Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Reassessing Caribbean Migration: Love, Power And (Re) Building In The Diaspora, Andrea Natasha Baldwin, Natasha K. Mortley

Journal of International Women's Studies

Traditional research has framed Caribbean migration as a socio-economic issue including discourses on limited resources, brain drain, remittances, and diaspora/transnational connection to, or longing for home. This narrative usually presents migration as having a destabilizing effect on Caribbean families, households and communities, more specifically the impacts on the relationships of working class women who migrate leaving behind children, spouses and other dependents because of a lack of opportunities in Caribbean. This paper proposes an alternative view of migration as a source/manifestation of women’s power, where women, as active agents within the migration process, in fact contribute to re building relationships, …

Claiming The Politics Of Articulation Through Agency And Wholeness In Two Afro-Hispanic Postcolonial Narratives, Silvia Castro Borrego

Journal of International Women's Studies

Following a context-based approach and the tenets of post-positivist realist theory, this paper will analyze two post-colonial Afro-Hispanic novels immersed in their articulation of moving towards Caribbeanness within the phenomenon of Diaspora Literacy: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1983) and Michelline Dusseck’s Caribbean Echoes (1997). As part of the Diaspora Literacy, these texts will be read employing the search for wholeness as a theoretical tool, towards an epistemology of anti-colonial feminist struggle. These texts take active part in a decolonizing process that fosters a definition and vision of agency which makes wholeness possible, becoming an active expression of black women’s spirituality …

A Subtlety By Kara Walker: Teaching Vulnerable Art, Marika Preziuso

Journal of International Women's Studies

In late Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned artist Kara Walker to create her first large-scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the legendary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was as controversial as it was revered. The powerful presence of the installation, coupled with its immersion in historical consciousness, makes A Subtlety rich in educational value. This article engages in a comparative reading of A Subtlety in the light of female writers and thinkers from the Caribbean, but also incorporates some of the generative questions Walker’s installation has …

Finding Your Own Magic: How Obeah And Voodoo Provide Women Agency In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea And Tiphanie Yanique's Land Of Love And Drowning, Matthew Cutter

Journal of International Women's Studies

One of the most important functions of Caribbean literature is to give voice to characters that would be otherwise voiceless. These characters are often slaves, women, racial minorities, and poor people; in other words, anybody who has been touched by the devastating oppression of a colonial society. The oppressed in the Caribbean have often turned to their belief in Obeah in order to assert themselves in the face of the colonizer. Obeah and magic are still ingrained in the culture of the Caribbean people because the culture of the European colonizer is still influencing society in the Caribbean.

Through this …

Carving Caribbean Spaces In Between: The Life Of Ruth Gourzong In 20th Century Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to make visible the community and their descendants of free Jamaican blacks who immigrated into the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica (specifically Puerto Limon) at the turn of the twentieth century to help build the American owned Northern Railway and work on the banana plantations owned by the American owned United Fruit Company. I illustrate the life of my great grandmother, Ruth Gourzong as an example of a woman from this community who managed to thrive against the odds of racism and sexism during her life time in Costa Rica. In order to fully appreciate the context …

"Everything Remains The Same And Yet Nothing Is The Same": Neocolonialism In The Caribbean Diaspora Through The Language Of Family And Servitude, Laura Barrio-Vilar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay examines Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, a novel that tackles the process of decolonization from old and new forms of colonialism through the language of servitude and family (specifically, mother-daughter relationships). The novel’s protagonist is not only an example of the wave of West Indian migration and the feminization of labor, but her agency also provides Kincaid with the necessary platform to deploy her views on U.S. imperialism. I propose reading Lucy’s evolution toward self-determination as not only an individual but also a collective experience. I interpret the novel as an allegory that can help us better understand the …

Wifredo Lam, The Shango Priestess, And The Femme Cheval, Paula Sato

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and his iconic construction of Afro-Cuban identity. From the vantage point of a literary scholar rather than art historian, and in keeping with Lam’s description of his paintings as “poetry,” I read his artwork as terse lines of verse, rich in metaphors. Although Lam is regarded as the painter of Negritude, commonly understood as a male-centered movement, he distinguishes himself from his contemporaries by incorporating in his brand of Negritude two female figures as metaphors of the power to decolonize the mind. One of those figures is his Afro-Cuban godmother, Mantonica Wilson. Healer, …

Julia Alvarez And Haiti: Transgressing Imposed Borders In In The Time Of The Butterflies, A Wedding In Haiti, And Protests Against Ruling 0168-13, Ellen Mayock

Journal of International Women's Studies

Throughout her writing career Julia Alvarez has been examining definitions of the “Americas” and rethinking conceptualizations of the nation. Her multiperspectivist literary works have given voice to women of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the United States, and to those who, as Alvarez says, “shift from foot to foot.” This article looks at Alvarez’s recent activism along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and calls upon Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) to establish how the author uses the feminist and activist transgressions of the Mirabal sisters to speak against the Dominican legacy of anti-Haitian sentiment and political action, so firmly …

The Politics Of Natural Knowing: Contraceptive Plant Properties In The Caribbean, Rachel O’Donnell

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper considers the eighteenth-century ‘voyages of discovery’ to the Americas within the framework of colonial history and the development of modern scientific practice and method. It uses a feminist methodological approach toward concepts of natural knowledge and knowledge production. The essay looks specifically at knowledges of particular plants from the Caribbean and their properties, focusing on one plant still used for fertility throughout the region. I investigate the centrality of Caribbean natural knowledge to the development of differing historical perspectives on nature as well as the relationship between the development of European botanical sciences and natural knowledge in the …

Fanm Vanyan: A Cultural Interpretation Of Resilience In Haitian Women, Castagna Lacet

Journal of International Women's Studies

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that promoted resilience in Haitian women earthquake survivors. The literature on mental health among Haitians is sparse. Furthermore, the concept of resilience is not easily translated across cultures. In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, relocated victims struggled to adjust. This study looks at what factors helped women adjust to their new environment and cope with the traumas and losses suffered from the earthquake. A qualitative design was used to discover and describe resilience. Findings indicate that cultural values and strengths were key factors in the women’s perseverance.

A Narrative Review Of Maternal Depression Research Focusing On Women Of Caribbean Descent In The Diaspora And Caribbean Women In The Region, Fatimah Jackson-Best

Journal of International Women's Studies

Maternal depression is a global public health issue (Almond, 2009); however, much of the existing research on conditions like the ‘baby blues’ and postpartum depression have been conducted with White women in North America and Europe. This narrative review seeks to expand the scope of maternal depression research by including and analyzing maternal depression studies conducted with Caribbean descent women living in the Diaspora and women in the English-speaking Caribbean alongside some of the work from North America and Europe. Through this engagement with the existing research three thematic areas emerged. These are: widely used prevalence and incidence rates of …

Social Erotics: The Fluidity Of Love, Desire And Friendship For Same-Sex Loving Women In Trinidad, Krystal Ghisyawan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Love takes many forms and can serve different functions in a person’s life. Some forms, such as romantic love, familial love, and love within friendship, while sometimes distinct, at other times cannot be separated. This paper discusses love and friendship for same-sex loving women in Trinidad, exploring this mutability of love, the functions of love and intimacy in these women’s lives, the role of social media and social circles for finding love, all while considering the notion that love amongst same-sex loving women is an act of resistance. Forty same-sex loving women were individually interviewed, and this paper is written …

Interview With Patricia Mohammed: The Status Of Indo-Caribbean Women: From Indenture To The Contemporary Period, Lomarsh Roopnarine

Journal of International Women's Studies

The following interview with Patricia Mohammed discusses the status of Indo-Caribbean women from indenture to the contemporary period. The interview seeks to understand why Indo-Caribbean women have been marginalized in the general historiography of the Caribbean and how the status of Indo-Caribbean has evolved in a predominantly patriarchal Caribbean plantation system. Some central questions in the interview are as follows: Are women better off in the Caribbean than their ancestral home in India. Are they still subjected to patriarchal trends in the home and at the work place, or any other place in the Caribbean? If they are, what sort …

Introduction: Women And Gender: Looking Toward "Caribbeanness", Allyson S. Ferrante, Diana Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this special issue of the JIWS, fourteen authors explore varying iterations of “Caribbeanness” and what it means to identify its specific cultural unity through diversity in literature, various forms of activism, and constructions of feminism, identity, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality.