Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination by Rosamond King (review)

This book takes as a point of departure the notion of Caribbean bodies, first as a locus of colonial exploitation through labor and sexual work, and then as a locus of pleasure, desire, resistance, and enjoyment. For King, it is important to recognize the agency and autonomy of Caribbean eroticism, as well as the diversity of desires and sexualities in a region that has been dominated by more than one imperial system. Island Bodies debunks the myth of the Caribbean as one of the most homophobic regions in the world, to explore the multiple ways in which non-normative genders and sexualities are part of the daily lives in the communities of this region. The book focuses on two major aspects: “the uses of the transgressive erotic (building in Audre Lorde’s work) and the power of desire as a motivating force for individual fulfillment” (9).

Island Bodies is composed of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction the author reviews and justifies the rich comparative analysis proposed in the book based on the study of cultural productions and legal debates taking place in the French, Anglo, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean. King develops her arguments through a comparative approach that examines a diverse array of genres of cultural expression, such as poetry, novels and short stories, documentaries and feature films, carnivals and festivals, popular music, visual art, and political texts in the form of legal cases and mission statements of organizations produced from the 1970s to the present in the Caribbean and its diasporas. This is an important time period in the region, since it is precisely in these same years that fields like Caribbean feminism and Caribbean sexual minority activism emerge. King also discloses some of the limitations of her study, particularly in the inclusion of the Dutch Caribbean, the representation of the physically smaller islands, and the inclusion of certain ethnic groups, like the Chinese and Arab Caribbeans.

One of the central notions in King’s book is what she denominates as the “Caribglobal.” Taking into account how globalization and transnationalism have an impact in the region, this term is used to refer to the individual and collective experiences within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. Island Bodies questions passive oppositions between the local and the global, especially in a region of the world where translocality and displacements are central historic and social experiences. This allows King to make a unique critical intervention using an archive firmly linked with a women of color feminist tradition—that includes Audre Lorde, Jacqui Alexander, Donette Francis, and Omise’eke Tinsley, among many others—while documenting a whole array of local terms used in the multilingual context of the Caribbean to refer to gender, sexuality, and desire. Each subsequent chapter engages a diverse and rich corpus to study the following forms of sexual transgression: unconventional genders, male and female homosexuality, women’s sexual agency, and interracial relationships between men of color and white women. This is an important critical gesture, since it conceives sexual transgressions as part of a continuum that includes heterosexual and non-heterosexual experiences.

Chapter 1 studies the representation of transvestite characters in carnivals and festivals, in literary depictions, as well as in three cases on legal definitions of trans identities in Guyana, Cuba, and Trinidad and Tobago. The main thesis is that trans identities are widely represented in Caribbean cultures, but these representations are usually done in a “backhanded way.” Many of these trans characters do not enjoy the social validation and depth of development of most of the other characters. This is the case in the representation of trans characters and narrators in No Telephone to Heaven (1987) by Michelle Cliff, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), and Sirena Selena by Mayra Santos Febres (2000). According to King, the trans characters represented in these narratives excel in spaces in which their cisgender counterparts fail. In their perfection and utopianness, these characters do not attain the...