The Internationalist Archive
Dr Kamala Kempadoo is a sociologist and Professor Emerita of Social Science at York University, Canada. With research spanning Caribbean, Black, and transnational feminisms, her work delves into critical areas such as Black Radical Thought and extensive studies on sex work and global anti-trafficking discourses. She's co-edited and co-authored books, including, Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender (2021) and Sexuality and White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking (2022).
For issue #51 of The Internationalist, we draw from Dr Kempadoo’s essay “Towards a Decolonization of Sexual Economic Praxis in the Caribbean” (The Scholar and Feminist Online, 2020). In this text, she examines the subaltern counter-narratives regarding various sexual-economic practices, including sex work and nonmonogamous relationships, and calls for a politics of decolonization of sexuality in the Caribbean to address issues of discrimination and social justice.
Subaltern Sexual Praxis
Under colonialism, fueled by early anthropology, a discourse on so-called deviant or mating practices in the Caribbean was established, and this today is overlayered by post-colonial Caribbean nationalisms and imaginations, which shore up specific notions about decent and respectable sexuality. Heteronormativity is one important cornerstone of that discourse, and so are notions of monogamy – especially for women – and sexual desire, where sexuality is most commonly posited as pure and uncontaminated, sutured to conceptions of love. Yet if we read from below, other practices and perspectives are evident. Mimi Sheller identifies these as subaltern counter-performances of citizenship, which map neatly onto Micheline Crichlow’s notion of Caribbean resistance that resides in liminal spaces and movements “forged through accommodation, connivances, and witting and unwitting subversions.” These recent formulations call to mind Kamau Brathwaite’s 1970s notion of a “little tradition” in the Caribbean to speak about the lived culture, habits, norms, and practices of “the folk” that are mostly taken for granted, unscrutinized, and interdependent of a formal tradition – the “Great narrative” – which dominates within and is cultivated through schools, organized religion, and state institutions. This little tradition resonates with Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic grounds” – that which lies “outside of our present mode of being/feeling/knowing as well as the multiple discourses, their regulatory systems of meaning and interpretative ‘readings'” – which lays the basis for a vantage point for a “new self-assertion.”
A number of aspects of these subaltern grounds of Caribbean sexuality have repeatedly been identified by scholars, policy makers, and public intellectuals in recent years, including multiple sexual partnering, nonmonogamy/serial monogamy/informal polygamy, hetero-, homo-, and bisexual partnering, sexual initiation for boys and girls at youthful ages, sexual relations before and outside of marriage, and transactional sexual relations. Organized struggles for sex worker rights since the mid-1990s and HIV and AIDS prevention work illuminate other aspects of this little tradition, namely the significance of sexual labor in the region. Such activities and scholarship point out that the exchange of sex for money, gifts, or benefits is not inherently sexual violence, even while it is mediated by classed, gendered, and racialized relations of power. Rather it is the criminalization and stigmatization of “prostitution” upheld by normative moral orders, legal systems, and state practices that lies at the heart of the problem, producing conditions for police violence, public scorn and condemnation, unregulated brothels and sex clubs, discrimination in the health-care system, and hostile judicial systems. Moreover, most people who transact sex claim that they willingly participate in “whoring,” “picking fares,” “boopsing,” or “sex for top-up” even when they are under the age of eighteen. They may directly perform sexual labor for money, where it is explicitly work, or may exchange sexual intercourse and affection on a regular or occasional basis for money, goods, or services, such as drugs, gold, cell phones, phone cards, food, rent, hairdos, school fees, a cylinder of gas, cars, or travel. There is little concept of a “victim,” other than in the discourses on intergenerational transactional sex and sex or human trafficking. Arrangements that lie outside formal sex work tend to be defined as friendships, “sweethearting,” “sponsoring,” or “sexual favors.” Among peers, this may be expressed as an exchange, sometimes for pleasure, with the relationships defined as “foop-buddies” or as “pick-ups” in different countries in the region. And while transactional or tactical sex is very feminized, school boys or toyboys have “sugar mamas” for “bling” or sneakers, and young men strike up relationships with older professional men and ask for “a help” or a “likkle somet’ing.” Mark Padilla, Denise E. Brennan, and Amalia Cabezas document how sexuality and affect figure into Cuban and Dominican tourism sectors, where workers cultivate friendships and romance that lead, directly or indirectly, to an improvement in the material conditions of their lives. “Relationships with foreigners,” as Cabezas notes, “often provide unmatched economic returns.”
Significant to this mobilization of sexuality is the notion that sexual intercourse and love without some material benefit are not of great value. “Giving sweetness for sweetness” may, for example, be considered inconsequential, frivolous, disreputable, stupid, or lascivious behavior. Or we can turn to “visiting unions” in which women expect and receive financial assistance from the person with whom they have a sexual relationship and often children, but do not cohabit, as well as to long-standing African-Caribbean partnering models where sexual relations that are enduring are also paid for, albeit indirectly. “Money,” Elisa Sobo observes in her study of the Jamaican body, “is properly and respectably exchanged, with a time lag,” and serves not so much to attract a partner but to maintain the relationship. While romantic love is a part and parcel of many of these arrangements, it is also widely held that “romance without finance cannot ‘fill belly.'” Carla Freeman’s study of entrepreneurs in Barbados illuminates that this is not exclusive to the working class, the poor, or the last century, and points out that twenty-first century middle-class “partnership marriages” are sealed around a combination of love and economics. She argues that “the persistent emphasis on the desire for support and material security cannot be read as an absence of romance and love but as the particular idioms through which love and romance are expressed.” Even when participants claim that sexual liaisons with tourists are “just for the fun of it, to enjoy lots of sex while it lasts” as male beach and resort workers are wont to do, the fact that tourist women “offer everything” means that the men expect and receive gifts, money, dinners, travel, and homes, as well as sex and affection. In the absence of benefits beyond the sexual, however, attraction to the tourist declines or disappears.
Most Caribbean sexual economic arrangements so far described, including sex work, take place alongside other income-generating activities – informal and formal – and more often than not on a seasonal or limited basis. They become part of a more general struggle of Caribbean peoples to “get by.” They often provide access to goods or a lifestyle that may be out of reach if a person relied exclusively on nonsexual, nonerotic activities, labor, or relationships, but rarely are they the only basis for survival or “betterment.” This necessarily points to the larger problem of the envelopment of much of the region in westernized, neoliberal development and consumption patterns, as well as the wider issue of limited formal employment opportunities, within contexts of postcolonialism and heteropatriarchy that place a disproportionate value on raced and gendered sexualities in particular ways. Nor can we overlook patriarchal capitalist depreciations and exploitations of women’s and feminized work more generally – but we must also remember that sexual economic praxis is not a product of contemporary globalization or postcolonialism.
Toward the Decolonization of Caribbean Sexuality
Not only do we need to take the grounds of Caribbean sexuality as part of the social and cultural makeup of the Caribbean, but by disavowing the subaltern counter narrative we do severe injustice to Caribbean people’s lived experiences, ideas, and morality. Such disavowal maintains an untenable dichotomy between sexual and economic spheres of existence, and heightens secrecy, shame, and illegality. It maintains laws that support discrimination of sex work and nonmonogamy (especially for women), queerness, and teenage sexual activity, while also robbing people of their dignity. Moreover, lack of acknowledgement of the tradition, rather than supporting a creative sexual imagination, upholds unrealistic and, for many, unobtainable ideals.
We need a politics of decolonization of sexuality in the Caribbean, not just around heteronormativity and LGBT identities but also, and perhaps more importantly, around sexual-economic praxis. We need to come up with Caribbean-specific definitions that are grounded in practice rather than in colonial or postcolonial hegemonic ideals of sexuality to inform our politics of resistance and struggles for social justice. As Sheller writes, “Placing sexuality at the center of our understanding of freedom and how it might be embedded and performed offers a breathtaking revision of traditional political histories of slavery and freedom.” It is a call to “root and reroute” that which is marked as degraded and base – the Caribbean “bass culture,” or the “vulgar” – in order to refashion the past and present and to engage with the future. Or, as Cecilia Green suggests, “we need to understand not only the commanding heights of the economy and its hegemonic force, but also the nooks, crannies, and living networks of the popular domestic economy and its creative potential.”
Sex workers’ organized struggles make visible some of this potential, speaking out loudly and publicly about the hypocrisies, stigmas, and discriminations that haunt Caribbean sexuality as well as about the need to recognize sexual economic relations for the social space they occupy. One of the most vivid instances of this was in 1994, when the Maxi Linder Association in Suriname held a sex workers’ rights march through the capital, chanting “No Condom, No Pussy,” with women claiming their rights to protection, good health, and respect for sexual labor.
However, it would be unfair and unjust to place the burden of sexual justice work on sex workers’ shoulders. They are, after all, some of the most marginalized in our communities. Many more need to be involved in the struggle and in reframing sexuality in the region, to fight for the decriminalization of antiprostitution and buggery laws that render sex workers and queers and all others who rely on tactical sex as absent, or illegal noncitizens.
But would this mean, with the increasing commodification of social life we see in this globalized neoliberal era, and in the face of a persistent devaluation and hyperexploitation of women’s labor, that sex work or tactical sex will become even more prevalent, more everyday, and more important to the future of the Caribbean? Would it mean not just that, as Cynthia Enloe once wrote, the Caribbean will become nations of busboys, but that it will become nations of sex workers? That the image of the region as exotic and erotic will be promoted by tourism industries even more than it is already? Or that racialized hypersexuality in dance hall or carnival become one of the region’s primary economic mainstays?
This is not necessarily the future I have in mind. Such scenarios would reduce the diversity of the region to a monosexual culture and leave it at the beck and call of globalization, recolonizing patriarchies, and hegemonic Creole nationalisms. Struggles to change global inequalities around gender, race, and wealth need to accompany struggles for sexual justice so that it is ultimately irrelevant whether sexuality is inflected by and through economics – so that people can practice their sexuality in freedom and with respect, irrespective of how it is configured and lived. I am suggesting, then, that to claim sexuality as economically infused and integral to Caribbean ways of being would not just bolster respect for many marginalized people, especially working women, or empower them in their negotiations with the wider world, or bring them out of the realms of the criminal, the despised, and the noncitizen. It could also help us to imagine a more just future in Caribbean. And so I conclude by quoting Vivian Zelizer in The Purchase of Intimacy when she urges us to “stop agonizing over whether or not money corrupts, but instead analyze what combinations of activity and intimate relations produce happier, more just, and more productive lives.” If we, Caribbeanists and feminists, are serious about sexual rights in the region, then our future work should also take on the sexual economy, explicitly and respectfully.
Excerpted from the original with permission of the author. First published in The Scholar and Feminist Online.
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