Critical Explorations of Gender and the Caribbean: Taking It Into the Twenty-First Century

Respectable Families and the Body Politic

“…Feminist and civil rights movements across the Atlantic world have widened the possibilities for subject formation for women, including more options in their reproductive lives, and cohabitation no longer incurs similar shame or stigma as before (Reddock 2005: 83). The social deficit perspective has been rejected in revisionist scholarship on African American families since the 1960s, and Caribbean feminist writers have critiqued portrayals of black working class sexuality or family as aberrant in social scientific research and policymaking since the 1980s (Hill 2006;Mohammed 1999;Reddock 2005;Slocum and Shields 2008;Trotz 2003). However, marriage and the nuclear family have not lost their symbolic value in the discursive construction and performance of normative, legitimate selfhood in the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean, and concerns about 'broken families' and singlemother households as sources of social problems continue to be voiced in public discourse (Barrow 2001).…”