155 p., Explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices.
Considers deployments of the term ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ (MSM) through what the author terms a ‘Risk-Rights’ strategy in international development. Examining two Caribbean initiatives – the 2011 documentary film Living in the Shadows and the Guyanese NGO Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) – this paper documents and evaluates this strategy. Living in the Shadows demonstrates the dominant characterization of MSM as murderous, while SASOD's engagement is more consciously critical of the strategy's limits.
Compares sexual prejudice in Jamaica to that in Britain and investigated the relationship between contact and sexual prejudice in both countries. Jamaican participants reported more negative attitudes toward gay men than did British participants, but contact was more strongly associated with reduced sexual prejudice for Jamaican participants than for British participants.
Three local non-profit groups, the African Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario (ACCHO), the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP), and Women's Health in Women's Hands Community Health Centre (WHIWH) hosted an event called Black Queer Resistance: "Are We Unified in the Fight Against Homophobia?" during Pride Week in Toronto, Canada.
