Caribbean Feminisms Workshop

CARIBBEAN FEMINISMS WORKSHOP RECENTERING CARIBBEAN FEMINISM

THE IDEA

The Caribbean Feminisms Workshop: Recentring Caribbean Feminisms, is an inaugural activity hosted by the Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS), UWI, Cave Hill in collaboration with the UWI, Faculty of Law, Cave Hill.

For us, this is an attempt to create a permanent Caribbean feminist intellectual forum to formulate, debate, critique and disseminate new and ongoing ideas and knowledge about Caribbean feminist scholarship and its relevance to dissecting the multiple realities of women and men in Caribbean societies. We see this dialogue as important because of the centrality that women’s voices have had in the process of initiating social change and development within the region. The project is designed therefore to ‘harness’ this intellectual and activist synergy in ways that recentre the feminist challenge of social and gender justice in the forefront of intellectual production and policy change in the region and generate new knowledges to benefit women’s lives and Caribbean society.

THE CONTEXT

Caribbean feminist scholarship is poised at a critical juncture. It has moved beyond stocktaking, number crunching and rendering of visibility long overdue but ignored by earlier anthropological and sociological research of the mid twentieth century Caribbean. The 1970s was a watershed period. it marked the growth of Caribbean feminist activism and by the mid 1980s signaled the coming emergence of feminist thought in the Anglophone Caribbean. Often identified as the ‘second wave’ of Caribbean feminisms, this period saw the growth of numerous women’s organisations regionally, the establishment of Women’s Bureaux and the introduction of state run programs that sought to address issues affecting women’s lives. At the level of the academy, the institutionalization of gender studies as an academic discipline was achieved in the early 1990s, following the introduction of Women’s Studies in the early to mid 1980s.

The University of the West Indies, and the Cave Hill Campus in particular, has played a leading role in creating new knowledge about the lives of women in the commonwealth Caribbean. These include the pioneering work of Dr. Lucille Mathurin Mair at the Mona Campus, the Foundation provided by ISER’s path breaking Women in the Caribbean project under the leadership of Dr Joycelin Messiah at Cave Hill, the establishment of the Women and Development Unit, UWI, and the international leadership within the women’s movement by Dr Peggy Antrobus, a first generation of feminist scholars at the University of the West Indies forced visibility and analysis of the particular conditions shaping women’s lives in the region. The campus based units of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies serve a critical institutional function in developing academic programs and in continuing to generate and encourage intellectual ferment in the scholarship on women and gender issues. Throughout the campus, in the Faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, course offerings within women’s studies and gender studies have grown. The same is true for publications; a number of edited collections, books and referred journal articles now exist and are widely used in this field.

By the end of the 1990s Caribbean feminist scholarship had clearly matured. yet Caribbean feminists in the region and internationally whose field of study is metaphorically and literally the societies of the Caribbean only ‘spoke’ to each other through chance encounters at conferences and imagined conversations through their published works. As between community based feminist activists and feminists academics who often share similar goals, the distance is even more perceptible.

Caribbean societies are experiencing rapid and profound political, economic, social, and cultural change. Caribbean women and men have begun to rethink and negotiate inherited gender identities and question prevailing gender ideologies. New feminist theoretical constructs and explanations are generated to illuminate and dissect these changes. it is now imperative that Caribbean feminists develop an intellectual space and community to collectively debate and theorize these developments.

There have been other developments in the region, particularly over the last ten years that signal the urgency of maintaining a focus on feminist commitments to equity and justice and to the particular realities of women in Caribbean societies. Over 44% of households in the Commonwealth Caribbean are headed by women. This apparently simple demographic detail has enormous political, economic and social implications for women and children. yet there has been a weakening of state machineries addressing women and development issues. There is now a widespread misunderstanding of gender as a synonym for women and men and never as an analytical framework that can reveal the differential biases and injustices in economic and social relations women continue to experience.

Noticeably there is a burgeoning anti-feminist rhetoric, crystallizing in the idea of “The Marginalisation of the Caribbean Male” thesis. Despite the virulent and pointed hostility, there is still only a vague and abstracted idea of who are Caribbean feminists and what is Caribbean feminist thought. over the past thirty years there has been debate ‘the woman question’, ‘the gender question’, and now ‘the man question’, but insufficient attention has been given to nurturing the growth of feminist thought or rethinking feminist activism. In spite of this, it is now clear that critical perspectives are being offered by Caribbean feminists throughout the region and internationally on a wide range of concerns.

Today, a new generation of Caribbean feminist scholars are advancing the analysis of Caribbean societies and peoples, developing new analytical frameworks, and reflecting on, critiquing and refining the earlier contributions. They join the more, well-established voices. This workshop is designed to provide an intellectual space to bring new and experienced Caribbean feminists together to dialogue, debate and document the changes in Caribbean society from feminist perspectives. This workshop is designed to facilitate this fervour.

THE GOALS

(a) Provide a forum to facilitate dialogue between different generations of feminists across the Caribbean Diaspora.

(b) Create a community to facilitate, support and increase the production of interdisciplinary Caribbean feminist scholarship through the publication and dissemination of books, monographs, and special issues of journals.

(c) Begin to examine neglected and taboo issues within Caribbean feminisms.

(d) Create a network to strategize for the generational and institutional growth and sustainability of Caribbean feminist scholarship and activism.

Eudine Barriteau
Michelle Rowley
Tracy Robinson
Co-ordinators

June 12 2002