Gender, Health, and Society in Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean
author of chapter 8: “Here to Stay in the Bay!”: The Politics of Vestibularity, Black Trans Women of Jamaica, Gendered Duress, and the Work of Recognition
This research endeavors to tell the story of queer citizens of color in Jamaica. Of particular interest, is the extent to which Black trans citizens of Jamaica are able to experience the full rights of citizenship extended by the former British-ruled nation. Although there are many voices that can be called from the margins to center, this research focuses primarily on the narrative of Gully Queen, a Black trans woman of Jamaica, as a lens to understand the various ways in which Black queer Jamaican citizens are discriminated against by the state, and, in turn, by fellow citizens. Toward this end, this project is undergirded by an analysis of laws, newspapers, eye witness accounts, and existing scholarship. This research argues the ending impact of such laws and social climates are that Black transwomen are rendered non-citizens, and, furthermore, that these laws position queer identified persons as enemies of the state—barring them from being able to claim space, participate in affairs of the state, or gain access to needed resources. Lastly, this work argues that Jamaica is a participant in a larger international framework of hetero-dominance and colonialization of the body. In this way not only do the bodies of Black trans-women become sites of settler colonialism—both before and after death—but Jamaica’s participation in marshaling heterosexuality as a socio-legal lens through various means permits the island nation to collude with world powers such as the United States in the oppression, marginalization, and deaths of trans Black women. All told, this work seeks to advance the claim that heterosexuality is a violent state project to that results in the deaths—both social and corporeal—of Black trans-women.
Under Siege: Black Women, the Choreography of Law, and the Public Carceral Sphere
This project endeavors to make an intervention in the discourse of carceral analysis by unapologetically placing the experiences of Black women at center while moving beyond the concrete and barbed wire walls of State and Federal prison facilities to explore the ways in which the public sphere is transformed into a carceral space. Approaching incarceration in this way illuminates areas that are not often considered when imprisonment is the subject matter at hand. Gendering the phenomenon of incarceration also permits carcerality to be conceptualized in alternative and various geographical spaces and locations, as opposed to being limited to static institutional facilities. As this project progresses, Black women, as opposed to law or Black men, are centered so as to highlight the gendered limitations of much of the current analysis regarding carcerality, as well as the ways in which Black women have been deeply marginalized, if not completely rendered invisible in some instances, in “the New Jim Crow.” As a result of centering Black women, what this project endeavors to prove is that our understanding of carcerality must shift and, moreover, that the very idea of carcerality itself is constituted at the intersection of race, gender, citizenship, and geography, and therefore must be understood together.
