Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

Afterword

Afterword At the beginning of this study, I proposed imagination as part of a methodology for the study of sexuality in popular culture and literature. The preceding chapters explore portrayals of transgressive sexualities in diverse creative works, including carnival and festival performances, novels and short stories, feature films and documentaries, and music and visual art. This analysis also engages traditional mores, official laws, and formal and informal activism as imaginative acts, insofar as they reveal the perceived limits and possibilities of Caribglobal sexualities. To conclude this work, then, I propose imagination as a methodology for the inclusion of sexual transgression in Caribbean community- and nation-building. For if nations are, in large part, imagined communities, then how we imagine our communities is crucial. Three important Caribbean thinkers, Puerto Rican sociologist Manolo Guzmán, Jamaican author Thomas Glave, and Trinidadian activist and poet Colin Robinson, have also invoked the imagination inrelationshiptotransgressiveCaribbeansexualities.Inhisimportantbook Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities, Guzmán addresses what I name in chapter 2 el secreto abierto, the situation in which people “know” someone is a homosexual, though the fact is not openly acknowledged. Guzmán argues that those who criticize el secreto abierto do not understand its context ; he writes that “The claim that sexual silence in Latino cultures is a symptom of homophobia is an effect of the failure to imagine a thoroughly historicized gay homosexuality. Thus, this so-called silence is not only misconstrued but also conceptualized as a problem in need of remedy.”1 Glave, in his oft-reproduced essay originally published in 1999, “Toward a Nobility of the Imagination: Jamaica’s Shame,” focuses on Jamaican homophobic ignorance and shame that are the opposite of the “noble imagination” he 195 196 · Afterword dreams of. And Robinson, in direct response to Glave’s essay, argues that Glave and many Caribbean and non-Caribbean LGBT activists outside of the region suffer from a “poverty of imagination” in relationship to “the humanity of both the Caribbean homophobe and of the means to change his/ her heart.”2 Like Guzmán, Robinson worries that too many activists propagate “a disturbingly neocolonial vision of the Caribbean as backwards on issues of sexuality and humanism alongside a reductionist vision of Caribbean homophobia as irrational, ignorant and inhumane.” Presumably all of these men want, as Glave writes, “the ability to envision goodness, even greatness, in all things, and most of all in ourselves; the ability to love ourselves—all of ourselves, irrespective of color, class, gender, or sexual orientation.”3 Interestingly, however, they direct their discontent to different constituencies. Guzmán targets scholars who misunderstand Latino cultures, while Glave criticizes Jamaicans who are ignorant of or hateful towards same-sex desiring people. Robinson, in contrast, addresses Caribbean LGBT activists and allies. The conversation between these men’s work is instructive and absorbing. However, I want to present a Caribglobal argument that engages but broadens the discussion of sexuality and the imagination beyond the sociolinguistic boundaries of Latino cultures, the national boundaries of Jamaica, and the boundaries of sexual minority activism. Throughout the Caribbean region and its diaspora, trans people, same-sex desiring individuals, and women who display sexual agency are considered transgressive because they contradict prevailing gender and sexuality norms and therefore threaten Caribglobal heteropatriarchy . And when interracial relationships between Caribbean men and white women are considered transgressive, it is because they are thought to threaten white male hegemony or to threaten racial or territorial nationalism . Yet, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, there is an abundance of evidence both of transgressive Caribbean sexualities and “native understandings”ofthesedesiresthroughoutCaribbeanhistoryandculture, in every era, and in every part of the region and its diaspora.4 Among other realities, the increasing visibility of heterosexual women’s sexual agency in music and of trans people and other sexual minorities through activism and in the media makes the realities of their lives more difficult to ignore. The persistent existence of sexual transgression despite all efforts to suppress it demonstrates the power of the erotic and shows that resistance exists in Afterword · 197 some form everywhere and all the time, even at great risk, and even if that resistance is difficult for some to discern. Ironically, the visibility of advocates of sexual repression “inadvertently speaksofthemalleability”ratherthanthefixityofsexuality.5 Thesimultaneous persistence of notions of “right” and “wrong,” “proper” and “indecent” sexuality are neither accidental nor spontaneous but are concepts that undergird heteropatriarchal structures which, in turn, help to determine and...