Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

Notes

199 Notes Introduction: From the Foreign-Local to the Caribglobal 1. This author is, of course, aware that not all of the places that identify as or are identified as Caribbean are islands. Nevertheless, other geographic locations such as Guyana and the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America share a similar history of being exoticized. 2. Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 5. 3. Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 664, 655, 665. 4. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 30; La Fountain-Stokes, Uñas pintadas de azul, 7. A “department ” is the rough equivalent to a U.S. American state or a Canadian province. 5. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, xi. 6. K. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 5. 7. Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity, 204. 8. Hall, “Minimal Selves,” 115. 9. K. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 7. 10. Atluri, “Putting the ‘Cool,’” 20. 11.SeeE.Clarke,MyMotherWhoFatheredMe;Safa,MythoftheMaleBreadwinner; Solien de González, “Consanguineal Household”; Slater, Caribbean Family; Barrow, Family in the Caribbean; and Wekker, Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture. 12. For statistics on Bahamian children born outside of heterosexual marriage, see Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 38. For research on the nonuniversality of heterosexuality in the Caribbean, see Ramírez, What It Means to Be a Man; Decena, Tacit Subjects; and Jafari Allen, ¡Venceremos? 13. K. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 2. 14. Ironically, ultraconservative Christian fundamentalist groups from the United States are working more frequently in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa, where they believe the cultural climate is currently more welcoming to heterosexism than are North America and Europe. See, for instance, Colin Robinson, “Work of Three-Year CAISO,” and Center for Constitutional Rights, “Ugandan LGBT Activists File Case.” 15. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 22–23. 16. K. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 28. 17. Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” 198. 18. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 22. 19. See, for instance, the website for Haitian organization KOURAJ, http:// kouraj.org/; Robinson, “Patricia Gone with Millicent”; Decena, Tacit Subjects; and G. Ayala, “Retiring Behavioral Risk.” 20. Seigworth and Gregg, introduction to Affect Theory Reader, 1. 21.SeeDalleo, Caribbean Literature andPublicSphere,4.IagreewithDalleointhat my conception of public sphere is more democratic than “Habermas’s monolithic construction of the bourgeois public sphere.” 22. Tim Padgett, “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?” Time online, April 12, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1182991,00.html. 23. For a similar approach in relation to use of accents, see La Fountain-Stokes, Queer Ricans 190, n.5. 24. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 28. 25. Wekker, Politics of Passion, 76. 26. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 118. 27. J. Allen, ¡Venceremos? 58–59. 28. K. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 4. Chapter 1. The Caribbean Trans Continuum and Backhanded Re/Presentation 1. For discussion of the termtransgender, see, for instance, Namaste,InvisibleLives, introduction. On surgery, see J. Allen, ¡Venceremos? 192 2. La Font, “Very Straight Sex,” 1. 3. Orsi, “Cuba Transgender Wedding.” 4. Adding significantly to the small archive of work on Caribbean trans people, Tinsley’s analysis in Thiefing Sugar (175) provides some history of Caribbean trans genders. She cites nineteenth- and twentieth-century Haitian, Surinamese, and Cuban references to “male women,” remarking that Caribbean realities “generated a spectrum of Creolized names beyond effeminate to designate culturally specific formations of male femininity—including Suriname’s male mati, Caribbean Spanish travesti, and the French/Kreyòl masisi and macommère” (175). 5. A Jamaican study by Hron et al. notes that “transgendered individuals (especially men to women) maintain a very low public profile due to the overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward them, and are therefore not commonly subject to public scrutiny. While cases of abuse do occur, no personal statements exist to document them” (“Report on Persecution” 2). Similarly, the entry for Puerto Rico in The InternationalDictionaryof Sexuality statesthat“Asinotherpartsoftheworld,transvestites and transsexuals do exist in Puerto Rican society. However, scientific data on the extent of this population and its practices are unavailable” (Montesinos and Preciado, “Puerto Rico,” n. pag.). This quote comes from the only article in the dictionary that discusses trans people in a Caribbean country. The missing voices and analysis of trans lives in such studies points to their vulnerability and marginality, as well as 200 · Notes to Pages 11–24 to the low priority many sexual minority advocates place on their experiences and well-being. 6. These times were marked, for instance, by the DeSouza case discussed later...