Erotic Cartographies

Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781978821385
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women's quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women's challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Trinidadian English
• Prologue
• Part I: Introduction and Methodology
• Part II: Confronting Binaries: Space, Gender, and Social Class
• Part III: State, Religion, and Personhood
• Appendix 1: Analytics Used for Maps
• Appendix 2: Bio-Data of Research Participants
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Series Editor