Heard at the salon

19Nov09

“Natural hair does not go with every outfit.”

“Natural hair does not look polished.”

“Natural hair cannot go everywhere.”

“When they stop making relaxer I’ll wear natural hair.”

When they stop making relaxer just let me die.”

Filed under: Barbados, caribbean, culture, stupse   |  3 Comments
Tags: natural hair, politics of hair

Fat Politics

15Nov09

Are Bajans ready to be led by an obese unmarried feminist, who has a turbulent private life, and a history, while in public office, of personally approving large payments on a no-bid contract to a company that has subsequently been accused in a foreign court of bribery? Or: Are Bajans ready to be led by a privileged lawyer who heads a party that has frequently put the interests of business elites ahead of the interests of ‘ordinary’ Bajans?

source: Living in Barbados blog

with blogs, the comments are as interesting as the post themselves. i can definitely see conservative elements in Barbados rejecting an “unmarried feminist” as leader, especially since this is the time of the women-are-taking-over panic and feminist is after all, an F word. Barbadians, despite grossly immoral behaviour, can get very moralistic not to mention misogynistic.

the commenter’s use of the word “obese” in the context of a country which ranks as #2 in the Caribbean and #12 in the world on obesity rates, is less a reflection of fat prejudice and more about how women’s bodies become objectified when they enter the public world of politics. the male politician need not worry about his physicality becoming an issue on the political platform. for the female politician, her personal life and her very body are up for dissection and discussion.

did i say female politician? i meant any woman who dares to just be.

Filed under: Barbados, gender, media, sex   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: fat politics, gender and politics, harassment

Loving my haters

02Nov09

“Haters” has become a popular new piece of slang. i used to roll my eyes whenever someone spoke of having haters, being blind to their haters etc. It seemed both silly and self-important. Now i’ve got some haters of my own. LOL. Someone has been attempting to sabotage what is a very good opportunity that has opened up for me. i have no idea who it is but it is obviously someone who knows me, most likely a close acquaintance or colleague, perhaps even a “friend”.

my first reaction was disbelief that someone could be so willfully and strategically hateful, spiteful and mean.

nothing rolls off my back easily but i’ve decided that whatever will be will be. i’m not stressing.

whenever someone is grudgeful of whatever it is they think i have i laugh to myself. i’ve been blessed and life has been good to me. i’ll be the first to admit that i enjoy tremendous privilege. but there is also the living on the edge of sanity, literally waking up each day and having to choose to live, to hold it together, to take life one day at a time. there is the long, hard, impossible road i’ve walked- so much pain and shame that it is a task not to let it overwhelm me.

i only wish to do a little good in the world, to honour all that i’ve been given. and when i give, i give generously of spirit which is all i have and all that really matters anyway.

so i’m sending a little love to those that are wasting their time hating me and trying to put obstacles in my way. i will rise and i hope you do too. the world is big enough that we can all be brilliant. now stop the foolishness!!!

Filed under: personal   |  2 Comments
Tags: haters

back to school

26Oct09

So much for making this blog less personal…

The last few months have been my most stressful ever and in many ways both my lowest ebb and my brightest moment.

i’ve taken that giant leap of faith in myself and resigned my job (a job i quite liked and was doing very well in) and joined the ranks of fulltime studenthood again. and while this is a humdrum piece of news, it was a major decision for me. much of my life has been characterised by scarcity and i’ve been basically on my own money-wise since i left secondary school so the decision to stop working was not an easy one. in fact, it kept me up at night. literally. i still feel a tremendous amount of shame about being unemployed (i know, i know, technically i’m not unemployed but that’s the way the people who matter to me most see it, sadly).

nonetheless, i know it is a privilege to able to do research that i’m passionate about without the grind of a 9-5. it is great gift and i am fully committed to honouring all that i have been given. i attended a friend’s graduation this weekend and i cannot wait to take that walk myself. i look forward to that new beginning and in the meantime i’ll enjoy my PhD journey. after all, i worked very hard to get to this point.

this post is my little reminder:
1. do not worry about money
2. you’ll get through the daunting list of interviews, trust me
3. you’ll develop a love for microfiche, stay with me here
4. you can write 80, 000 words
5. all 80,000 of them will make sense
6. you will graduate in 2011, you better!
7. there is work, life, love after university
8. dreams do come true
9. life is what you make it
10. write! write! write!

Filed under: education, personal   |  8 Comments
Tags: faith, graduateschool, PhD journey

Clothed with meaning

17Oct09

“All persons conducting business in the courts, the precincts of the courts or within the various sections of this Department should be dressed appropriately.”

The restricted wear includes blouses and dresses with straps, “back out or belly out” garments, mini skirts, shorts, slippers and curlers.

Men cannot wear earrings or body rings or shorts and all cell phones must be turned off.

From the dress code of the Barbados Registry, which is where you go to pick up a birth/death/marriage certificate.

A grandmother in an arm-hole (sleeveless) top, knee-length skirt and leather thongs was not permitted to enter the registry because of how she was dressed.

On the whim of some civil servant a dress code which reinforces gendered norms of dress for men and women, displays complete disregard for Barbados’ climate (not to mention the need for pedestrians like me to wear comfortable shoes) is being forced on to the bodies of Barbados’ women and men.

What is considered “appropriate” is loaded with the violence of gender, race, class and, of course, our history of colonialism. The registry’s incursion on to the bodies of Barbados citizens’ and it’s infantilising attitude- hints at something larger and more problematic- treating this country’s people not as citizens but as supplicants whose “immature minds too often are ruled by their adult bodies,” to borrow a line from the West India Royal Commission Report of 1945.

Likewise, Morehouse’s ban on women’s clothing, durags, sagging pants, sunglasses and barefeet speaks volumes about heterosexuality, homophobia, class and black masculinity- specifically that black masculinity is supposed to be straight, or at the very least appear that way; and be visibly middle-class so as not to offend folks like Bill Cosby and the civil servants at the Barbados Registry.

Filed under: Barbados, caribbean, culture, gender, stupse   |  3 Comments
Tags: class, clothing, coloniality, dress, gender, heterosexuality, homophobia, Homosexuality, masculinity, men, race, women

Bad Company

07Oct09

So a 27 year-old man beat his ex-girlfriend until passersby pulled him off her. He admitted to the assault in court. He also openly admitted in court that perhaps the next time their paths crossed one of them would not make it out alive (guess which one).

Nonetheless, the magistrate felt that this was a clear case of a young man being lead astray by a woman. (You know evil us women are, always provoking attack just by existing.) The magistrate cautioned the man to “to recognise when people will lead you down the wrong path.”

Misogyny leads to some peculiar reasoning…

Filed under: Barbados, angry, gender   |  2 Comments
Tags: Barbados, Caribbean masculinity, gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, violence in the Caribbean

Raising Boys

03Oct09

In the Nation’s coverage of adoption in Barbados two things stuck me:

Single women are more likely to adopt than couples (i’m assuming couples refers to heterosexual marriage).

Most people interested in adoption did not want to adopt boys.

The coordinator of foster care and adoption at the Child Care Board is quoted as saying:

“Women between age 30 and up is the primary age bracket for those who come forward to express interest in adopting. For the year they have had 14 applicants, which they are currently processing but expect more by the end of the year, and the majority of them are women.
And the women who come forward have fortunately been able to provide the boy children they’ve either fostered or adopted with a connection to a male role model. That aspect is very important for males to have someone who will have some input in their lives,” she stated, emphasising there was a distinct difference in the way boys responded to male authoritative figures as opposed to female figures.

I agree that boys need positive father figures in their lives (girls do too).

What troubles me is the assumption that that boys generally have no regard for women’s opinions and that they are either harmed by women authority figures or do not view women as legitimate authority figures. Indeed, the assumption that boys need “authority” and not more importantly unconditional love, care and attention from someone who is willing and capable serves to reproduce gender in a way that is harmful for boys.

We are failing too many of our boys in the Caribbean. The ideologies that view them as difficult because they are boys, that equate fatherhood with discipline and authority and little else; and view women and girls as some how inimical to boys’ education and lives are harmful and devastating to our children who above all deserve our love and care.

Filed under: Barbados, caribbean, gender   |  3 Comments
Tags: adoption, adoption in Barbados, boys and adoption, Caribbean family, Caribbean masculinity, gender and adoption, race/class/colour/gender in the caribbean

Racialicious Indeed

03Oct09

The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.

The question is whether this, for all of its moral urgency in the local sense, qualifies as education under any serious definition.

Typical is the curriculum of one African-American Studies department in a solid, selective state school west of the Mississippi. In this department, racism is, essentially, everything.

Since i started reading racialicious i’ve been asking myself, doesn’t the blog itself fetishize race? i find that collectively the ideas expressed are less an interrogation of race as a social fiction and more a creation of race and racism as always already menacingly present with the simplistic trope of the eternal victim foregrounded in the commentary. this criticism is by no means specific to the racialicious blog i read often but it is the collective spirit of the posts which leaves a bad taste in the mouth- the idea that the single most-defining characteristic of life for persons who are referred to as minorities in the US is their shared victimhood. For example, when Solange Knowles spoke about being a slave to black women’s hair culture by spending US $50,000 on hair (not her exact words). i found it mind-boggling to associate victimhood with being able to spend that much money on something as frivolous as hair ought to be. (When i learnt that there were online natural hair support groups for black women i couldn’t help but think that turning yourself into a victim in need of therapy is utterly ridiculous. we’ve all been through the hair drama wallowing in the pathology of it just seems so counterproductive.)

Understanding that race in the Caribbean is very difference from race in the USA i did not feel qualified to make such statements nor to question the USA’s diversity industry and how diversity itself becomes fetish.

John McWhorter’s piece has provided an opening for these questions to be considered.

There is a lot of social inequality in the Caribbean that needs to be addressed. The US tolerates more social inequality than any other wealthy nation. There is a lot to be redressed but if we are collective victims how do we get anything done? How do we even manage to get out of bed in the morning? The point is that we’re not. Discussions on race, gender and social inequality should have moved passed such a simplistic framing of the issues. It’s about time.

Filed under: culture, education, race   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: black women's hair, education, Good Hair, John McWhorter, natural hair, politics of hair, race in the Caribbean, race in the US, race/class/colour/gender in the caribbean, racialicious, Solange Knowles

What’s love go to do with it?

27Sep09

The Nation continued its examination of intimate partner violence this week with interviews with three women.

Being in love emerged as one of the reasons for staying with one of the interviewees declaring:

People might ask me why I married him despite the verbal abuse. Why does any woman marry a man? You love him, you want stability. All women want a Prince Charming,” she said.

I find this statement very interesting especially since for Caribbean women getting married was specifically linked to an increase in social status, particularly home ownership. Some couples would live together for years and only marry after they managed to afford a home together and often by then the children they raised together were fully grown. Absolutely nothing to do with fairy tales but rather a practical way on dealing with life as they knew it. Perhaps things have changed. Or perhaps what the interviewee describes as “stability” is the same thing our fore mothers were after.

Her explanation of why she stayed contradicts that given in another article about battered women’s syndrome:

PSYCHOLOGISTS believe women stay in abusive relationships due to a phenomenon known as battered woman syndrome where a woman believes she cannot leave the abusive situation.

It describes a pattern of psychological and behavioural symptoms found in women living in abusive relationships.

There are four general characteristics of the syndrome:

The woman believes that the violence was her fault;

She has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere;

She fears for her life and/or her children’s lives;

She has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

A portrait of a woman who is completely powerless, a quintessential victim, emerges. My opinion is going to be quite unpopular but nonetheless i’ll share it. Battered women’s syndrome seems to simplistic an explanation of why women stay in abusive relationships. It paints them as passive, helpless and acted upon. While it would doubtlessly prove useful as a defense if a woman is accused of killing her partner it seems to be less an adequate explanation of why some women remain in abusive relationships. Is anybody ever always passive, helpless and inert? What of women who are abused by their partners and are in turn emotionally abusive to their children?
Doesn’t the picture of woman-as-victim and man as aggressor fit a little too nicely within traditional and patriarchal conceptions of “woman”- a conception echoed in Western feminism? Last week’s examination of male victims similarly traded in stereotypes.

Please don’t accuse me of blaming the victim. I think the very question of “why did you stay?” is in itself blaming and shaming. Maybe in seeking to understand emotionally unhealthy relationships, some of which become violent and fatal, we have to start by asking different questions and by questioning the answers which we get.

Filed under: Barbados, caribbean, gender   |  1 Comment
Tags: Caribbean family, gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, violence in the Caribbean

Male Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

20Sep09

The Nation has two articles on domestic violence, particularly on male victims. i hope that this represents a move towards opening dialogue on the myriad ways in which our relationships are often emotionally unhealthy and even violent. In the future i hope they will not just discuss heterosexual relationships but same-sex relationships as well.

However, i was disappointed though not surprised to see that their treatment of the topic was a rehashing of old stereotypes:

Peter (an alias) was abused both physically and verbally by his former wife to the point where he felt emasculated. He was never allowed to be the man of the house and his opinions were shot down by his spouse, who was more educated than he was.

Ah, yes the emasculating BITCH aka independent woman who does not let a man be a man.

However, things bcame clear after his ex-wife hit him in the head. He moved out, it became a police matter and she was summoned to court. But, as Peter put it, she used her feminine wiles to get him to drop the case.

He did, but regretted it.

Peter thought that sexual encounter was a sign they could work things out – not so.

The evil temptress who puts a gun to your dick and makes you have sex with her!

“When I say things to my wife, she doesn’t dismiss them. She allows me to lead; she doesn’t belittle me,” he said.

And a submissive wife shall save the day!

“Women like men who are strong – not to the extent of beating them
or anything like that, but they want
a man who would stand up to them and say: ‘No, I don’t think what you are saying or doing is right.’”

So how does reiterating the same stereotypes which keep men silent and cause them to be ridiculed by their peers help them to leave abusive relationships?

He said men sometimes called him asking him to suggest a place where they could lay their heads for a night when their partners acted up.

“I think there should be a shelter for abused men if only on the basis of gender equality. Women have somewhere to go when they are abused. Why not the men?” he reasoned.

Is this what gender equality means? That men should get the same things as women and vice versa? Would men really want that? If there was a shelter for abused men would it also be open to men in homosexual relationships?

Women’s violence towards partners and children is very rarely discussed. It’s time we had a frank dialogue on women as violent aggressors and on the sexual abuse of children by women but i fear we are along way away from letting go of old stereotypes.

Filed under: Barbados, caribbean, gender, sex   |  3 Comments
Tags: gender-based violence, violent women; male victims of domestic violence; intimate partner violence