Flaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Social Change in Barbados by David A. B. Murray (review)

Sex and sexuality have always been implicated wherever people, capital, and power have flowed among and across national borders. Nevertheless, Euro-American-style sexual politics have recently taken a decidedly transnational turn. From LGBT groups’ furor over Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, to the U.K.’s linkage of foreign aid and gay rights, to Hillary Clinton’s assertion before the United Nations that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” those in the “developed” world have evidenced growing fervor for the promotion/enforcement of gay rights in the “developing” world. It is against this backdrop, and in opposition to these politics that David A. B. Murray offers us Flaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Social Change in Barbados. Derived from 6 years of ethnographic field work in Barbados, and illuminated by Murray’s more than 30 years of research there, Flaming Souls offers a textually and methodologically diverse reading of Barbadian homosexuality and Barbadian homophobia, asking what it means to label the Caribbean a global problem area for gay rights and, more broadly, whether it is “problematic to speak of groups, communities, regions, or nations as homophobic” (6).

Flaming Souls is divided into two related but methodologically distinct segments. In the first segment, Murray uses discourse analysis to take macro-level stock of the homophobia with which Barbados and the Caribbean at large are so frequently indicted. Acknowledging the ubiquity of anti-gay rhetoric in Barbados, Murray focuses on teasing out the sociohistorical circumstances from which that rhetoric emerges to illuminate how blanket assessments of homophobia and concomitant calls for gay rights are unwieldy instruments for the promotion of queer-inclusive social justice. Chapter 1 examines the uptake of homosexuality in participatory media, noting that the absence of homosexual voices creates “a spectral homosexual” whose “threatening, perverted, and/or sick sexualized body . . . is continually incarnated in discourse but never fully instantiated in the flesh” (17). Placing this homosexual spectre within the context of Barbados’s subjugation under neoliberal free trade policies, Murray concludes that the “homosexual serves a particular semiotic strategy, acting as the key indicator of downward movement of the social respectability of the nation” (25). Murray carries this (neo)colonial reading of Barbados’s anti-gay discourse forward in the segment’s subsequent two chapters. In chapter 2, he examines a 2003–2004 controversy in which key government officials called for decriminalizing sodomy to reduce HIV-AIDS transmission, only to be met with strong public opposition. Murray suggests that it is an error to read this controversy as a confrontation between pro-gay and anti-gay rhetorics as both positions frame “the homosexual’s place in the Barbadian nation” solely in terms of how “male anal sexual intercourse threatens to infect the ‘good’ (heterosexual) citizens of the state” (35). The final chapter of the segment critiques gay rights discourse more broadly. Here, Murray analyzes Barbados’s international and intraregional rights charters, highlighting the (neo)colonial complicities of the human rights discourses those charters rely upon. As an anti-colonial alternative, he offers up Barbados’s “long tradition” of “populist egalitarianism” (50), arguing that this tradition might offer a less problematic framework for contesting state violence against queers.

The second segment of Flaming Souls presents Murray’s ethnographic work, intervening in the Barbadian homosexual’s discursive reduction to “a ghostly haunting without flesh and bones” (54). In chapter 4, Murray unpacks the guidance offered to tourists by a white bed and breakfast owner, claiming that it homogenizes queer identities by conflating “local and black with lower socioeconomic status” (60). Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Barbadian “queens,” working class homosexual men who primarily dress and live in normatively feminine ways (65). Murray argues that queens escape the socially mandated invisibility of gender-normative gay men because their lower-class positionalities allow them to “engage in and practice a set of values . . . that other members of their...