Lubna Alli

This week’s readings on the complexities between land, gender, family, colonialism and heterosexualism explore the impacts that these very things have had in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is particularly important to note the discourse around gender roles in the British Caribbean post 1838 emancipation, as explained in Brereton’s paper, where this notion of women who work is taken back and reclaimed. This tells a story of resistance, of resilience, and of overcoming. The violence that was inflicted upon these communities as a result of the British colonial violence is one that can never be forgotten, even for myself. As someone that was born and raised in British Guiana (now Guyana), I read the passage both with the ease of familiarity but also with the pain of familiarity. I saw my great grandmother tending to the home while my great grandfather ran his trade business to keep these British gender ideologies in place as a form of strategic survival. The author argues that women across the British Caribbean did, in fact, play a major role in plantation work post emancipation, citing that they often worked faster and harder than men. As an extension of this, Lugones’ reading talks on the coloniality of power and the role that this plays in the heterosexualization of the modern gender system. Lugones says that the way to discuss is not through the heterosexualist patriarchy that has an ahistorical framework of analysis, but through the historicization of gender and heterosexualism. This puts at the forefront of the discussion the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a way that enables her to understand the differences that persist in much feminist analysis. 

Thinking back to previous weeks, the relationship to the land and the ownership of property in this history of colonization is immensely powerful, and it continues to challenge Locke’s ideas about property. Locke says that those who farm and cultivate the land have the right to that land because of the labour that they have exerted on it. What, then does this mean for the ex-slave? Do we need to consider a modern day form of repatriation in this sense?

Sources:

Bridget Brereton. 2005. Family Strategies, Gender, and the Shift to Wage Work in the British Caribbean. In Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 19 pages.

Maria Lugones. 2007. Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), pp.186-219.