what dey want.” If a girl wanted to be alone with her boyfriend or with another man, for instance, she might climb into the backseat of his car and lie down on the floor so as not to be seen by family members or by other people from her village who might recognize her and inform her parents; this way her boyfriend could drive through town and through other smaller villages to get to some of the more secluded beaches so that the two might be alone. I also learned that it was not uncommon for a girl to turn her cell phone to a vibrating mode; that way, if her boyfriend wanted to contact her, no one, such as her parents or siblings, would be privy to the call, and she might speak to her boyfriend all night in her bedroom or arrange to meet him after everyone else in the house was asleep. Apart from the fact that they have cell phones to depend on and access to cars for transportation, the girls’ desires and Ruthie’s appear similar, namely to steal a few precious moments alone with their boyfriends.The social continuities are the same—girls seeking out pleasurable moments with boys, away from the scrutiny of their parents or from other family members; however, the cultural and economic context in which girls of today negotiate their subjectivities has changed drastically from when Ruthie came of age in the 1980s. Assuming that the production of subjectivities can never be understood apart from the social and economic context in which they are embedded, the girls’ lives need to be situated and understood within the changing and dynamic aspects of Nevisian social life. In this chapter, I provide a description of the changes in Nevisian society that have had the greatest impact on various aspects of the coming-of-age process. I focus on the last two decades because while Nevis, like other Caribbean islands, has always been affected by global influences, since the 1980s, the small island society has undergone radical changes as a result of the increased dependency on tourism and on other economic development opportunities, including the offshore financing industry.1 Over the past twenty years, with a greater economic base, the Nevisian government, as well as local businesses have been able to make a number of infrastructural changes affecting social life. For example, in the late 1980s, for the first time, Nevisians had access to network and non-network TV via satellite ; waterlines providing water throughout villages to individual homes were laid;primary schools in Charlestown,which were once segregated according to sex, became coeducational; the telecommunication system offered phone services to all residents; theVoice of Nevis, a privately owned radio station, went on the air; the first self-serve grocery store was opened; and in 1991, the Four Seasons resort opened. All of these developments would prove to have profound effects on social and economic life on Nevis. Prior to the 1980s, Nevisians, including girls, were more tied to subsistence economy. As such, everyday activities were largely determined by chores that facilitated daily living needs; as a result, there were fewer opportunities for leisure activities associated with a consumer culture, such as watching television, shopping, listening to music, or surfing the Internet. Additionally, there were limited opportunities for exposure to multiple global influences, including mediated images and scripts presently available to Nevisians. In sum, subsistence living produced obvious constraints on leisure that restricted the girls’ access to images and scripts within and outside Nevisian culture.2 I would also argue that subsistence living limited both knowledge of, and opportunities for, sexual activities. For example, busy girls with little...

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