By Rosamond S. King
“Outstanding. the best examinations of the dissonance among legit sexual ideologies and genuine social and cultural practices i've got had the excitement of reading.”—David William Foster, writer of São Paulo: views at the urban and Cultural Production
“A considerate exploration of ways Caribbean girls and sexual minorities are on the middle of a sexual revolution that refuses containment inside of Euro-American techniques of identification and sexuality. this is often an remarkable sexual revolution, led by means of sexual minorities, remodeling the zone and giving new meanings to what inclusion and liberation glance like.”—Amalia L. Cabezas, writer of Economies of wish: intercourse Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic
In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression within the Caribbean adventure. reading the sexual norms and expectancies portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, track, movie, and pop culture, King skillfully demonstrates what number members contest conventional roles by means of maneuvering inside of and/or attempting to swap their society’s binary gender structures. those transgressions have come to raised signify Caribbean tradition than the “official” representations perpetuated by means of governmental elites and sometimes codified into legislation that strengthen patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes.
Unique in its breadth in addition to its multilingual and multidisciplinary procedure, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial kinfolk, transgender humans, and women’s sexual organization in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. also, King explores the paradoxical nature of sexuality around the zone: discussing sexuality in public is frequently thought of taboo, but the tourism economic climate trades on portraying Caribbean citizens as hypersexualized.
Ultimately King finds that regardless of the numerous nationwide specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic variety around the islands, there are impressive similarities within the methods Caribglobal cultures try to limit sexuality and within the methods members discover and transgress these boundaries.
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Additional info for Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination
Sample text
The chapter title has a number of meanings embedded within it that I will briefly lay out here and to which I will return throughout the discussion. To begin, re/presentation refers to representations of trans people by themselves and by others. It also refers to revised re/presentations of the self as the “true” self; situations in which trans people change—override, if you will—their external presentations of their bodies to more accurately reflect their internal (their mental and emotional) selves.
S. novels that Morrison refers to is that the Caribbean novels do not encourage restraint but instead encourage giving in to the desire, the “sin,” the fear, and the pleasure. They imply that relationships with trans people are a way—if not the way—to discover one’s own “true” self and that after emotional (and sometimes sexual) involvement with a trans person, “regular” people can go on to lead more self-aware, more truthful, and sometimes more gendernormative lives. Another area in which the texts I analyze and the ones discussed in Playing in the Dark intersect is the recurrence of nurses within them.
21 We learn even less about Harriet in No Telephone to Heaven than we do about Otoh and Tyler in Cereus Blooms. The child of a wealthy white Jamaican and his dark maid,22 Harry/Harriet is raised by his/her father and his wife. While at ten he/she is raped by a white policeman, Harry/Harriet is adamant that the rape “did not make me the way I am. No, darling, I was born this way, that I know. ” As an adult, and before choosing to live completely as a woman, Harry/Harriet sometimes openly dresses as a woman: “Harry/Harriet in his/her Pucci bikini, his/ her furry chest getting the odd stare .