“The Sound of Unknowing”: Theorizing Race, Gender, and “Illegitimacy” through Jamaican Family Photography

This article explores race, gender, and “illegitimacy” in the Jamaican context through an analysis of family photographs from the early twentieth century. The photographs depict the family of Doris Butcher née Benjamin, a Jamaican woman who was born in 1900 and died in 1989. The article argues that Butcher’s status as a light-skinned “illegitimate” woman shows the complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions within race, class, and gender hierarchies in colonial Jamaica.