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Abstract
In post-colonial Jamaica, the iconic portrayal of “sun, sex, and smiles” clashes with the disproportionate rates of HIV among working-class black Jamaican women. Even though the Caribbean has both the highest incidence rates of reported AIDS cases and HIV prevalence rates in the Americas, second only to Africa, the region remains largely ignored in scholarship on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and black political movement. This essay draws from feminist ethnographic research on the grassroots organizing of HIV-positive Jamaican women in Kingston, Jamaica. In this essay, I delineate how women in an HIV/AIDS activist organization, EVE for Life, develop and cultivate HIV/AIDS care strategies through women-centered networks. I read these networks as intentional communities of interdependence and psychosocial care, rather than simply invisible “at-risk” groups or passive victims subjected to “a paralyzing plague.” I contend that the homosocial intimacies that characterize these networks of care reflect an “intraventive” cultural practice and knowledge, a term that Marlon Bailey uses to describe the organic ways community members represent themselves individually and collectively. Furthermore, they reveal how the embodied knowledges of HIV-positive Black women challenge pathologizing public health and academic discourses, while also serving as conduits for enhancing and extending theories about bodies, sexuality, power, and intimacy. By offering a culturally-specific exploration of the socio-erotic lives of working-class HIV-positive Black Jamaican women, this paper concludes with a discussion about how centering our analysis on the Caribbean and Black women expands the geographic and thematic scopes of studies of race, racism, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS.
Disclosure statement
There has been no financial interest or benefit that has risen from the direct applications of my research.
Notes
1 I have translated to Standard American English from Jamaican Creole English, a creole language with West African and British English influences, in order to communicate the participants’ ideas and opinions. Jamaican Creole English is also known as “patwah”, a term which scholars note provides a characteristically Caribbean linguistic reframing to describe a creole language and not a dialect that is often viewed as substandard.
2 These names are pseudonyms. While I originally designed this study to be anonymous and confidential out of my desire to protect the privacy of the individuals and the organizations, some EFL participants wanted to be identified given the lack of documentation of Black women-centered HIV organizing. The project thus became one in which individuals and organizations could decide if and how they were to be identified in this study.
3 Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “The Social and Economic Context of Black Women Living with HIV/AIDS in the US: Implications for Research,” in Sex, Power, and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond, eds. Rhoda Reddock, Sandra Reid, Dianne Douglas, and Dorothy Roberts (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008), 33–66.
4 Jacqui Alexander’s use of the “transnational” is instructive here: it grounds “historically intransigent colonial relationship[s], in which a previously scripted colonial cartography of ownership, production, consumption, and distribution all conform to a ‘First World/Third World’ division” (1998: 294). In this project, I use this framework to illustrate how women’s political engagements with HIV interventions on the ground highlight the ongoing battles of differently located subjects to redefine and transform race-, gender-, and class-based inequities and women’s exclusion in the HIV/AIDS movements. See Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review, no. 48 (1994); The recent scholarship of scholars such as Roderick Ferguson (2004), Rinaldo Walcott (2003, 2005), Michelle Wright and Antje Schuhmann (2007), Jafari Allen (2012), and Lyndon Gill (2018) who have engaged Black, queer, and diaspora simultaneously have broadened the geographic and thematic scopes of studies of blackness and sexuality. I rely on Jafari Allen’s use of black queer diaspora as “a caution, a theory, and (most centrally) a work” that pushes the territories of queer theory and black queer studies in different sites and forms by simultaneously deepening connections between scholarship and critical engagements with political organizing “in the context of various shifts in Empire(s) and affiliations” (Allen 2012: 214, 237). See Jafari Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” GLQ, 18 no. 2–3 (2012).
5 I consider EFL a “framing institution,” which Celeste Watkins-Hayes describes as “agents that help women revise their personal frameworks and directly challenge the societal narratives within which they initially frame the diagnosis” (2011: 2028). I similarly foreground the links Berger makes between identity, resources, and participation in her ethnographic exploration of how marginalization constrains Black and Latina women’s access to resources and services, ultimately shaping their health trajectories and political participation. See Celeste Watkins-Hayes, LaShawnDa Pittman-Gay, and Jean Beaman, ““Dying from” to “living with”: framing institutions and the coping processes of African American women living with HIV/AIDS,” Social Science & Medicine, 74 (2012): 20208-36; Michele Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–4.
6 Black feminist scholarship and artistry has long engaged the dimensions of Black women’s intimate lives. Some courageous visionaries include Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Faith Ringgold, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange. Within a Jamaican context, these include Honor Ford Smith and Sistren Theatre Collective, Yanique Hume, Ebony Patterson, and Edna Madley. For more information on Black and Caribbean feminist artistry and scholarship, see: Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: NYU Press, 2015) and Annalee Davis et al., “Introduction: Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice,” Small Axe, 52 (2017); Karina Smith, “Struggling to Cross the Race and Class Divide: Sistren’s Theatrical and Organizational Model of Collectivity,” Theatre Research International, 36, no. 2 (2010): 64–78.
7 Eileen Moyer, “The Anthropology of Life After AIDS: Epistemological Continuities in the Age of Antiretroviral Treatment,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44, no. 1 (2015): 259–75.
8 I echo the calls of previous scholars who caution against using labels of sexuality on non-European people in contexts such as the Caribbean and Latin America. In particular, Gloria Wekker cautions against adopting Western labels of sexual constructions that homogenize cultures while privileging certain social experiences (2007: 191, 213, 224). For more elaborate discussions about cultural constructions of same-sex sexuality as well as the uses of “MSM” in the social science literature, see: See Evelyn Blackwood, “Reading Sexualities across Cultures: Anthropology and Theories of Sexuality,” Gender and Society, 19 no. 2 (1986); Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Mark Padilla, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Gregory Mitchell, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
9 Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013), 183, 203–204.
10 Honor Ford-Smith (1986), Carolyn Cooper (2004), Donna Hope (2006), and Sonjah Stanley-Niaah (2006) have discussed working-class women’s participation in cultural movements such as theatre, organizational collectives, and dancehall and their potential as alternative spaces to intervene in race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society. Carol Boyce Davies (1994) has discussed Black Caribbean women's activism and theorizing and Lynn Bolles (1994) has examined how poor wage-earning women organize their lives around work, child rearing, childbearing, and extended kin.
11 Angelique Nixon and Rosamond King, “Embodied Theories: Local Knowledge(s), Community Organizing, and Feminist Methodologies in Caribbean Sexuality Studies,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies no. 7 (2013): 1–15.
12 Faye Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation (Arlington, V.A.: American Anthropological Association, 1991); Jafari S. Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2012): 211–48.
13 I rely on Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as “a resource within reach of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed and unrecognized feeling” (Lorde [1978] (1984), 53). My understanding of the erotic is also heavily informed by Lyndon Gill’s discussion of a praxis of survival that is rooted in an ‘interlinked spiritual-sensual-political (erotic) subjectivity’ which he uses to describe the intimate connections among queer Caribbean subjects who face multiple oppressions. Recent work in Caribbean Studies has built upon Lorde’s conception of the erotics to elucidate the dynamics among quotidian life, political possibilities, subjectivities, and black queerness throughout the Caribbean and the African diaspora. See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984); Lyndon Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018); Lyndon Gill, “Chatting Back an Epidemic Caribbean Gay Men, HIV/AIDS, and the Uses of Erotic Subjectivity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2–3, (2012): 277–95; Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Miami: University of Florida, 2014); Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Jafari S. Allen, Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2011); Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke University Press, 2010).
14 I consider how women insist on sexual agency while resisting heteronormativity. For more discussion about expansive models of complex black subjectivities that embrace a resistant insistence on pleasure, see both books of Horton-Stallings, Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture; Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures.
15 In recent years, the black and Caribbean feminist scholarship of sexuality by scholars such as Lyndon Gill (2018), Jennifer Nash (2014), Rosamond King (2014), Marlon Bailey (2013), Mireille Miller-Young (2013), Mimi Sheller (2012), LaMonda Horton-Stallings (2007), and Gloria Wekker (2006) has departed from ideological, political and cultural investments in sexual morality and respectability in favor of elucidating more diverse sexual realities of non-normative Black subjects. See Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019); Lyndon Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018); Lamonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, (University of Illinois Press, 2015); Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Miami: University of Florida, 2014); Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press Books, 2014); Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013); Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and Caribbean freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
16 For an imaginative conversation on locating a political agency and sexual universe that escapes colonial archival record and official documentation of governments, institutions, and scholars, see Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and Caribbean freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
17 Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 27.
18 Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood, 24–25.
19 Lyndon Gill, Erotic Islands, 176.
20 Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019).
21 Recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and political movements in the Caribbean has noted the transnational politics of organizing strategies. Noteworthy is Matthew Chin’s discussion of “gaydren” as a transnational political practice reflected in the cultural work of Jamaican activists who contest normative configurations of gay and bredren while transforming rigid political discourses around sexual politics. See Matthew Chin, “Constructing ‘Gaydren’: The Transnational Politics of Same-Sex Desire in 1970s and 1980s Jamaica,” Small Axe 2, no. 2 (2019): 17–33.
22 I embrace the insights of scholars such as Lyndon Gill, Marlon Bailey, and Michelle Tracey Berger who center ethnography in their study of HIV/AIDS in Black communities. Additionally, feminist ethnography’s emphasis on subaltern ways of knowing and reflexivity allows for more ethical and culturally-informed observations and interpretations of interactions and conversations in naturally occurring situations. For more on reflexivity and feminist ethnography, see Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Patti Lather, “Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography,” Signs, 27, no. 1 (2001): 199–227. For further discussions on how gender, sexuality, illness, and marginalization shape lived experiences, see: Lyndon Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018); Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013); Michele Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (Princeton University Press, 1998).
23 Alan Whiteside, HIV/AIDS: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.
24 Ibid., 21.
25 Jamaica became one of the four countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2005 named ‘champion countries’ by the United Nations Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, for its work to protect against and educate children about the epidemic; For more information on the initial stages of the epidemic, read: Idowu A. Olukoga, “Epidemiologic Trends of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica,” Pan American Journal of Public Health 15, no. 5 (2004): 358–363;
26 Ministry of Health, “HIV Epidemiological Profile 2015, Facts & Figures,” last modified May 4, 2017, accessed November 2017, https://www.moh.gov.jm/data/hiv-epidemiological-profile-2015-facts-figures/; UNAIDS Global AIDS Response Progress Report, “Jamaica Country Proress Report, March 31, 2014, accessed November 2017, https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/country/documents/JAMnarrativereport2014.pdf.
27 Ibid.
28 Shanti A. Parikh, “The Political Economy of Marriage and HIV: The ABC Approach, ‘Safe’ Infidelity, and Managing Moral Risk in Uganda,” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 7 (2007): 1198–208; Ruth C. White and Robert Carr, “Homosexuality and HIV/AIDS Stigma in Jamaica,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 7, no. 4 (2005): 347–59; Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 45, no. 3, (2004): 305–25.
29 Richard Parker, “Sexuality, Culture, and Power in HIV/AIDS Research,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2001): 163–79.
30 Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 57.
31 See Gina Ulysse’s incisive analysis of how the socioeconomic practices and self-making strategies contest the traditional binaries of lady/woman and uptown/downtown that are rooted in racial and gender hierarchies that are color-coded. Gina Ulysse, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-making in Jamaica (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).
32 Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 9, 13–15.
33 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 296.
34 Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 27; Marlon M. Bailey, “Performance as Intravention: Ballroom Culture and the Politics of HIV/AIDS in Detroit,” Souls 11, no. 3 (2009): 255.
35 Jamaica has the third-largest population of people living with HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, after the Dominican Republic and Haiti (MOH 2001). Haitians became the only national group marked as at risk for AIDS by the Center for Disease Control (the U.S.'s official governing institution of public health) in the early 1980s. A New York Times article chronicled the international response to Lawrence K. Altman, “Lawrence Atlman, Debate Grows on U.S. Listing of Haitians in AIDS Category,” New York Times. July 31 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/us/debate-grows-on-us-listing-of-haitians-in-aids-category.html. (Accessed January 28, 2018).
36 Kamala Kempadoo, “Caribbean Sexuality: Mapping the Field,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies no. 3 (2009): 1–24; Oneka, LaBennett. She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2011).
37 In contrast to the initial years of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., where the behavioral categories of “men who have sex with men” (MSM), injecting drug users (IDUs), and hemophiliacs emerged as categories of “risk” as defined by surveillance bodies, in Jamaica the initial categories were both occupationally and behaviorally driven, with migrant workers, commercial sex workers, out of school youth, MSM, and the generalized population identified as “risk groups”. During the second decade as the epidemic became more generalized and mother to child transmission rates increased alongside growing teenage pregnancy rates, some attention to Jamaica’s epidemic turned to the broader concern of girls and young women’s sexual vulnerability and the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV. See Peter Figueroa, “Review of HIV in the Caribbean: Significant Progress and Outstanding Challenges,” Current HIV/AIDS Reports 11, no. 2 (2014): 158–67.
38 Kamala Kempadoo, “Caribbean Sexuality,” 11.
39 Ibid., 2. By making a distinction between identity and praxis in the approach to sexuality, Kamala Kempadoo moves us beyond the exclusive focus on sexual behavior and sexuality as a primary basis for social identification, which creates more complete understandings of the sexual arrangements in the region and in broader African diasporic social life.
40 In recent years, HIV/AIDS researchers have increasingly used interdisciplinary frameworks rooted in the culturally specific realities of Caribbean youth to unpack rigid measures of risk and vulnerability. Noteworthy is Orlando Harris’ discussion of the socio-structural factors that influence the sexual decision making among young Jamaican men who have sex with men who engaged in transactional sex as a result of homelessness, family neglect, or limited financial resources. See Orlando Harris, “Survival now versus survival later: immediate and delayed HIV risk assessment among young Jamaican men who have transactional sex with men,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 21, no. 8 (2019): 883–897.
41 “Jamaica Gets Millions in HIV/AIDS Funding,” Ministry of Health, National HIV/STI Program, last modified July 15, 2015, http://moh.gov.jm/jamaica-gets-millions-in-hiv-funding/.
42 This is not to say that local Caribbean organizations do not find creative and strategic ways to develop and implement their own agendas while navigating these controlling forces. As noted by queer Caribbean feminists Rosamond King and Angelique Nixon in their discussion of the relationship between Caribbean feminism, feminist practice, and sexuality studies, they argue that it is through “local scholarly and non-scholarly knowledges, community-organizing, and embodied theories that we can transform the limited discourses around sex and sexuality for Caribbean people generally” (2013: 11). See Angelique Nixon and Rosamond King, “Embodied Theories: Local Knowledge(s), Community Organizing, and Feminist Methodologies in Caribbean Sexuality Studies,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 7, 1–15.
43 The parishes of Kingston and St. James are key sites to investigate the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS. St. James remains the parish with a significant tourism-based economy and the highest level of cumulative number of reported HIV cases since the start of the epidemic in the 1980s (MOH 2010). Kingston is also the site for various social welfare agencies and HIV/AIDS NGOs, many of which provide care and advocacy for the rights of children, women, and their families, as well as the disabled and sexual minorities such as lesbians, gay men, and transgender people. Both Montego Bay and Kingston share deep and highly visible inequalities between the poor, working poor, and elites, as well as grave social and economic inequalities.
44 I join other critical HIV/AIDS researchers who have resisted the framing of HIV/AIDS as a “chronic condition”. While mainstream narratives emphasize the transition of HIV from an inevitable “death sentence” to a “chronic condition” globally, Afro-diasporic people’s social and political realities disrupts these linear notions of progress that often circulate in resourced countries such as the U.S. Thus, the ongoing narratives that emphasize the path to the “End of AIDS” fail to align with the current trajectory of the epidemic and its subsequent racial, gendered, and classed dimensions, particularly in the lives of the multiply marginalized. Given that “the age of treatment” still does not include many people in these countries in the “Global South,” it is crucial to note, as Eileen Moyer notes, that this period “is bounded less by time than it is by economics and geopolitics.” See, Moyer, “The Anthropology of Life After AIDS,” 261.
45 I rely on Juana Maria Rodriguez’s definition of interdependence as a value and commitment that is “built on mutual respect and consideration, absent coercion, in the search for mutual pleasure, in the search for other sexual futures.” Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 96.
46 See Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–7. Angelique Nixon and Rosamond King, “Embodied Theories: Local Knowledge(s), Community Organizing, and Feminist Methodologies in Caribbean Sexuality Studies,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies no. 7 (2013): 1–15.”
47 In 2016, Mentor Moms usually received a monthly stipend of JD$30,000 (∼USD $250) for their provision of services. Mentee Moms received JD$1,500 to 3,000 (USD $12.50 to $25) for their attendance at each workshop and additional meetings as well as occasional care packages. While having a steady income, Mentor Moms often noted that the costs of childcare, school fees, housing, food, and additional work-related costs of transportation to and from outreach events makes it challenging to meet all of their monthly expenses.
48 The 25th Annual Review and Planning Retreat conference gathered over two hundred health care providers, government officials, civil society organization leaders, and international donors to discuss the trajectory of the HIV epidemic in Jamaican, review previous interventions, and develop new strategies for moving forward. I served as a note-taker for the duration of the conference.
49 I agree with critiques that note the limitation of the categories “Men who have Sex with Men” and “female sex workers” which conflate sexual practices with sexual orientation and occupation, ignoring the spectrum of intimate exchanges that shape sexual relationships and encounters. According to Mark Padilla, this approach frames bisexual behavior as incidental and sporadic, and the men who “deviate” from hegemonic heterosexuality as culpable in the spread of the disease to the rest of the population. See Mark Padilla, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Evelyn Blackwood “Reading Sexualities across Cultures: Anthropology and Theories of Sexuality,” Gender and Society, 19 no. 2 (1986); Gregory Mitchell, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
50 Errol Miller, Marginalization of the Black Male (Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1987).
51 Peggy Antrobus, “Critiquing the MDGs from a Caribbean Perspective,” Gender and Development 13, no. 1 (2005): 94–104. Similarly, Eudine Barriteau encourages scholars and practitioners to address the ways the assumed relative disadvantage of men neglects a complete analysis of the formal and informal state action, juridical decisions, gender inequities, and lived experiences that shape differential access to and distribution of material resources and non-material resources of status, power, and privilege among women and men. For more discussions about gender inequality, Caribbean feminisms, and identity development in the region, see Eudine Barriteau, The Political Economy of Gender in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Patricia Mohammed, Rethinking Caribbean Difference (Psychology Press, 1998).
52 I developed my understanding of embodied knowledge to further highlight how HIV-positive Black women’s experiences and perspectives intervene in the conventional theorizing of racial, gender, and sexual politics. I locate this analysis in the thought of Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Deborah King, and Patricia Hill Collins that have challenged claims of universality in terms of gender and race by emphasizing consciousness as a site of multiple voicings and the urgency of a multivalent praxis. This understanding moves beyond the additive approaches to conceptualizing oppression that subsumes one type of oppression under another. In rejecting this approach, Black and women of color feminist scholars have developed alternative models that have considered how intersecting oppressions have coalesced in their lives. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 42–72; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008); Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders no. 10 (1991): 1–24.
53 Caribbean women writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Conde, and Paule Marshall have developed multifaceted links that bind women to each other and to their children. They have been foundational in demonstrating how the centrality of motherhood and femininity in these networks as loci of female social identity in both home and host countries drives expressions and understandings of belonging and home. For example, Audre Lorde’s women-centered networks in Zami are sources and resources that lead her “home” to her domestic past in the Caribbean community of Harlem and “home” to Grenada, which guides her engagements with a multiplicity of histories, communities and selves in her work. See Audre Lorde, A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, California: Crossing Press, 1982).
54 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Special Issue on Queer/Migration 14 no. 2–3 (2008); Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Extract from ‘Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Specific,” GLQ: A Special Issue on Queer/Migration 18 no. 2–3 (2012); In her incisive article, “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian challenged the increasing domination of African-American literary study by those who were primarily interested in theory rather than in writers and their work. Her critique of the continual race for theory, a race that sometimes leaves the literature itself in the dust, provides a starting point for Black women writers theorizing with their literature and using their lived experiences. See, Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique no. 6 (1987): 51–63.
55 Jafari Allen and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “A Conversation ‘Overflowing with memory”: On Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s “Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Pacific,” GLQ A Special Issue on Queer/Migration 18 no. 2–3 (2012): 251; Rosamond King’s discussion of the relationships among nonbinary gender and nonheteronormative Caribbean sexualities provides an opening to uncover how women’s sexual agency contest Caribbean heteropatriarchy as they “live, love, and fight” beyond restrictive social and legal spaces. See Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Miami: University of Florida, 2014). My understanding of intimacies elided in the archive is also informed by Latina queer of color scholar Juana Maria Rodriguez whose focus on “queer gestures” of sexuality shifts our focus from queer identification to the dynamics between “sexual desires and political demands, between discipline and fantasy, between utopian longings and everyday failures” (2014: 24, 7). See Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
56 Cohen’s 1997 article along with José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications (1999) and Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black (2004) made evident how queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, and the history of sexuality excluded and rendered obsolete a critical intersectional analysis on race. Recent works by Roderick Ferguson (2003, 2011), Grace Hong (2011), and Juana Maria Rodriguez (2014) have extended these critiques of racialized sexuality and heteronormativity. Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65.
57 I recognize the contributions of gay male activists in the early years of the pandemic in the U.S. and the Caribbean, which helped expand AIDS activism and develop an infrastructure and social services that now support HIV/AIDS. I also heed the calls of feminist HIV researchers to elevate the elided histories and labor of women of color and lesbians who cared for each other and the living and dying among them. For more information on these gendered and racialized erasures and the impacts of this early activism, refer to: Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality (University of California Press, 2019); Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994).
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Jallicia Jolly
Jallicia Jolly is a PhD candidate in the American Culture department at the University of Michigan. Jallicia uses ethnography and oral history to study how the transnational politics of race, gender, sexuality and health unfold in Black women’s daily lives and activism. Her dissertation, “Ill Erotics: The Cultural Geography of Sexuality, Illness, and Self-Making Among Young HIV-Positive Women in Jamaica” explores the sexual lives and grassroots politics of HIV-positive Jamaican girls and women to illustrate how they reshape the landscapes of public health, reproductive (in)justice, and transnational black activism in Jamaica and the broader Americas. Jallicia is currently a Pre-doctoral fellow in Black Studies and American Studies at Amherst College and a Sarah Pettit Doctoral fellow in Queer Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University. Jallicia hopes her work encourages new models of political participation, community formation, and embodiment while transforming the boundaries of black politics, feminist liberation, and coalitional organizing within and beyond U.S. borders.