Addresses the socially controversial issue of the public expression of sexuality in dance in the Caribbean. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of 'wining' or 'wukkin' up', dancing involving pelvic gyrations.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
218 p., Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, Amalia Cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly "affective economies"), "sex workers," and "sexual tourism," and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism.
On the roles of gender, migration, and sexuality in the concept of sexiles, or people who are geographically displaced because of their sexuality, in the Carribean. Analyzes the short story "La Cautiva" by Pedro Juan Soto, the novel "I Am a Martinician Woman" by Mayotte Capécia, and the novel "No Telephone to Heaven" by Michelle Cliff.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
313 p., Analyzes the phenomenon of mati work, an old practice among Afro-Surinamese working-class women in which marriage is rejected in favor of male and female sexual partners. Wekker describes the lives of these women, who prefer to create alternative families of kin, lovers, and children, and gives a fascinating account of women's sexuality that is not limited to either heterosexuality or same-sex sexuality. She offers new perspectives on the lives of Caribbean women, transnational gay and lesbian movements, and an Afro-Surinamese tradition that challenges conventional Western notions of marriage, gender, identity, and desire.
Journal Article, Examines the power-evasive reduction of 'race,' racial conflict, and racial subordination from the terrain of the social, material, and structural to the 'private' realm of affect and emotions, in an effort to explain how neoliberalism operates in the everyday lives of U.S.-born Latino and Latin American migrant youth, particularly, young, working-class Puerto Rican and Brazilian women in Newark, New Jersey. Argues that urban neoliberalism has been complicit in generating new racial configurations in the United States and that, in the case of populations of Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean backgrounds, such articulations of difference have deployed a variation of 'racial democracy' ideologies.
