Explores how African, Caribbean and White British women worked to hide psychological partner abuse as they experienced it. They prioritized negotiated competencies as “good partners,” actively setting socially and culturally embedded boundaries to their abuser’s behaviors.
Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. Article shows how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centered on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.
Focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Uses extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities.
Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
Caribbean women writers such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations.
Examines the sentiment of love among the indigenous Miskitu people along the Honduran and Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast. The Miskitu are a Native American ethnic group in Central America. The people are primarily of African Native American ancestry. Miskitu women historically have held high positions of power in their matrilocal society. Since the lobster-diving industry began in the 1970s, however, gender and power relations have shifted, rendering women more dependent on men who earn wages. Women's loss of power is not only due to the economic changes, but it is also caused by the ideology and discourse of romantic love in Miskitu society.
Examines welfare-reliant, female heads of households and the barriers they face in their attempts to obtain employment. Almost all the Latina respondents spoke only Spanish and were born in South or Central America, Cuba, or the West Indies. The study challenges the assumptions on which the Temporary Assistance for Need Families operates, including its political origins and its current regulations that mandate time limits on assistance in spite of persistent national economic problems.
