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.
The findings of a questionnaire survey distributed to 153 female university students in Barbados and Jamaica in 2008 reveal the attitudes to diverse female sexualities in the Caribbean. The participants in the survey discussed changing beliefs about sexuality in Caribbean society. The findings show that slowly, as a consequence of globalization and the mass media, people are increasingly open-minded about sex. Women are confidently expressing and increasingly asserting themselves as equal partners. There is greater debate in Caribbean society about female same-sex relationships, and deeper awareness of sexual harassment is evident. Nevertheless, for some respondents, the same degrading notions of women as sex objects and promiscuous beings continue to exist.
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.
Reviews the essays El Amor, El Sexo Y Los Celos, by Alberto Orlandini, Before Night Falls A Memoir, by Reinaldo Arenas, El Caiman Ante El Espejo: Un Ensayo De Interpretación De Lo Cubano, by Uva de Aragon Clavijo, Cuba Sin Caudillos: Un Enfoque Feminista Para El Siglo XXI, by Illeana Fuentes, La Mujer Rural Y Urbana: Estudios De Casos, by Mariana Ravnet et al.;
Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
168 p., Provides an accessible account of a poorly understood aspect of Jamaican popular culture. It explores the socio-political meanings of Jamaica's dancehall culture. In particular, the book gives an account of the power relations within the dancehall and between the dancehall and the wider Jamaican society.
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.
