OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse taalkunde, letterkunde en geschiedenis. Jaargang 27

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Kamala Kempadoo
Caribbean sexuality
Mapping the field

Caribbean sexuality is both hypervisible and obscured. That is, it is celebrated in popular culture as an important ingredient in Caribbean social lite and flaunted to attract tourists to the region, yet it is shrouded in double-entendre, secrecy, and shame. In this article I present a review of the main trends in studies of Caribbean sexuality, arguing that while there are few exclusive studies on the subject, there is much we can draw upon for insights into Caribbean sexual relations, sexual expressions, and sexual identities. Drawing from published as well as ‘grey’ materials, this article points out that Caribbean sexuality is often perceived and analysed as linked to force and (domestic) violence against women and children, sexually transmitted infections (i.e. HIV/AIDS), and economic imperatives. It is also widely accepted as attached to heterosexuality and gendered imbalances of power, as well as to men's sexual agency.

However, studies of same-sex relations, transactional sex, prostitution, and sex tourism suggest a far greater complexity, which demands more elaborate and complicated understandings of sexuality. Moreover, given the range of sexual practices and relations that appear in the studies, I argue here for a conceptualisation of sexuality as semi-autonomous from gender, and begin to map the contours of a specific area that can be designated as Caribbean sexuality studies. This article is part of the outcome of a 2006 study that was aimed to assist the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and its partners to ‘better understand and therefore address how gender and sexuality are related to risk and vulnerability’ in the Caribbean.¹

A primary focus here is how sexuality is expressed or practiced, not the way in which sexed bodies or sexualities are constituted or determined. Sexual praxis is then used to capture the way in which sexuality is made visible through behaviours, activities and interactions between people, in relations, and in the ways in which desires are actualised. There are two main reasons for focusing on praxis rather than identity: firstly, sexuality does not form a primary basis for social identification in the Caribbean,

1 The study was commissioned by UNIFEM-Caribbean Office, the Barbados National HIV/AIDS Commission, and the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC). It was conducted by this author in collaboration with Andy Taitt. The report was presented to UNIFEM as ‘Gender, sexuality and implications for HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean; A review of literature and programmes’ (Barbados, July 2006).

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consequently sexual behaviours, activities and relations have become the central focus for analyses of sexuality in the region. Secondly, the specification of sexual identity groups often elides the very varied sexual arrangements in the region, and can work to hinder broader understandings of how Caribbean peoples relate sexually.

Trends in sexual praxis

Despite the mountain of grey documents that include some mention of sexual praxis (reports, conference papers, theses and policy briefings) and the growing number of more accessible documents (published journal articles, electronic articles, chapters in books, media reports and books), there is little consistency in existing studies, thus little basis for comparison cross-ethnically, cross-nationally, or regionally.² Also apparent is the repetition of ideas through multiple reviews of studies and several small-scale qualitative research efforts that had not been replicated or are not replicable. Yet, while many of the studies tend to repeat broed generalities, they also contain specific details and important nuggets of information about localised, class- and ethnic-specific sexual expressions.³

The most common aspects of sexual praxis we identified in the literature are elaborated below. These involve violence against women, sexual-economic exchange, same-sex relations, adolescent sexual activity, population mobility and multiple partnering. Incest, women's sexual agency and expressions of sexual desire and bisexual behaviour are repeatedly signalled, yet are not well-researched themes in this body of literature. And while male sexual pleasure and agency in many instances are taken to be a natural state of affairs and appear as an underlying assumption in many studies, the significante of notions of virility, fertility, sexual prowess and violence to constructions of masculinity remains under-interrogated and obscured.

2 The complete body of literature that was reviewed here can be found in the UNIFEM/IDRC report by Kempadoo & Taitt (2006).

3 A recent review of studies of Caribbean sexuality published in the U.S. women's journal Signs by Jenny Sharpe & Samantha Pinto takes up studies that are published and available internationally. The authors, however, miss much of the research that has been produced locally and regionally, thus privileging the work of researchers who have access to the global academic publishing industry.

Violence against women

The issue of sex-as-violence to women is a main theme in the literature, related primarily to the lives of adult women. It is reflected in a large number of reports on, laws against, shelters for, and public discussions about domestic and gender-based violence. One of the first exclusive studies on domestic violence in the region was undertaken in the 1980s in Guyana by Basmati Shiw Parsad (Shiw Parsad 1989; Danns & Shiw Parsad 1989).

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In the following two decades a number of other significant studies nn domestic and gender-based violence have been conducted (see for example Haniff 1995; Gopaul & Cain 1996; Clarke 1998; Red Thread & Peake 1999; Robinson 2000; LeFranc 2001; Arscott-Mills 2001; Lazarus-Black 2003). A recently published annotated bibliography on gender-based violence in the Caribbean now lists 388 reports, articles and studies dealing with the subject (Quamina-Aiyejina & Braithwaite 2005).

While these studies document violence against women, it is not always easy to discern the extent or scope of sexual violence, as they do not always distinguish between sexual and other types of domestic or gender-based violence, nor do they specify the meaning of the violence. From research in the 1990s it is also claimed that there is little difference in rates of violence in intimate or domestic settings between East Indian and African ethnic groups, or for women in different classes (Gopaul & Cain 1996; Peake & Trotz 1999), although a more recent or sustained comparison has not been made. The concept of sexual violence, especially within domestic violence studies, remains then vague and obscured, and is barely specified by ethnicity/race, or class.

Nevertheless, data from fifteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean show rates of physical abuse by a partner ranging up to 69 per cent of all women, with 47 per cent of all women reporting being victims of sexual assault during their lifetime (Morrisson, Ellsberg & Bott 2005). Such data support the argument that even though the statistics on rape are unreliable indicators of the incidente of gender violence, they demonstrate the pervasiveness and social acceptability of violence against women throughout the region (Clarke 1998). The general conclusion in such studies is that the problem of gender-based violence, which includes sexual violence, while not quantified for the region, indicates that the problem ‘is serious, growing, and probably quite widespread’ (LeFranc & Rock 2002).

Violence against women is continually raised as a way in which Caribbean men seek to maintain patriarchal power; and sex becomes a primary means available to them to exert control over and inflict physical harm on women, East Indian and African alike. ‘Stabbing’, ‘nailing’ and ‘slamming’ are common metaphors for male sexual acts, seen to represent acts of violence (Chevannes 2001). The issue of forced sex stresses men's actions upon the bodies and psyches of Caribbean women, and they are overwhelmingly positioned as victims in the studies, with men as the perpetrators of violence. Sexuality in this way is revealed as a site of conflict and harm, firmly attached to abusive gendered relations of power. Violence is considered a regular or normal part of male sexual expressions and masculinity. However, the coupling of the normalisation of violence within sexual relations to a broader acceptance of social and political violence and the everyday abuse of power, or to the expression

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of affection and love by both men and women, is underexplored in the literature.

Sexual-economic exchanges

Sexual praxis is also highlighted in studies regarding the exchange of sexual acts or services for money, material goods or security. This involves arrangements that have been descrihed in three main ways.

First, prostitution, sex work or ‘commercial sex work’: this is the most immediately identifiable form of sexual-economic exchange; it includes the sale of sexual labour from the street, brothels, bars, clubs, hotels, mining camps, as well as exotic dancing, stripping, and escorting, and has drawn the most attention since the mid-1990s (see, for example, studies by O'Carroll-Barahona et al. 1994; Kempadoo 1996a, 1999, 2004; Cannings & Rosenweig 1997; de Moya & Garcia 1999; Campbell & Campbell 2001; Samiel 2001).

Second, ‘romance’ with tourists, or ‘tourist-oriented prostitution’, when Caribbean men and women are engaged in sexual-economic/material exchanges with vacationers predominantly from North America and Europe - both men and women - that cover a range of practices, from brief ‘sex on the sand’ encounters to steady, longer term partnerships (see Pruitt & LaFont 1995; O'Connell Davidson 1996; Kempadoo 1996b, 1999; O'Connell Davidson & Sanchez Taylor 1999; de Albuquerque 1999, 2000; Phillips 1999, 2002; Cabezas 1999, 2004; Sanchez Taylor 2001, 2002; Brennan 2004).

Third, ‘transactional sex’, referring to relationships that involve a deliberate exchange of sex for some form of ‘betterment’ - material goods, clothes, accommmdation, social status - but which are not viewed by the people involved as prostitution, and are not based on notions of mutual sexual pleasure and desire. These usually involve young women with older men, but also include teenage boys with older women, and are sometimes identified as ‘Sugar Daddy and Sugar Mommy’ arrangements (de Zalduondo & Bernard 1995; Chevannes 2001; Dunn 2001; Kempadoo & Dunn 2001; Ahmed 2003; Kempadoo 2004; Barrow 2005; Figueroa 2006).

The extent and range of sexual-economic relations in the region are not easily determined, for they encompass a wide variety of activities and exchanges and, due to their illegal and stigmatised character, are not widely acknowledged. Despite the lack of visibility of the arrangements, they are most commonly identified as heterosexual, although they are also signalled in studies of same-sex relations. In such studies, a notion of sexual intercourse as ‘work’ appears regularly, leading to conceptualisations of the exploitation, trade, or sale of sexual labour. It is also here that female (hetero)sexual agency appears, most commonly coupled to poor women's strategies to ‘make do’. And it is around sexual-economic exchanges,

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mostly within tourism contexts, that issues of racialised agency, identities and desires are discussed.

Sexual-economic activities are lodged in needs and desires for comfort and security - such as material things, some of which may be ‘basic’ (groceries, housing, electricity, clothes) or immediate needs like lunch-money - while others are related to long-term residential, educational, economic or emotional security. Yet, due to gendered asymmetries in social and economic benefits, women and girls most commonly hold the weaker negotiating positions. Moreover, notions of ‘prostitution’, ‘transactional sex’ or ‘sexual-economic relations’ carry a sense of moral opprobrium, particularly for young women, as it is associated with ‘promiscuity’ or undisciplined sexuality (‘looseness’ or ‘slackness’) in hegemonic discourse. The stigmas, moral disapproval and discrimination against persons - particularly women - engaged in sex work and other forms of sexual-economic exchange, are maintained in most Caribbean countries by legislation that criminalises the commercialisation of sex (i.e. prostitution) and by policies and international campaigns to combat the trafficking of persons, and are subject to ongoing scrutiny.

Same-sex relations

Despite the claim that homosexuality is unnatural to the Caribbean, same-sex relations have been neted in anthropological studies since the 1930s. In the past two decades a number of studies have appeared that foreground these relations. For ‘women-who-love-women’ the main studies are hy M. Jacqui Alexander (1991, 1997, 2005), Makeda Silvera (1992), Gloria Wekker (1993, 1994, 1999, 2006), Joan French & Michelle Cave (1995), Joycelin Clemencia (1996) and Rosamund Elwin (1997).⁴ About men, the prominent work on the Caribbean is by E. Antonio de Moya & Rafael Garcia (1996, 1999), David Murray (2000, 2006), Thomas Glave (2000, 2005), Robert Carr (2003, 2005, 2006), Wesley Crichlow (2004), Andil Gosine (2005) and Mark Padilla (2007). Aside Erom establishing that same-sex relations exist in Suriname, Jamaica, Trinidad, Curaçao, Martinique, the Dominican Republic and Barbados, noticeable in these studies is the flexibility in the naming of homosexual practices and same-sex desire in the region. The range of terms represents a great heterogeneity in the practices, desires, self-identifications, and external views of people who have sexual intercourse with, or who sexually desire persons of the same gender. In many of these studies homosexual practice is not in the first instante claimed as identity, but rather as activity, as people disclose information about same-sex practices without identifying or viewing themselves as homosexual.

4 For reviews of these studies see Kempadoo (2004), Calixte (2005), and Sharpe & Pinto (2006).

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The studies have also brought to the fore the commonality of bisexual behaviour. According to most of the research on Caribbean men-who-have-sex-with-men, they also have sex with women. Wekker makes similar claims for mati in Suriname - that many women-who-love-women also engage in heterosexuality, through marriage, for childbearing purposes, or to avoid attention or stigma. Nevertheless, bisexuality remains an under-recognised dimension of Caribbean sexual praxis.

An important focus in the literature on same-sex relations is an ideologies (heterosexism and homophobia) and discriminations and violence against groups of people whose sexual practices transgress the dominant norm of heterosexuality. While religion may be offered as a main basis for the intense expressions of homophobia that have been recorded in the Caribbean, other factors are seen to underpin this homophobia, such as definitions of masculinity that ‘emphasize sexual prowess with women and eschew “softness” in a man’ (White & Carr 2005: 8). Due to the silencing, stigma, and discriminations that same-sex relations and behaviours face, public self-identification as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ is uncommon, although this has not prevented the emergence of organisations such as the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG), and United Gay and Lesbian Association of Barbados (UGLAB). Moreover, despite the ongoing public assaults on homosexuals, there is some acknowledgement of positive shifts in attitudes, thought to be the result of increased exposure to gay images on television, and the frequency of reporting on homosexual behaviour in the media (White & Carr 2005).

The issue of homosexuality has been taken up in studies for HIV/AIDS prevention and programming, and by and large tends to highlight the behavioural aspect of men's lives, under the banner of ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ (MSM) (Russell-Brown & Sealy 1998/2000; Caceres 2002; Royes 2003). The general assumption in this literature is that this group poses a particular health risk to the rest of the population, and acts as a ‘bridge’ in transmitting the disease, since the men who fall into this category are believed to be basically heterosexuals who at times have sex with homosexual men.

Padilla (2007) argues that this approach is faulty in that it assumes that bisexual behaviour is incidental and episodic - thus not a structural part of social behaviour - and implies that men who ‘deviate’ from normal heterosexuality are responsible for spreading disease into the rest of the population. Moreover, in this discourse, ‘MSM’ often becomes a euphemism for ‘gay’, which works to neglect the large number of men who do not identify themselves as such (Gosine 2005). The focus in such studies is commonly an behaviour change among the MSM-community, emphasising condom use, single partners and other safe sex practices. Far less attention is paid to stigma and discrimination that bisexual men face and which prevent them from accessing services. Unlike MSM, ‘women who

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have sex with women’ do not appear prominently in studies or interventions with an epidemiological or medical approach, due to the perception that they are a ‘low risk’ population (Gosine 2005).

Nevertheless, stigmas and discriminations against gays, lesbians, transgenders and ‘all sexuals’ in Caribbean societies art propped up by legislation that outlaw ‘sodomy’ and other forms of same-sex intercourse. Efforts to decriminalise same-sex relations are often met with vehement public opposition, and to date no part of the CARICOM has been successful in removing the laws. Instead, ‘there remains an insistence on unnaturalness, en discourses of “we” versus “them” that preserve the myth of a stable and authentic society’ (Smith 2000: viii).

Adolescent sexuality

With the incidence and prevalence of HIV/AIDS through heterosexual transmission on the increase since the 1980s, and settling primarily among the 15-45 age group, concerns have arisen over the sexuality of young people. Sexual expressions along with the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents, youth and children have therefore become an area for public scrutiny (Eggleton, Jackson & Hardee 1999; Allen et al. 2000; Chevannes & Gayle 2000; Christie et al. 2001; De Bruin 2001; Norman 2002; LeFranc & Lord 2004; Whitman 2004; Barrow 2005). The studies primarily concern young African Caribbean people in low-income and poor communities. Highlighted in particular are first ages of sexual activity, condom use and young people's knowledge about sexually transmitted infections and safe sex practices.

Aside from the studies an HIV/AIDS, adolescent sexual expressions are also taken up in studies of prostitution or transactional sex amongst young people under the age of eighteen, with a focus on girls (Silvestre, Jaime & Bogaert 1994; Danns 1998; Mayorga & Velasquez 1999; Dunn 2001). In a few studies of child labour, sexuality is also examined, mostly in the context of prostitution or transactional sex (Dunn 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). In such studies the majority of the incidences of sexual activity involve same form of transactional sex, with young women partnering with older men for a variety of reasons, including school fees, money and sneakers.

The overriding trend in studies of adolescent sex is the uncritical problematisation of young people's sexual praxis, accompanied by a search for methods to curb or end youthful sexual expressions through ABC campaigns, and religious, parental, or school instruction. Nevertheless, sexual rights have been a focus of various reports regarding adolescent or youth sexuality and health, and children's rights, and it is in this body of literature that a conception of young people's sexual agency begins to emerge (UNFPA 1999; Barrow 2001; Kempadoo & Dunn 2001; Clarke 2004; LeFranc & Lord 2004).

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Population mobility

Activities of persons who move around the world and within the Caribbean also contribute to an understanding of Caribbean sexual praxis. Studies of sex tourism, for example, illuminate sexual practices of tourists while in the Caribbean (O'Connell Davidson 1996; Kempadoo 1999; Herold, Garcia & de Moya 2001; Sanchez Taylor 2001; Brennan 2004; Padilla 2007). The international tourism industry brings an estimated ten million visitors a year to the region and is seen to provide ‘opportunities for new sexual encounters including casual sex’ (Figueroa 2002: 2).

It is also in the context of sex tourism that the intersection of race and sexuality is analysed. O'Connell Davidson & Sanchez Taylor (1999) argue that Caribbean men and women are constructed in tourist imaginations as racialised-sexual subjects/objects - the hypersexual ‘black male stud’ and the ‘hot’ mulatta or black woman - whose main roles are to serve and please the visitor. Global and local tourism industries and governments feed this imagination by marketing the Caribbean as a sexual paradise, exoticising the region and its people in the search for profit.

The majority of the studies of sex tourism concern North American and Western European vacationers. Sexual practices of persons who travel to the Caribbean in other capacities, especially as visitors from Caribbean diasporas in Europe and North America, as well as of Caribbean persons who travel internationally for business, pleasure, or family reasons, have not been the focus of attention, although a large body of literature on Caribbean migration exists, as well as a growing number of studies on return migration. One notable exception is a study of sexual risk behaviour of Surinamese and Dutch Antilleans who visit the Netherlands Antilles from Europe. This study links sexuality to disease and concludes that ‘migrants are at substantial risk for HIV and STIs while visiting their homeland’, due to the high numbers of new, yet unprotected, sexual relations that are established during these visits (Kramer et al. 2005).

While sex tourism is commonly believed to corrupt and debase local populations, particularly Caribbean womanhood, a counter-trend in the studies is to situate the arrangements within the context of a dependency of the Caribbean region on tourism within the larger global economy, making sexuality a resource that is, on the one hand exploited by national governments, the international tourism industry and tourists for their own benefit and profit, and on the other hand, is used by local populations in order to participate in development and transnational flows.

Apart from people who move around for leisure and pleasure, sexual praxis also comes up around the subject of regional labour migration. As one researcher remarks:

Population mobility... increases the number of sexual partnerships as well as contacts with high-risk groups such as sex workers. Loneli-

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ness, insecurity, and freedom from social norms provide an impetus to risky sexual behaviour; these are compounded by economic hardship that may force people to trade sex for money or favours (Allen 2004: 1).

In the context of studies of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, mobile labour populations are commonly identified as vectors of disease. Migrant sex workers who work in territories other than their own have traditionally been analysed as such, or more recently as ‘bridges’ of sexually transmitted disease, and their sexual practices, in the context of prostitution, have been under examination for a number of years (Kalm 1985; Carter 1993; Kane 1993; O'Carroll-Barahona et al. 1994; Cannings & Rosenweig 1997; Persaud 1998; Samiel 2001). Analyses of sexual relations of other types of labour migrants, such as Haitians who work on the sugar-cane plantations in the Dominican Republic, are not as common but also exist (Brewer et al. 1998). Nonetheless, the larger story of the impact of population mobility - whether in the form of tourism, labour and return migration, or annual family visiting - on Caribbean sexual praxis, is still to be fully explored.

Multiple partnering and sexual networks

Informal polygamy and multiple partnering are commonly signalled in studies of family, masculinity, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Such arrangements are usually associated with men and considered an accepted part of (African) Caribbean masculine social life. For example, Barry Chevannes concludes that ‘becoming an African Caribbean man privileges one to engage in all... forms of sexual relations, from the promiscuous and casual to multiple partnerships (which in effect is unrecognized polygamy)... A man is not a real man unless he is sexually active’ (Chevannes 2001: 217). Others concur. Masculinity ‘is often viewed by men in terms of how many women or baby mothers they have. It is clear that the practice of men having an “outside woman”, that is one outside his main partnership, is a deeply ingrained cultural practice’ (Figueroa 2006: 3). Although not as frequently mentioned, multiple partnering for women occurs as well, particularly among young women. For Barbados it is observed that ‘the contemporary literature reports patterns of aggressive sexual initiation, infidelity and concurrent multiple partnering among adolescent girls' (Barrow 2005: 14), while in Jamaica '30-40 percent of [young] women may be having multiple sexual partners in the past year’ (Figueroa 2006: 3). While not considered appropriate conduct for a woman, multiple partnering is culturally accepted if it is believed to be for economic reasons (Senior 1991; see also LeFranc et al. 1996; Chevannes 2001).

When multiple partnering crosses into same-sex relations and presents itself as bisexual behaviour, it is more likely to be discussed as deviant or

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abnormal behaviour. The wide-scale practice of multiple partnering, along with the condemnation of same-sex relations has, moreover, focused attention on the ‘wrong’ behaviour of ‘some’ men (and women), and removes attention from the more socially accepted practice amongst the wider population. Thus it is homosexuals, prostitutes, migrant workers and ‘promiscuous’ adolescents who are linked to sexual networks or to multiple sexual partners, and in HIV/AIDS discourses are then blamed for transmitting disease into the general population: for being ‘the bridge’.

Heteronormativity

Common to many of the studies is that sexual practices and arrangements are held to be operational around a gender binary that firmly attaches the biological to the social, whereby masculinity and femininity are located in ‘reproductive functions’ and ‘immutable, biological facts’ (Mohammed 1995; Marshall 1997). Heterosexuality is most commonly represented ‘as the only legitimate sexuality... it is sex with the opposite sex that makes a man a man and a woman a woman’ (Peake & Trotz 1999: 127). This collapse of sex and gender in everyday and academic discourse often elides the existence of persons whose social identities, sexual practices or physical bodies do not adhere or conform to these categories. Caribbean sexuality then regularly appears as rigidly heterosexual and intolerant of sexual difference. Sex folds into gender, and masculinitry and femininity are commonly held as complementing each other: two parts of a whole.

Moreover, heterosexual gender identities are rigidly defined. The common characterisation in Caribbean social studies, literature and fiction is of men as ‘powerful, exceedingly promiscuous, derelict in his parental duties, often absent from the household, and, if present, unwilling to undertake his share of domestic responsibilities’ (Lewis 2003: 107). ‘Promiscuity’ with multiple women is often emphasised, and links berween sex and male virility or fertility are commonly made. Deriving pleasure, power and freedom from sexual performance appears critical to Caribbean masculinity, and is sometimes assumed to be biologically determined.

Regarding women, studies continue to find that heterosexual activity is a common signifier of maturiry, and is still often perceived by girls and women as attached to fertility, through which one becomes a ‘real’ Caribbean woman (i.e. a mother) (Mohammed & Perkins 1999; Peake & Trotz 1999; Gupta 2002; Clarke 2004; Barrow 2005). Women from an early age continue to face many social pressures to have children, to confirm their identity as women, and to prove they are ‘not a mule’ (Eggleton, Jackson & Hardee 1999: 82). Sexual activity is thus not only attached to biology, but to social identity: sex and gender are deeply intertwined. And despite the claim that ethnicity is believed to be important in shaping sexual behaviours, it has been found to not significantly alter

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the idea that ‘the majority of young women think that children satisfy the most important goal of womanhood and are women's greatest (and lasting) contribution’ (Hosein 2004: 552).

The dominant, almost unquestioned, links between sexuality and gender are lodged in a norm of heterosexuality as being natural. As Jacqui Alexander pointed out in the early 1990s, heterosexuality is paramount in the region and, as described above, the dominance of a heterosexual orientation for African Caribbean men and women is repeatedly corroborated. Likewise, for Indian Caribbean men it has been noted that ‘the Indo-Caribbean subject of jahaji bhai culture is not only always-already gendered, but also always-already sexualized... the Indo-Caribbean masculine subject is indeed heterosexual’ (Lokaisingh-Meighoo 2000: 86). Heterosexuality is reinforced by education, social studies and the media, or as ‘the norm as ordained by God’ (Holder 2003; see also Genrich & Braithwaite 2005). Conceptions of heterosexuality as normal to Caribbean society have, nevertheless, been rigorously interrogated and critiqued in recent years. Such studies acknowledge complexities in masculinity and changes in femininity that also trouble hegemonic constructions of sex and gender. And even though much of the literature concerns African Caribbean people, studies of Indian women's cultural practices in the matikor tradition and chutney music contribute to the critique (Niranjana 1997; Baksh-Soodeen 2002; Puri 2004; Mehta 2004).⁵ It is in these studies that femininity is linked to sexual agency and freedom, as well as to the contestation of heteropatriarchy.

Questioning normative heterosexuality in Caribbean social and gender studies becomes critical for not just acknowledging same-sex relations and changes in definitions of masculinity and femininity, bul also for conceptualising sexuality itself. Wekker, for example, argues for a distinction between concepts of gender and sexuality. Women who express desire and passion through a sexual relationship wirh another woman and who transgress boundaries of existing gendered categories, thus require a separate conceptual category.

Likewise, Alexander argues that the impetus to distinguish between sexuality and gender does not simply rest in everyday social practice, but is deeply embedded in state discourses and laws, visible through the criminalisation of particular types of sexual expressions. People who engage in same-sex relations and those who sell sex are two categories that are defined and treated differently in many Caribbean laws, on the basis of sexual practice. National governments, therefore, codify sexual behaviour and expressions of erotic desire distinct from gender. Indeed,

5 The terms ‘maticore’ (or matikor) and ‘chutney’ (or chatney) refer respectively to ‘the female celebration of female sexuality which takes place on the eve of a Hindu wedding’ and the ‘grassroots Indo-Caribbean singing and dancing with topical lyrics and sensuous rhythm’ that originates in the wedding celebration (Kanhai 1999: Introduction and Glossary).

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as studies in Cuba and the Dominican Republic demonstrate, while many men who have sex with men socially identify as masculine, it is their sexual activities and desires, not their gender identification that sets them apart from other men in state policies, laws, and everyday practices. Discrimination on the basis of gender is codified in most national laws as unjust and as a violation of civil or human rights, yet discrimination on the basis of sexual expressions and identities is still possible in many countries, due to laws that criminalise anal sex, prostitution and same-sex activities. Sexual difference is thus firmly etched into Caribbean society as semiautonomous and distinct from gender.

Sexual agency, pleasure and desire

The review of literature found that the expression of female sexual desire and sexual agency is not a prominent theme: the studies are primarily male-centred in this respect. As one author notes about the silence on the subject in Caribbean discourses: ‘how men manage to explore their sexuality while women remain marginally involved remains a perennial mystery to the casual observer’ (Lewis 2003: 7). The silence may well have to do with the general difficulty of broaching the subject in Caribbean societies and communities, particularly for and by women, as

cultural and moral taboos about sex are very deep... young girls are not provided the information, services, skills and resources necessary for safer sex... no one talks to them about sex and sexuality except in religious/moral terms of disapproval or, at the most extreme, disparagingly, with lewd overtones (CARICOM 1999: 7).

In literature on gender-based and domestic violence, sexual desire is elided for women and girls, and female agency appears mainly in the context of self-defence, including the battering or killing of husbands or children by women (Shiw Parsad 1989; Robinson 2000; Binda 2001). The silence about sex within families and communities in the Caribbean also combines with reductionist biases in HIV/AIDS work which foreground sexual behaviour for purposes of survival, reproduction and fulfillment of needs, relegating ‘complex negotiations about matters of heart and body’ to invisibility (Gosine 2005: 62). Studies of prostitution, sex work, and transactional sex that highlight sexual agency for women and girls lend support to ideas that women's sexual agency is tied to economic concerns. Love, sexual desire and sexual passion are rarely broached in these studies, although increasingly the importance of emotions that accompany sexual expressions - such as feelings of intimacy, trust, sharing and respect - is being recognised by researchers in the field.

The studies by Sobo (1993), Chevannes (2001), Murray (2002) and Wekker (2006) are some of the few recent ethnographic accounts where

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African Caribbean sexual desire and agency is explored in any depth. In studies of East Indian-Caribbean populations, the majority of the focus is on history, when indentureship produced new sexual freedoms for women, with colonialism and patriarchy working to curb and confine their expressions of sexual desire (Mohammed 2002; Shepherd 2002). Overwhelmingly, discussions of female sexual agency and desire - East Indian and African Caribbean - appear in analyses of music, dance and performance (see for example Cooper 1995, 2004; Barnes 2000; Ramnarine 2001; Mehta 2004; Puri 2004; Hope 2006). Here, for example, the coupling of sex with violence may be questioned. ‘Stabbing’ in dancehall songs is then read as a referent to ‘the intense pleasure of vigorous, not violent sex’, whereby the penis becomes ‘a metaphorical dagger stabbing pleasure into and out of the woman’ (Cooper 2004: 13). Alternatively, sexuality is taken as a simultaneous site af pleasure and danger for women. The double entendre found in chutney-soca performed by women allows lyrics to be read as depicting both the pleasures of oral sex for women and sexual violence against women (Puri 2004). Importantly, such cultural studies create possibilities for more complicated analyses of women's sexuality.

The domain of Caribbean sexuality studies

The studies reviewed indicate that Caribbean sexual praxis is produced by and through a variety of factors, although it is clear that not all factors are of equal significance or fully captured or explored in the literature. However, the recurring aspects in rhe literature draw the general contours of Caribbean sexuality. It is characterised by patriarchal heteronormativity yet includes bisexual and same-sex relations. It is powerful or violent, frequently acts as an economic resource, sustains polygamy, multiple partnering and polyamory, and is mediated by constructions of race, ethnicity and racism.

The conceptual and legal distinction between sexuality and gender made in some studies, and which I highlight here - of sexuality as semi-autonomous from gender - is important to this mapping and allows us to capture the specificities and variety of Caribbean sexual praxis. Taking sexuality and gender as overlapping yet distinct terrains means that we can examine sexuality not simply as a derivative of gender relations and identities but as constituting a distinct culture and set of social relations and identities that interact with, yet can be studied separately from, gender.

The focus enables an examination of the ways in which sexual arrangements are attached to racialised relations of power, particularly within tourism-oriented prostitution and transactional sex settings, where constructions of race and ethnicity structure possibilities for young women and men in different ways, and which mediate and transform traditional gender relations of power. It allows for studies of the ways in which

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sexuality is reconfigured through new technological innovations and new imperialisms, and for examinations of the production of new identities, expressions and transactions, and new sexual arrangements that may or may not be attached to a gendered binary.

The focus on sexuality also supports continuing explorations into the commodification and exploitation of Caribbean sex within local and global economies, and into questions about ways in which the economic infuses specific meaning into racialised gendered constructions of sexuality. The significance of sexuality to development policies and strategies for the region is also of significance (Adams & Pigg 2005; Gosine 2005; IDS 2006).

However, for sexuality to be a vantage point for Caribbean research and study, the current complexities need to be acknowledged, and the intricacies of a range of sexual arrangements and practices appreciated. And it is perhaps through untangling the knot of power and violence, pleasure and desire, and intersections of gender, race, and economics, in the context of twenry-first-century global development, that the map can be filled in or redrawn. Caribbean sexuality might then find the space and respect it deserves.

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Kamala Kempadoo is Associate Professor of Social Science and Director of the Graduate Programme of Social and Political Thought at York University in Canada. She has published widely on the sex trade in the Dutch- and English-speaking Caribbean, and is currently engaged with research on sexuality and HIV/AIDS.