GEM-IWG Unsettling Masculinity in the Caribbean:

06-9
Working Paper Series
Unsettling Masculinity in the Caribbean:
Facing a Future Without Guarantees
by Linden Lewis
GEM-IWG
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Unsettling Masculinity in the Caribbean:
Facing a Future without Guarantees
Linden Lewis
GEM-IWG Working Paper 06-9
November 2006
ABSTRACT
This working paper is based on a lecture delivered by Dr. Lewis on Nov. 14, 2003 in a
lecture series sponsored by Caribbean Women Catalysts for Change. Dr. Linden evaluates
Caribbean masculinity in terms of how it is bound up with the crises and contradictions of
capitalism. The impact of the process of global economic restructuring, the all-consuming
power of transnational capital, the emergence of new forms of globalized masculinity and
patriarchy, and the prospects of economic marginalization all represent the context in which
Dr. Linden considers men and masculinity in the region. In considering the specific ways
Caribbean masculinity could be unsettled or destabilized, the paper considers
unemployment, homosexuality, impotence and other sexual disfunction, and masculine
essentialism.
Linden Lewis is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University in
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Professor Lewis is a Caribbean specialist whose work focuses on
globalization, the state, labor, and the intersection of race, class and gender. He has
published widely in these areas, including the edited collection The Culture of Gender and
Sexuality in the Caribbean (The University of Florida Press, 2003).
This paper is also published as Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of West Indies, Cave
Hill Campus Working Paper No. 13.
GEM-IWG WP 06-9
Unsettling Masculinity in the Caribbean:
Facing a Future without Guarantees
INTRODUCTION
It is indeed a privilege to participate in this Caribbean Women Catalysts for Change
Lecture Series, in honor of Dame Nita Barrow, a woman who has made an invaluable
national and international contribution to expanding the meaning and understanding of
citizenship engagement.
Dame Nita Barrow was also a tireless worker in the cause of improving the lives of
women and in raising the status of nursing and nursing education. In addition, and of
special importance to this author, Dame Nita Barrow was dedicated to the cause of social
justice – a cause with deep historical roots and experiential precept in her own family1. This
occasion therefore represents a wonderful opportunity for me to engage some of the issues
and concerns that might have coincided with some of Dame Nita’s interests.
First, we need to be very clear about this phenomenon of masculinity on which we
focus in this lecture. Masculinity is simultaneously a set of social practices or behaviors, and
an ideological position by which men become conscious of themselves as gendered subjects.
Masculinity is therefore an ontological process of becoming aware of societal roles and
expectations that are inscribed on the text of the body. Men are not born with this
awareness of themselves. Society must impose this understanding on them, as it does in
similar and different ways for women. This is the context in which we can talk about the
1Dame Nita Barrow’s father Reginal Barrow was a well-known Caribbean cleric, political activist and champion
of working class issues. Her brother Errol Walton Barrow was a veteran politician and former Premier of
Barbados. He is generally regarded as the father of independence, steering the people of Barbados from
colonialism to independence in November 30, 1966, and becoming the countrie’s first Prime Minister.
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idea of masculinity as being socially constructed. For not only does society play a
determining role in shaping the consciousness of subjectivity, but it proceeds by sanctions
and rewards to police the boundaries of the identities it establishes.
In addition, what must be made clear about any definition of masculinity is that it is
always articulated in oppositional and relational terms to femininity. Masculinity is as much
to do with what men do, how they behave in order to win the respect and honor of other
men, as it is about winning the respect and admiration of women. Similarly, femininity is
defined along similar lines. What I would like to do this evening is to disabuse you of the
notion of the fixity of masculinity. Masculinity cannot be distilled down to some essence,
which is universal and transhistorical, much as some would have it. A number of social
forces, social class, race, ethnicity, religion or culture for example, may intervene in
determining how masculinity is practiced and experienced by different men.
I would like to begin with excerpts from two texts which I believe, get at the heart of
the matter of the nuancing of the construction of masculinity in the Caribbean. These
excerpts are taken from two of the best-known Barbadian and Caribbean writers, Austin
‘Tom’ Clarke and George Lamming. My experience of doing research on masculinity in the
Caribbean has taught me that whereas the scholarly literature is only now emerging in this
area, the creative writers of the region have been more attentive, more perceptive and more
consistent in their observations and analyses of gender and specifically of masculinity than
many of the social scientists.
In his 1986 novel Nine Men Who Laughed, ‘Tom’ Clarke writes of a Barbadian man
who has been living in Canada for the past thirty years. The story is called The Man. The
reader never really learns the name of this man in the course of the telling of this story.
Clarke notes: “He calls everything his own. Although none of his money went into their
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purchase”. In fact, the man is unemployed, but poses as a lawyer and dresses each morning
as though he is going to work somewhere. In reality, he is a kept man; living at the expense
of a wife and two mistresses. He decides to invite one of his mistresses to his home for the
weekend, because his wife and his son were away visiting relatives:
There were too many prima facie chunks of evidence to link him to
the fact of being a married man, too many pieces that could destroy
the bachelor image he had been giving Rachel (1986:137-138).
Clarke then goes through some of this inventory that would have exposed his character’s
marital status: hairpins, nail polish, bottles of lotion, face creams, HIS and HERS towels
and matching mugs, etc. In the middle of this mission of erasure, the man began to muse:
“How does a home look when a woman lives in it? How does she arrange chairs and sofas
and couches and pillows? And at what angle? And how would a bachelor do these things?”
(1986:139). The man decided that every trace of his wife and son had to be eradicated
(1986:139). It is at this point, in the process of deliberate erasure, that he reflects on what it
is to be a man, or in his case, to be ‘the man’.
Here he was, for the last two hours, trying to remove all trace of his
wife’s presence in the house, and what did he discover? He had come
face to face with the cold fact that no smell, no idiosyncrasy, no
photograph, no snapshot, no cigarette box used even for paper clips
and for discarded calling cards, nothing of his stamp was on his own
home. Has he been living in such a neutral way for so many years?
How many were there? At least ten in this big old house (1986:141).
What Clarke offers here is a constellation of issues that serves to unsettle certain taken-forgranted notions of masculinity with which we are used to working. In the case of this man
then, unemployment, dependency, and even philandering combine to destabilize a particular
understanding of masculinity.
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I turn next to the work of George Lamming who comes to this issue of identity from
a rather different perspective. In George Lamming’s phenomenal work Season of Adventure,
there is a remarkable exchange between two characters, Crim and Powell, which is one of
the most intriguing philosophical statements about the ontology of manhood and
masculinity in the Caribbean that I have come across to date. Powell, the leader of the Steel
Drum band, speaks first in this exchange:
‘So I put it to you as one man to a next.’
‘Who say I’s a man?’ And Crim’s voice meant what he had asked.
‘Is you self say so.’
‘When?’
‘The very day you born’
‘But I couldn’t make a noise with words that day,’ Crim argued.
‘Is words make a note with you,’ said Powell, ‘like how you beat your drum till it shape a
tune, words beat your brain till it language your tongue.’
‘Is what that got to do with man?’
Every everything. Till then you aint nothin’ but a beast.’
‘Some beasts does talk’
‘But talk aint nothin’ till it ask,’ said Powell. ‘Man is a question the beast ask itself.’
‘All right, I’s a man’ (1979:15).
This exchange between two friends is rich with all kinds of philosophical meaning.
Lamming is referring here to an ontological process of consciousness and becoming. Here,
for Lamming, the existence of man can only be understood in the context of the acquisition
of language and culture. It is only with the acquisition of these social tools that one begins
to understand one’s self as a conscious subject; this is what separates us from common
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beasts. The social is therefore important. I will return to this issue of the role of culture and
the emphasis that Lamming places on it later in this presentation.
The title of this lecture warns of my intention to unsettle masculinity. In a way, this
purpose is deliberately both misleading and provocative. I should perhaps indicate that what
I intend to do is not so much to unsettle masculinity, but to destabilized certain traditional
meanings and understandings of masculinity. For masculinity has never been settled in the
sense of being fixed and unalterable. Masculinity has always shifted, regrouped, adjusted or
reposition itself in relation to the specific configuration of social forces and challenges that it
faces. Judith Butler perhaps said it best when she asserted: “Gender ought not to be
constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather,
gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time. . . ” (cited in Cornwall and Lindisfarne,
1994:40). Men under slavery and indentureship, in prison, in poverty and unemployment, or
in other contexts that are devoid of autonomy, have always had to adjust to new
configurations of power. I am always struck by the unproblematic manner by which people
speak of Caribbean or other men being in crisis, as though they are in danger of extinction.
If we could point to the changes and adjustments in masculinity, then we need to
recognize that it has a lot to do with behaviors. To pursue this angle further, we must
therefore ask, if gender is largely about behavior, and masculinity is also in part about
behavior, can we reduce all such behavior to men? Put differently, can masculinity only be
performed by men? Is there such a phenomenon as female masculinity? Or as Judith
Halberstam notes, can there be masculinity without men (1998). Halberstam is correct when
she argues that masculinity, at some level, has to be extended beyond the male body
(1998:13).
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Being masculine need not be an exclusive identity. It can involve
self-preservations which include behaviour conventionally associated
with both masculinity and femininity. Such, of course, is the case
with the so-called ‘butch’, as opposed to ‘femme’, lesbian. There are
male and female versions of masculinity and, equally, female and
male versions of femininity (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994: 15).
Having suggested this possibility, I would hasten to add that my talk deals only with
masculinity that is practiced by men. Moreover, I am convinced that patriarchal power,
domination and privilege, pose more problems for the realization of gender equality when
masculinity coincides with sex-born males. Female masculinity is in the final analysis, a
marginalized form of subordinated masculinity. In short, I part company with Judith
Halberstam when she asserts, “ that the shapes and forms of modern masculinity are best
showcased within female masculinity” (1998:3). This claim to my mind could only be
considered preposterous and deliberately provocative.
Gender and Labor
Thought I have spent some time so far relating masculinity to behavior, I would like
to move to another level, and to address an area of profound neglect in most of the
academic literature as well as popular discourses on the subject of Caribbean masculinity. I
would like therefore to establish a link between gender and labor. If we understand gender
relations, of which masculinity is but one dimension, to be social at the core, then those
social relations cannot be understood outside of the framework of the production and
reproduction of the means of existence. In short, there is an organic relationship between
gender and labor. To understand masculinity or femininity, we cannot ignore an analysis of
the social ontology of labor as an important category of the status of men and women.
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Why labor? Marx was particularly insightful in this regard when he noted that labor
was, first of all, a process between man and nature (1977: 283). For Marx, labor is the formgiving fire, or as Gulli puts it, “the fire which gives form to all beings that come out of the
relationship between humans and nature or humans and technology” (1999: 13). Labor as a
category is neither, productive or unproductive, but as Gulli points out, creative. It is only
under the rule of capital that it becomes productive or unproductive (see Gulli, 2000: 1).
George Lamming helps us to understand this creative dimension of labor by relating it to the
idea and practice of culture. He notes:
The original meaning of the word 'culture' had to do with the tending of
plants and the care of animals. In other words, this word, and the process it
describes, has its roots in the practice of agriculture, and it has never lost this
sense of nurturing; of feeding; of cultivating; whether it be a body or a mind
that is under consideration.
The first and essential meaning of culture is, therefore, the means whereby
men and women feed themselves; clothe and shelter themselves; the means
whereby they achieve and reproduce their material existence. No food; no
life. No food; no book, no religion, no philosophy, no politics, no performing
arts. No one is exempt from the demands of material life (1992: 283).
The creative aspect of labor refers to its ontological dimensions. The Hungarian philosopher
George Lukács articulated this point very clearly when he noted:
Through labour, a teleological positing is realized within material
being, as the rise of a new objectivity. The first consequence of this
is that labour becomes the model for any social practice, for in such
social practice – no matter how ramified its mediations – teleological
positings are always realized, and ultimately realized materially (1980:
3).
It is in the context of labor therefore that human consciousness ceases to be an
epiphenomenon or secondary symptom. I am in agreement with Lukács when he surmises
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that it is appropriate to see labor as the model for all social practice – all active social
behavior (Lukács, 1980: 46).
It is only when we begin to examine labor as a social category, that we can get past
the sort of contentious issues about whose employment comes at the expense of whom, or
who has greater job insecurity, or who is being marginalized, and more ominously, whose
autonomy renders the other irrelevant. My point is that an unwillingness to situate gender
relations within the context of labor and the social relations of production is to fail to
realize that some of these issues of concern are bigger than the effect on the individual man
or woman. We need to begin to discern the many ways by which capitalism necessitates the
configuring and re-configuring of labor to achieve its objective of transforming surplus
value into profit.
The status of men and masculinity is inextricably bound up with the crises and
contradictions of capitalism. To be sure, capitalism did not invent the divisions and
differences between men and women, but it has become adept over four or more centuries,
at seizing upon and exploiting those distinction for its own benefit. Understanding fully the
nature of the social process of labor is at the heart of the ontology of social being. What
does all this mean? It means that cognizance of the role of labor, social reproduction and
gender, might afford us greater clarity about the challenges posed to masculinity by the
occurrence of such events as global economic restructuring, unemployment, the
reconfiguring of work and the impact of all this, on the lives of men. When we are fully
conscious of these ramifications we might be able to see that men of different social class
backgrounds, of different races and different sexual orientations, may indeed practice and
experience masculinity quite differently. We might also be able to see more clearly why
some bourgeois men in the Caribbean, who feel threatened by the advancement of some
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women, find it necessary to convince themselves and other men, of their marginalized
statuses - this at a time when patriarchy remains firmly ensconced in all the sinews of power
in the region, with little indication of yielding ground any time soon.
The Burdens of Masculinity
So far I have talked about the way in which masculinity is heterogeneous and plural
in its construction and its practice. Depending on the society and culture, masculinity
might have different emphases. The fact of the matter is that the challenges of modernity
and globalization may render certain aspects of the construction of masculinity either
obsolete or burdensome. Could it be, that if some men were left to their own devices, they
would rather not undertake certain responsibilities normally associated with manhood and
masculinity? Do Caribbean mean feel burdened by some aspects of masculinity? It seems
to me that there are a number of areas of self-imposed responsibility in which men would
do well to re-examine. For example, there is the issue of the monopolization of knowledge.
Regardless of social class background, race or level of education, men in the
Caribbean as well as in other societies, have long arrogated to themselves guardianship of
knowledge. This control extends out from the most banal areas of everyday life, to issues
of sexual intimacy, and of course to the most complex and cerebral areas. We feel we are
unable to claim ignorance on any of these levels because we equate insufficient knowledge
or plain old ignorance, with some sort of compromise to our reputations as men. How
much less stressful might life be for both men and women if occasionally men did not
know why a car would not start, or a computer would not work, or the complete anatomy
and physiology of the female body? This situation might be funny if it did not have
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profound implications for knowledge claims, in the sense in which Patricia Hill Collins
identifies how power relations shape who is believed and why (see Hill Collins 2000: 252).
What is at issue here is the extent to which regimes of knowledge are articulated in
complex ways with regimes of power to affect behavior and how people are perceived in
terms of gender (see Foucault, 1972 for the development of a related argument). In other
words, the knowledge which men are presumed to have on a wide variety of topics, forms
part of the basis of legitimacy claims.
Beyond this level however, assuming knowledge on sundry matters represents an
epistemological pose on the part of men. It is not just a matter of knowing but also a way
of knowing that is important. What feminist epistemology has been teaching us is that we
have to place knowledge in a particular historical, social and political context because these
factors all impact on both the knowledge and the persons claiming to be in possession of
the same.
Equally important, is what are we to make of the expectations of knowledge that
women have of men? Why would women expect that a man would know something
technical about a car engine or that he really does know something about the electrical
wiring or technological devices? The point in essence is that patriarchy runs deeper than we
might imagine and that we might begin to examine how and when we participate in this
system. Nevertheless, based on the foregoing type of philosophy of knowledge however,
women’s claims to expertise can be dismissed because their gender renders them incapable
of possessing knowledge in areas already claimed by men, and also because they are
presumed not to be rational thinkers.
Based on this type of faulty logic then, any revelation then of girls or women out
performing men and boys in the realm of knowledge or training therefore becomes
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particularly unsettling to masculinity. This reasoning in part explains the current
preoccupation in the region with the plight of young boys and young men, who seem to be
performing at what are considered to be unacceptable levels of expectation for men. Much
of these concerns seem completely insensitive to the role and impact of issues of social class,
ethnicity, race and poverty in determining why some boys seems to perform poorly, while
others do quite well at all academic levels.
Men also seem burdened by the presumption of strength and the expectation to
provide protection for their wives, girlfriends and children, irrespective of their own
physical endowments or capabilities. This responsibility, which some women expect men
to assume, and which many men feel obliged to honor, encourages fearlessness, and forms
part of a general tendency of men to embrace risk as a measure of manliness. By far the
greatest burden on many men is to assume the responsibility for being the breadwinner in
the household. The stress associated with this role is evident in men hiding their
unemployment from friends, relatives and even sometimes from their spouses.
An example of this problem can be seen in the excerpt from ‘Tom’ Clarke’s novel
that I referred to at the beginning of this talk. I will address the issue of unemployment in
the next section of this paper. An additional issue here is when the role of provider has
become so fetishized that the man becomes blinded to the reality that he is not the principal
breadwinner, or that the income of his partner eclipses his economic provisioning. Rather
than be content with the cumulative household income, some men see themselves as failing
to live up to the role of main breadwinner.
There are even cases where men have discouraged their spouses from pursuing jobs
that would put them in a higher income bracket than themselves. Some men on occasion
have persuaded their partners not to pursue educational opportunities that would result in
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higher paying and more prestigious jobs than they possess. These are some of the
insecurities that men have in one way or another fashioned for themselves through their
participation in a very traditional type of construction of masculinity. These are all factors
that affect men in a variety of ways, creating burdens from which some would perhaps
prefer to be relieved.
Unsettling or Destabilizing Masculinity
We come therefore to some of the specific ways in which Caribbean masculinity
could be unsettled or at least destabilized. There are several ways in which this process
takes shape, for the purposes of this lecture however, I will focus on four areas. These
spheres of unsettling or destabilizing are: Unemployment, homosexuality, impotence and
other sexual dysfunction, and masculine essentialism.
Unemployment The earlier discussion concerning the role of labor is particularly
relevant here. The workplace has long been a site of the construction and reinforcement of
gender identity and meaning for men and women. Men perhaps more so than women,
have tended to define their gender identity in part, through work. Work is integral to that
idea of winning the ‘bread’ which men are expected to undertake. In the context of the
Caribbean however, this breadwinner role appears to be more ideologically affirmed that
real. It therefore becomes problematic for some men, if they do not participate in this
particular construction of their masculinity. In the context of high unemployment levels in
the Caribbean, the idea of measuring one’s masculinity in terms of one’s ability to work
becomes unsettling to the performance of masculinity. What happens when the
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expectation of working and providing for one’s family is not an option? Are men no longer
men, or do they feel less than men on such occasions.
We have a lot of work to do in the Caribbean about assessing the social and
psychological impact of unemployment on men of all social classes. For indeed, social class
background has an effect on how men cope with unemployment. Working class men, who
stand in a particular relation to the means of production, and whose jobs are often
characterized by economic uncertainty and insecurity, may appear to be able to handle
unemployment relatively well because of their familiarity with this condition. However,
such men are plagued by the burdens of poverty and face all sorts of difficulties coping.
One man in Cuba told me, that he felt less than a man whenever he was ‘broke’. I believe
that this is perhaps the existential condition that calypsonian the Mighty Shadow was
describing when he sang that ‘poverty was hell.’ Poverty is in many ways a debilitating
condition, which constantly assaults the self-esteem of those ensnared in its unforgiving
grasp.
Some middle class men, who have occupied positions of middle management, and
who have worked continuously since completing high school, or after graduating from the
university, have been discovering the bitter taste of unemployment for the first time in their
50s, often as a result of a process of global economic restructuring. In effect, decisions
about their employment are being made at the global level with devastating social effects at
the national level. For many such men, this is entirely unfamiliar territory, and the coping
mechanisms at this level are not always sufficiently developed. In effect, in similar fashion
to the way we have gone about the business of assessing the impact of the structural
adjustment and the neoliberal agenda on women, we must now begin to examine how these
economic policies affect men at all levels. We must begin to study more carefully how
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increasing mobility, particularly of transnational capital, facilitates job insecurity for many
men, and leads to alienation and economic marginalization for some. The impact of these
development could ultimate affect how men construe their abilities to fulfill societal role
expectations about their gender.
I believe that a strong case can be made for the state, trade unions, and NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs), to develop policies and programs to address the
issue of retraining and retooling of men who find themselves unemployed or underemployed. The fact of the matter is that unemployment is a casualty of global economic
restructuring, and therefore men and women must come to terms with the cold reality that
education and job training are continuous life processes. This is also not a time to be
depleting the base of union membership. In a context where capital is becoming
increasingly more concentrated, rigorous union participation is required. Globalization has
tended to denude some of the power of unions at a number of levels, but to abandon the
principle of collective bargaining and union representation is to concede industrial defeat
which is tantamount to surrendering all control to management and capital. Labor and
capital co-exist in a dialectal space which must always be contested. Resistance has always
been a bulwark against industrial exploitation. John Holloway’s argument in this regard
should be central to the consciousness of workers both men and women in the Caribbean:
The violent restlessness of capital is the clearest indication of
the inadequacy (for capital) of the existing relations of
exploitation, of capital's incapacity to subordinate the power
of labour on which it depends. Despite appearances, the
restless movement of capital is the clearest indication of the
power of the insubordination of labour. It is not the breaking
of old patterns by money, not the 'reform of the state', which
holds the key to the recovery of capitalist health, but the
reorganisation of exploitation, the restructured subjection of
the power of labour to capital; and despite all the changes in
the organisation of production, and despite all the aggressive
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politics of capital over the last ten or fifteen years, it is not
clear that capital has yet succeeded in achieving this end
(Holloway, 1995: 135).
By the same token, where unemployment and informal work become more commonplace,
the union has a responsibility to address these constituencies, more creatively that it has so
far demonstrated.
Homosexuality Homosexuality has always, and will always, pose a problem for
hegemonic masculinity. Homosexuality represents one of the biggest challenges to
masculinity because it refuses to conform to those dominant ideas about what is a man,
how he should behave and whether there is only one way of understanding masculinity.
The fact of the matter is that men do not stop being men because of the sex of the person
with whom they sleep. Homosexuality is so unsettling to masculinity, that it results in
attempts to try to deny its existence, to remove it from society through force, that is to say,
to beat up individuals who are gay or believed to be gay, or to ridicule, publicly harass or
otherwise ostracize people of different sexual orientation.
The question that is of course very fascinating to me, at least, is why does it become
necessary to respond to homosexuality in this way? Is heterosexuality so fragile that it
cannot be contested by other sexualities? We must understand that homophobia is a
heterosexual strategy designed to police the boundaries of masculinity. This issue of
homosexuality is at the heart of sexual politics. Stuart Hall’s comment in another context is
quite germane here. Hall draws our attention to what he describes as ‘matter out of place”2.
When you see a piece of dirt in your garden, there is no need for alarm – matter is properly
in its place. However if you should see dirt on your carpet, then ‘matter is out of place’.
2See the Stuart Hall’s lecture in: Race: The Floating Signifier Produced by Sut Jhally, and published by Media
Education Foundation, 1996.
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What do we do with matter that is out of place? We immediately act to remove it, sanitize
it, and remove any stain or blemish it may have caused to the carpet, so that we may safely
return to the status quo.
Barbados has in a way, albeit in a problematic and acrimonious way, begun a
national discourse on the topic of homosexuality. This national debate was occasioned by a
suggestion made in October 2003, by the Attorney General and Deputy Prime Minister Mia
Mottley, that perhaps the time has come to decriminalize homosexuality and prostitution in
the island. This idea seemed to have been simply floated to the media, with no sense of
immediacy, no draft of legislation in hand or pending. Perhaps this was simply an attempt
to assess the climate of the Barbadian populace to a matter of change with respect to the
issue of sexual orientation. Regardless of intent, the suggestion set off a firestorm of
reaction, mostly negative in the press, on radio talk shows, in churches and more generally
in the public domain. The implications of such a suggestion are worthy of some studied
reflection, rather than the standard fare of vituperation which it elicited. The implications
of the suggestion are especially significant in light of the fact that the idea of decriminalizing
homosexuality at this time did not only surface in Barbados, but has been debated in St.
Lucia and Jamaica. In Guyana the Sexual Orientation Bill No. 10, which sought to remove
the stigma of discrimination from homosexuality, was hotly debated by church groups and
private individual, and supported by human rights advocates, but was ultimately tabled to
be further discussed at an unspecified time in the future. In short, floating the idea of
decriminalizing homosexuality in Barbados at the time was by no means fortuitous, contrary
to official pronouncements.
Very interestingly, there has not been as much debate about the prostitution part of
this suggestion, and who knows, perhaps the decision has already been made to
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decriminalize this practice in the popular imagination of Barbadians. Perhaps also, there
was less debate around the issue of prostitution because it powerfully reaffirms
heterosexuality, albeit in a subversive manner, and perpetuates a practice which some
believe is incorrigible. The debate so far has been heated, and the condemnation of
homosexuality has been resounding. This response to homosexuality is quite amazing
considering that Barbados has long been considered among the most tolerant of the
practice in Caribbean.
Surely, Barbadians are not now discovering a homosexual presence on the island.
Homosexuality has been around for a long time. Indeed, speaking of the region as a whole,
B. R. Burg traces the practice of sodomy to 17th century buccaneers. The 17th century was a
period when, incidentally, there was little condemnation of homosexuality from “ordinary
citizens, officers of the Church, the military and by leaders of the civil government” (Burg,
1983:xvi). Given the history of homosexuality in the island, why would people suddenly
feel that decriminalization would lead to a breakdown in the moral fabric of the society,
when homosexuality has not succeeded in accomplishing such an apocalypse in all these
many years of its existence in Barbados?
What exactly would happen if homosexuality were to be decriminalized in
Barbados? Would heterosexual men suddenly decide that homosexuality is perhaps an
option that they had not considered before but ought to entertain at this stage? Are we to
believe that heterosexuality can be so easily shaken from its moorings? Or that
homosexuality is a sexual practice laying in waiting for a propitious moment of official
legitimation? What exactly is the nature of the fear? Maybe it is that while being fully
cognizant of its existence, we would all be more comfortable if homosexuality were to
remain closeted and marginalized, to the point that we can pretend that it does not exist,
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and maybe, just maybe, it might go away. In short, we might all rest more comfortably if
homosexuality – the matter that Stuart Hall talked about – remained in its place.
What needs to be made clear is this: decriminalizing homosexuality does not mean
or even imply an embrace of this sexual practice or orientation. Those who are
heterosexual will continue practicing heterosexuality, and those who are homosexual will
presumably remain homosexual, irrespective of the status of the law, of the admonition of
the Church or society’s ridicule or hostility. To continue to criminalize the private practice
of consensual sex between adults of the same sex is to perpetuate a policy of discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation. Such a practice sends a message to the less considerate
or tolerant among us, that it is okay to persecute, taunt, harass, inflict violence upon and
even to murder people, simply because they do not share the sexual orientation embraced
by the majority of people.
We cannot afford to play fast and loose with the idea of democracy and inclusion.
The State has a responsibility to protect its most vulnerable citizens. Either we apply the
democratic principle to ensure all people’s rights to live in society without fear of prejudice
and discrimination; or we subscribe to the tyranny of the majority. Fairness, full benefits of
citizenship and the elimination of prejudice at all levels, are desirable goals for any society,
even on those occasions when achieving such objectives might prove unpopular or perhaps
even troubling to political survival or public acclaim.
Sexual Dysfunction One of the areas of masculinity that is particularly vulnerable
to destabilization is that of sexual performance. Remarkably this issue has the potential to
unsettle all types of masculine sexualities. Indeed, a lot of the popular culture of the
Caribbean is saturated with messages about sexual performance of one kind or another. A
cursory look at some of the folk songs or the calypso would easily confirm this point. At
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the popular level in the Caribbean, there is a high premium placed on sexual performance,
for both men and women. For men, sexual competence is not just important, but for
many, it is central to their understanding of themselves as men. The inability to perform
sexually is perhaps more than unsettling, perhaps even devastating to masculinity. It is a
small wonder that all forms of anxiety therefore characterize the arena of sexuality.
Impotence and other perils of the penis, have profound effects on men’s sense of
self-worth, not to mention their reputations, should this information enter into the public
domain. The centrality of sexuality will vary with the age of men but could remain
important even at advanced ages, especially in a region long known for its machismo.
Indeed, the issue of male potency has never been left entirely to chance and men in
the Caribbean have sought all manner of folk remedies to hedge their bets against
vulnerability long before the advent of Viagra, Cialis, Levitra or other pharmaceutical knock
offs. These efforts manifest themselves in such folk medicines for sexual enhancement
such as Yombina in Puerto Rico, pagopelo, the bark of the Taino plant, bois bande of
Grenada and Trinidad, pacro water from Tobago, steel drops, and an amazing combination
of barks from Guyana namely sasparilla, capadulla and kockshun; and of course China
Brush from Barbados. It has always fascinated me that in every part of the Caribbean there
is always a story about the man for whom the use of one of these potions, rather than being
a self-fulfilling aphrodisiac has become a living nightmare, and about whom the Mighty
Sparrow has immortalize in the calypso Bois Bande. My guess is that these apocryphal
stories function at the level of the folk culture to preventing abuse of these medicines.
There is however a very serious issue here where folk remedies for addressing
sexual dysfunction come up against established medical practice. Some of these folk
remedies may effectively dilate genital blood vessels, increasing sensation to the genital
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tissue and may cause increased excitability in the genital region. They may prove to be
effective for some men affected by psychological problems of impotence, while not being
as efficacious for those men with a physical basis for the same. The alpha-2 receptor of the
sympathetic nervous system functions to regulate the activity of the other receptors and
contributes to keeping blood pressure and heart rate under control by means of a feedback
loop. Some of these folk remedies enter the central nervous system where they block the
alpha-2 receptor of the sympathetic nervous system. Blockage of the alpha-2 receptors also
blocks the feedback loop that controls blood pressure and heart rate.
These folk remedies can act to increase blood pressure, heart rate, and in high doses
can cause cardiac arrest and death. They can also cause anxiety and tremor. They are
therefore not recommended for persons suffering from schizophrenia, depression, anxiety
disorder, kidney disease, liver disease, angina, heart disease and high blood pressure.
Interaction with many other drugs such as antidepressants, amphetamines and cocaine can
lead to serious complications with toxic effects3.
In effect, these folk remedies for sexual dysfunction that are dispensed in the
Caribbean, at street corners or in public markets, without the benefit of proper medical
knowledge or advice, may represent a short-term hedonistic decision, which might prove to
be far more devastating than the problem they presumably seek to address. The fear here is
that these folk practices remain blissfully ignorant of the medical complications involved.
In an economic climate where Viagra, Cialis or Levitra are prescribed drugs and represent
an expensive proposition, the resort to the folk remedies will continue to have some
3I would like to thank Dr. Christine Noble for helping me to think through this argument and to absolve her
from any responsibility for interpretations of the medical information that I have made.
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purchase at the popular level; hence the issue must remain a cause for concern for people in
the Caribbean with a long and rich folk tradition.
This issue of sexual performance is in some cases exacerbated by medical
complications. In an area with a high incidence of hypertension and diabetes, long-term
sufferers may experience erectile dysfunction as a result of prolong use of other types of
medicine to control their diseases. This is another serious problem for men. There are also
other issues of sexual dysfunction such as premature ejaculation and low sperm count that
have other kinds of implication for how men view themselves as men. For some men, the
inability to father a child by a certain age, let alone to be declared medically incapable of
procreation, is most destabilizing. It is not surprising therefore that some men shy away
from undergoing tests of sperm motility, preferring to shift liability for failure to procreate
on the woman in the relationship as a way of maintaining the illusion that their own fertility
is not in question. Here again however, Barbadian men have long placed their fate in the
restorative claims of sea moss, raw nuts and milk, and Guinness stout to shore up any
diminished fertility.
What is important for our purposes here is that men begin to define their behaviors
in ways that are not as restricting as they now appear to be. We cannot reduce our
masculinity to our sexuality, for then we are bound to feel less than men if that single
dimension of our identity – a dimension that we consider to be foundational – is challenged
or shaken in some way.
Masculinity and Essentialism One of the big ironies of our time is that men may
find that they participate in their own marginalization. This is not an attempt on my part to
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stand the marginalization thesis on its head4 – that is not my project. Rather I would like to
suggest, that the insistence on fixity of some men, might prove to be their own undoing.
The problem with essentialism of whatever variety is that it presupposes a fixed and
unalterable relationship between subjects, whether these relationships are in the area of race
relations, social class or gender relations. An essentialist position would argue that all men
must embrace a set of criteria of masculine behavior that mark them off as men. The
question therefore would be, who decides on these criteria? And when do subordinate men
get to speak in their own behalf? Some men, many of whom enjoy patriarchal privilege of
one sort or another, feel duty bound to reproduce the status quo. They are uncomfortable
with the notion of gender change, and because of this fear of change, they engage in a rigid
interpretation of masculinity.
This rigid notion of masculinity, of necessity, involves the control of, if not an
attempt to subordinate femininity and women in general. The problem here is that women,
for the most part, are refusing to be subordinated. Moreover, marginalized or subordinated
men are also refusing to be put back in their places. This situation therefore is at the heart
of the tension between men and women and among men themselves. One has therefore to
be wary of an insistence on the coded messages about returning men to their rightful places
as heads of households. This insistence is often essentially a call for the reinstatement of
patriarchal domination at the domestic level.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to play a more active role in family life and in
the affairs of the domestic sphere. There is something fundamentally wrong however with
a yearning for a retrospective illusion, about the way we never were, when the rule of men
4The reference here is to Errol Miller’s controversial work, Marginalization of the Black Male: Insights from the
Development of the Teaching Profession. Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1986.
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in society and in the household was paramount, and beyond question. These calls are not
about creating a new sense of justice in the public sphere; they are about using the language
of family to place it firmly in the control of patriarchal rule. Both women and progressive
men should struggle against the invidiousness of this development. There is no natural
order of things in which men have been designated the most competent to rule, these
conditions are socially determined, and intended to facilitate and institutionalize male
control.
Rather than insist on reproducing the status quo, men might more productively
spend their time, thinking about how they can contribute to the building of a new type of
society that is based on free and democratic participation of men and women as equals.
Towards a Future Without Guarantees
The Caribbean is at a critical juncture of its history and development. The
economic and social challenges facing the region are daunting to say the least. The
region faces a future without any guarantees. The Prime Minister of Barbados, the
Rt. Hon. Owen Arthur, reworking the Dickensian observation, assessed these
challenges very perceptively a few years ago when he noted:
On balance, the distressing circumstances in which the Caribbean
Community now finds itself, and the very fearsome prospects which
lie ahead do not create any grounds for the optimism that these are
the best of times.
It comes closer in fact to being just about the worst of times as we
begin a new century. For much of the Caribbean Community is
confronted with quite considerable uncertainty, and a tendency
towards disorder in just about every sphere of political, social and
economic life. [Arthur, 2000]
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Prime Minister Arthur had some specific problems and issues in mind when he
made the observation cited above. He argued:
It is not the best of times. In the social sphere, the Caribbean ranks
high on the list of those countries which face the threat of being
overwhelmed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. New forms of crime and
violence, linked closely to an insidious new drug culture which
threatens to undermine the integrity of the institutions of our civil
society, and linked to the behaviour of Caribbean nationals deported
from the USA, have and are taking root, and are representing
themselves as the most modern forms of social disintegration in a
fragile region [Arthur, 2000]
I cite the Prime Minister of Barbados here, not simply because I happen to agree
with his observation, but because given his understanding of the region, his role as a policy
maker, and as a person who is committed to the region as a whole, he is well positioned to
be able to evaluate the fate of the Caribbean in these times. The impact of the process of
global economic restructuring, the all-consuming power of transnational capital, the
emergence of new forms of globalized masculinity and patriarchy, the prospects of
economic marginalization, all represent the context in which we must talk about men and
masculinity in the region. We cannot divorce the issue of gender from these larger
structural issues, otherwise we run the risk of constructing facile arguments about usurping
men’s roles and their places at this or that level, without regard to the many ways in which
regimes of global capital accumulation shape and reshape the trajectories of gender and its
social relations.
The relations between men and women are too integral to the reproduction of
capital for them to be left unregulated. Capital is invested in disciplining these relations of
gender, and it will exploit whatever tensions and differences exist between men and women
in the interest of greater accumulation. Men and women have to begin to perceive the
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deeper involvement of capital in structuring their relations with each other. There is a
human cost involved in the project of globalization, and its impact is felt hardest on
developing countries such as those in the Caribbean. Both men and women should resist
the efforts of global economic restructuring from further exacerbating tensions between
them.
The challenge of the twenty-first century is to demystify these political and
ideological relations and expose them for what they really are – that is, strategies of
accumulation of capital by any means necessary. This should be the real work of civil
society organizations, that of contesting the power of transnational capital and engendering
democracy at all levels, not just articulating empty platitudes about a generalized
empowerment.
What is needed at this stage also is some vision about the creation of a type of
society that is based on gender equality. This equality implies a radical shift from the way
we do things. Change is always a bit frightening, and so it is understandable that some men
may become defensive or even hostile to the issue of change. We need to work on allaying
the fears of some men that women are on the verge of taking over. The reality is that they
are not. The point is that this new vision is not about the changing of the guards. It is not
about replacing men from positions of domination by women. It is about the dawn of a
new society without domination by men or women. Men need to be involved in helping to
construct such a society, for given a future without guarantees, we need to be moving in the
direction of gender transcendence, so that we might face such uncertainty together, as men
and women.
I believe that this was the spirit of the Prime Minister’s call for regional economic
integration in the address referred to earlier. We need to think also about transcendence,
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not as erasure of identity but of moving beyond those things that have traditionally divided
men and women and acted as obstacles to progress and transformation. We need to do so
also because there is a democratic imperative to do so, but most of all, we need to move
toward transcendence because it is an idea whose time has come.
We live in a world that offers no guarantees, and for small countries on the margins
of the process of globalization our vulnerabilities are even more magnified. Facing the
future as a unified region is not a guarantee of economic success or dominance, but it offers
greater hope of survival in a world dominated by much more powerful states and the
ubiquity of transnational capital. Similarly, the challenges of navigating a global economy
replete with numerous human, national and international insecurities, the pandemic of
HIV/AIDS and environmental dangers, are indeed daunting.
In this context, we as men and women must make adjustments. We cannot
continue to live our lives as though we operate in autonomous spheres from each other.
This period dictates a fundamental reordering of priorities and ways of interacting. This is a
call for fundamental social change which dictates that men and women establish better
relationships with each other and collectively negotiate their way in the world. Beyond this
level, the structural dimension, as suggested earlier, should not be ignored.
It is here also that the Church, community organizations, Non-Governmental
Organizations, feminist groups, environmental groups, progressive men’s groups and
powerful organizations such as the trade unions can join forces to usher in new forms of
social relations. The time for finger pointing and apportioning blame between men and
women is long past. This is a time when we must face the uncertainty of the future together
and with new agendas for the social and political transforming of the Caribbean. This must
be the legacy we bequeath to the generations to follow.
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