Barriteau, Eudine, Professor

By Stine Adrian on 28 Aug | 0 comments

Eudine Barriteau is Professor and head of The Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Barbados.

GEXCEL PROJECT
Coming, Coming, Coming Home: Applying Anna Jónasdóttir’s Theory of Love Power to Theorising Sexuality and Power in Caribbean Gender Relations

My paper seeks to apply Anna Jónasdóttir’s construction of “love power” to developing a theory of sexuality and power in the contemporary Commonwealth Caribbean, using Barbados as a case study. I engage in a triple play on the meanings of the word “coming” and anchor these meanings to black feminist theorising of the concept of “home” (Barriteau 2006: 21-22; Carby 1997: 47; Smith 1983: 64-72).

I am specifically interested in the complications romantic loving pose for Caribbean women, particularly in continuing attempts to subordinate women. I want to track how these complications become extrapolated into wider systemic inequalities, even as these are simultaneously reflected back onto the individual relationships and their representations of gendered hierarchies of power and inequalities.

I intend to foreground my analysis in the centrality of Caribbean women’s lives, as they navigate the intersections of the public and the private, production and reproduction. My challenge is to work backwards and forwards from the dynamics of that basic union (played out in private, intimate spaces such as the home), to contemporary developments in Caribbean political economy.

In everyday, Anglophone Caribbean culture, the word “coming” has an excitement and anticipation that I hope to convey in creating new theoretical insights about power and pleasure in women’s lives. While coming is used to refer to the eve of the orgasmic climax in sexual intercourse, in my analysis I want to capture the exhilaration, tension and anticipation of coming to reveal another layer of the complexities of asymmetric gender relations in the Caribbean. 

I intend to use Jónasdóttir’s theorisation of “love power” to carve a new understanding of sexuality in the Caribbean. This new understanding should not only recognise its historically fluid and contested features, but seeks to explore desire, sensuality, pleasure and power in the rethinking of the discourse on sexuality in the region. Specifically I want to extend Jónasdóttir’s theorisation of “love power” to Caribbean women’s realities.

Barbados is interesting because it ranks fairly high on the UN indicators for developing countries for the HDI, the GDI and GEM. Also Barbadian women have a fairly high standard of education, and to a lesser extent economic autonomy which they strive for. In their personal lives, their sexual relations, the majority become disempowered in a way that “extracted” power is collectivized and used against them. I agree with Jónasdóttir that marriage, relationships or unions, are the link between the private and the public so I want to explore or raise some questions around what the state and civil society reinforces, institutionalizes around the conjugal union that reinforces the gradual weakening of women's love power so it ends up being something that is more or less absent from their lives.