Caribbean Feminism 12 Challenges

1. I want us to unravel the knot around power and connect our difficulty with power as influencing what issues receive our attention whether the issue is women’s economic hardship or lesbianism and homophobia. I want us to recognise that we have a problematic relationship with power, that we experience contradictions around how we come to power, how we claim it, respect it and use it. I argue that this failure to grapple with our ambivalence over power constitutes the single major challenge confronting contemporary feminisms in the Caribbean.

2. To begin to rethink the processes we can develop and use to ensure that democratic practices define how we create knowledge and how we expose and avoid replicating, the hierarchies of power in the social relations we seek to disrupt.

3. To be aware that feminist scholarship and activism has to be distinguished by a commitment to interrogating, picking apart and honestly confronting how power works. In whatever avenues we work, we have to acknowledge that we are contesting and seeking to change relations of power.

4. The need to establish genealogical authority and continuity between feminist thought and gender studies. This is not a quest for theoretical primogeniture. It is about identifying the conceptual frameworks that recognise and explore relations of power that shape how women and men experience the same social and economic phenomena in fundamentally dissimilar and unequal ways.

5. To maintain and support a meaningful dialogue with masculinities. We anticipate the insights and new directions in the publication of a volume of essays edited by Rhoda Reddock from the St. Augustine’s CGDS’ 1996 symposium on Caribbean masculinities. Still, we need to nurture a space to converse with masculinity beyond the necessary, but generally reactive responses that have been generated so far.

6. Caribbean feminisms have to unravel the knot of race\ethnicity\class and an us\them frame of analysis that must transcend its origins in a post colonial, nationalist treatise. Rawwida Baksh-Sooden charges that the face of feminism and its intellectual content is Afro-centric (Baksh-Sooden 1998). In our necessary work to critique white privilege in nationalist discourses have we remained imprisoned by black\white boundaries in terms of an inability to turn the lens onto feminist scholarship and practice in the region?

7. The knotty challenge of class, another social relation of power and privilege that is not yet interrogated satisfactorily in our work. Andaiye states, while it is true that the movement was and is dominated by women of African descent, it had and has a minority of working class women of African descent... moreover the Indo-Caribbean women in the movement were not working class either (Andaiye 2002A: 13). Have we exhausted feminist analyses of race and class and gender?

8. The fragility and vulnerability of the women’s movement in the face of a frontal assault on Caribbean women that goes beyond a backlash (Barriteau 2001). The widespread, uncritical acceptance and promotion of Errol Miller’s Male Marginalisation thesis has caught women’s organisations by surprise and hold them in a state of suspended confusion (Barriteau 2001). The collective analysis of a UNIFEM\CAFRA study on conditions affecting Caribbean women in the Post Beijing period underscores how fragile and porous are the gains women have made. What are the implications for us who operate from the academy?

9. The retreat of the State from maintaining a focus on women in a majority of Caribbean countries. Many believe they have fulfilled their mandates and must now focus increasingly on men.

10. A retreat from a focus or concern with women by international development institutions accompanied by the cyclical resetting of their priorities. So for three years these organisations may fund initiatives dealing with such issues as violence against women, human rights or the girl child. Then in the next three years the focus could shift to poverty eradication, gender and the environment, diversity issues, or economic literacy. It is as if domestic violence and human rights violations put in appearances on the basis of appropriate funding or being ranked as a priority in a program cycle.

11. Weaknesses in both scholarship and activism in linking the adversities in women’s lives to larger structures of oppression and exploitation at two levels. In what ways can we use our creation of knowledge to link what happens to women’s lives to adverse developments for childrenand men? How can we use our critiquing of the public\private divide to reveal this divide as meaningless to understanding how Caribbean women operate since women negotiate and traverse these poles daily? At another level we have to link the specific adversities women experience to the wider systems of oppression and exploitations of homophobia, religious intolerance, class and race. We should not lose the specificity of a focus on women’s lives, but we have to guard against becoming balkanised in our analysis and application.

12. The gentrification and abuse of the leadership in both the academy and the movement. There is not enough continuity being buil up with a new cadre of up and coming feminist women leaders. We have to guard against a mistrust hardening to the point it prevents our strategic solidarities around the agendas with which we identify. We the ones who are established, who have paid some dues cling to power in all its manifestations and often frustrate younger women. Similarly, younger women anxious and eager to make their mark, often arrive before they have reached. They dismiss the wisfom, the experiences even the mistakes of the women who walked before them as irrelevant to feminist politics and scholarship of the twenty first century.