Sex & Exoticism in the Caribbean

Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean

Kamala Kempadoo

Introduction

The over-representation of “Other” women and the hierarchies of race and color within the international sex trade have increasingly become the subject of feminist interrogation in the field of prostitution studies (Shrage 1994, Kempadoo 1996, O’Connell Davidson 1999). Such investigations suggest that there is no straightforward correlation between economic conditions and prostitution, or patriarchy and prostitution - that, quite simply, not all poor women are likely to end up in the sex trade. CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

A History

Exoticism - the romanticization of the racial, ethnic or cultural Other, yet the simultaneous oppression and exploitation that occurs with it - CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Caribbean history did not escape exoticization. Colonialism with its attendant systems of slavery and indentured labor also produced ideologies of the “exotic” and few women in the colonies escaped the eroticizing, sexualizing gaze. CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Two main stereotypes of Black femininity have been identified as specific to the region during slavery. The first drew from general perceptions of Africans by Europeans as “slaves by nature” and defined slave women as passive, downtrodden, subservient, resigned workers. CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Perceptions of Black women as sexual and erotic objects were consolidated in various ways.CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Thus even before arrival in the colonies, African women were objectified as sexualized beings in the eyes and minds of the traders. Romanticized descriptions of African women as “Ebony Queens” and “Sable Beauties” CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Interestingly, a commonality in the perceptions, desires and passions of European men towards women in the East and West CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Prostitution in the Caribbean is inextricably tied to the power and control exerted by European colonizers over a Black population at a time when Western European nations sought to find new resourcesCONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Racialized dimensions of sexuality under slavery were, however, not uniform, with the category of women “of mixed race,”--the “mulatto,” “mustee,” or “colored” woman– being considered particularly exotic and sexually desirable by white men. CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Rape, concubinage, and prostitution often produced children, yet in the absence of marriage and formal recognition of the child by the white father, the child followed the condition of the mother and was defined as either part of the slave population or the free colored class.CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

The sexualized, romanticized, socially marginalized, prostituted, Brown female body, besides being a basis for domination during slavery, also constituted a site for reconfigurations of power. Brown women were known to make strategic use of their exoticized status through a self-conscious employment of their sexuality. Henriques writes,CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Continuing Legacies

The shift from a discourse that was primarily articulated through the white western European masculine consciousness, to one that is embedded in the imaginations and desires of the colonized man,CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Tourism in the Caribbean at the end of the twentieth century appears to confirm exoticizing tendencies present in the region since the sixteenth century. CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Such observations are not widely found on sex tourist websites that traffic in fantasies and tales by men about the control they exercise over women. Nevertheless, female sex tourism in the Caribbean has been noticed, researched, and commented upon since the 1970s and is a growing CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Exoticized Subjectivity and Agency

The notion of agency among people who have been victimized (oppressed, colonized, exoticized, prostituted, subject to slavery, rape, etc), is always a difficult subject to broach, CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

Conclusion

Exoticism in the Caribbean has in the past, and continues to, CONTINUED IN THE SOSUA BLUE BOOK!

References

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Kamala Kempadoo is a sociologist and assistant professor in Women's Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her work concerns global intersections of gender, race, class and nation, and particularly the ways in which these shape women's lives in “developing” countries. She is coauthor and editor of -Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition- and -Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean.

Bush 1990:17. Baudelaire's “Black Venus” and poetry inspired by his mistress of color, the bust of “Venus Africaine” sculpted by Cordier in 1851, or Picasso's “Olympia” of 1901 all belong to the tradition of Europe's exoticization of African women (Nederveen Pieterse 1990:182).

In di Leonardo’s account of exoticism, The Chicago World’s Columbia Exposition in 1893 exemplifies how nineteenth century “America” viewed and defined “the Other”, with certain groups of women marked as particularly exotic. “In the common orientalist parlance, Asian and Middle Eastern women were largely apprehended as embodiments of exotic beauty and sexuality... Black women, however, were frequently portrayed as offensively ugly and frighteningly savage” (p.7) White women on the other hand, though coming “close to slipping into the category of ‘otherness’ reserved for ‘savages’ and ‘exotics’ “ in the perceptions of the exposition’s male architects, were however, redeemed from this category “through their capacity to serve as mothers of civilization...” (di Leonardo 1999:8).

These letters described tourist experiences in Caribbean countries of Aruba, Cuba, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Suriname. In most cases the authors did not identify their home countries, but several authors indicated that they lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Nevada, Texas, Canada, Germany, England, the Netherlands, or the U.S. in general.