Caribbean Sexualities: Power and Privilege

Catalog description

This course examines Caribbean sexualities—identity, desire, interaction, and structure—with a particular emphasis on the Spanish Caribbean, allowing students to explore themes useful for them in developing a broad comparative perspective on the region. The course takes as a fundamental premise that since the first moments of “contact” with Europeans, the insertion of the Caribbean into the global economy has been crucially marked by relations of inequality. This inequality is negotiated through the representation and commoditization of bodies and desires. The readings and discussions will focus on finding ways to account for the agency of Caribbean peoples while remaining aware of the power dynamics within which their bodies become legible within and outside of the region.