Caribbean Feminist Possibilities

Intersect Antigua and Barbuda Teach-in Series

Dr. Tonya Haynes, April 30, 2024

Guiding Questions

• What are Caribbean feminisms?
• What are the radical possibilities of Caribbean feminisms?
• When and why have/do Caribbean feminists retreat from those radical possibilities?
• Do Caribbean feminisms confront their historical exclusions?
• Is Caribbean feminism an elite project which requires letters behind your name (as one young activist said to me)?
• Do we have the kinds of Caribbean feminisms we need for these times (of genocide, unrelenting sexual and gender-based violence, climate change, threats to queer and trans life and liberation, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, Indigenous dispossession, ableism etc)?
• Is feminism as a term, a politics, a livity copious enough to account for the past-present-future of Caribbean world-making?

Radical Potential of Caribbean Feminisms

• “if If I assume that some of us meant what we said in the beginning, which had to do with the interrelationship of oppressions and transformation, then it is very disturbing to see how that translated into all of us becoming either theoreticians of this view or consultants on it. Andaiye
• While resistance always contains elements of accommodation, there is often something left over, a remainder or an excess which cannot be reincorporated into the dominant hegemony and which pops up in unexpected ways, sometimes after the original critique of domination seems to have been subdued. This remainder or excess derives from the multiple ways in which human subjects engage with organized resistance movements, transforming their teachings over time to address everyday experiences of exclusion and exploitation. Honor Ford-Smith
• I believe that the unique origins and contemporary situation of the Caribbean call on us as its intellectuals to attempt to realize a now ecumenical—therefore, post-Western European, that is, post-monohumanistic, and complementarily post-monotheistic—conception of being human." --- Sylvia Wynter

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Radical Potential of Caribbean Feminisms?

 It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that? I’d just like to make a point here that is very important. Although I use the term “race,” and I have to use the term “race,” “race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.”

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 “I am trying to insist that “race” is really a code-word for “genre.” Our issue is not the issue of “race.” Our issue is the issue of the genre of “Man.” It is this issue of the “genre” of “Man” that causes all the “–isms.””

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 “Black women’s struggle is quite other. Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man,” of which the Black population group--men, women and children--must function as the negation.”

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 Source: Sylvia Wynter, PROUDFlesh interview with Greg Thomas

Locating race and gender in Caribbean history

•“Between 1873 and 1917, the numbers of Barbadian women committed to penal custody on an annual basis surpassed those of men. While women’s per capita imprisonment rate was still somewhat below that of men for most of these years, given the wide margins by which women outnumbered men in the population and the labor force, these proportions were nevertheless unprecedented, not only in the British Caribbean but also in other parts of the world.”

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•Source: Cecilia Green. “The Abandoned Lower Class of Females”: Class, Gender, and Penal Discipline in Barbados, 1875–1929,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(1):144–179.

What does Wynter mean by Man?

• Writing in 1908, John Daniels, corresponding secretary of the Congo Reform Association noted, that the publication of Leopold’s will, executed in 1889 “presented a spectacle amazing in the light of twentieth century constitutional and parliamentary government– the spectacle of one man deeding away, as his goods and chattels, the persons, liberties and property of 15,000,000 people, and a region nearly 1,000,000 square miles in extent. In 1890, as compensation for a loan, Leopold gave Belgium the option of annexing the Congo before his death. It is in accordance with this option that Belgium is now acting.”

Locating race and gender in Caribbean history

•High levels of male emigration induced the increased criminalization of so-called “abandoned” dependants. In the face of a grudgingly, or at least ambivalently, sanctioned male labor exodus, the state “stepped in” to exercise stricter patriarchal/ruling-class oversight of black working-class women and children (especially boys…).

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•Source: Cecilia Green. “The Abandoned Lower Class of Females”: Class, Gender, and Penal Discipline in Barbados, 1875–1929,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(1):144–179.

What do these histories mean for us?

Radical Potential of Caribbean Feminisms?

• “The lives of women at the bottom – working class, of color – are not feminist business. I don’t want any part of a politics where that is not my business.” - Andaiye
• "The problem is that we who call ourselves the Caribbean women’s movement don’t really believe that women produce anything except if we are doing something non-traditional. You know that’s true. We have the most complete contempt, most of us, for anything that is called women’s traditional work. In fact we are terrified of it, when we’re not contemptuous of it. So our problem is not that people in the unions don’t have any respect for women’s work. It is that we ourselves, in the first place, don’t have any respect for that work. We’ve also, I think, bought into the idea that women, at least in their capacity as housewives, don’t struggle, can’t struggle, can’t be organized.” - Andaiye

What does Andaiye’s intervention mean for us and our work?

Three Stories

• Amira Teul, Toledo Maya Women’s Council
• Michele Irving, Productive Organisations for Women in Action
• Phyllis Cayetano, Founder Belize Family Life Association & Garifuna National Council

Did any of these stories resonate with you? Which one and why?

What do they tell us about Caribbean feminisms?

Reflection

• How are we complicit?
• What needs to change in our activism, organisations, movements, ourselves?
• How do we keep the best of Caribbean feminisms alive?
• Why does Winter insist that the struggle must be an intellectual struggle?