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Doctrix Periwinkle's avatar

Fascinating as usual, Alice.

A few observations:

Consistent with your slavery effects hypothesis, my island of Saba is both the most LGBTQ-friendly Caribbean island by a very wide margin, and also has a very different history with slavery than most other Caribbean islands, because it’s too steep, rocky and has too poor of soil to allow for monoculture agriculture. These conditions allowed for subsistence farming, but not for profitable crop production on Saba—meaning slavery wasn’t profitable here, either.

A good comparison to test this hypothesis would be to compare Saba (pop. 1900) and St.Eustatius (pop. 2700), which is 16 miles away, also a Dutch special municipality, comparably religious, but St. Eustatius was a major slave-trading way station.

Also, while there are Dancehall songs that endorse homophobic violence, anal sex (with women) is absolutely celebrated in many Dancehall and Soca songs. A Caribbean denunciation of “sodomy” may be condemning homosexuality, but that also could be read as criticizing the popularity of heterosexual anal sex.*

Finally, you seem loathe to attribute any of the Caribbean’s homophobia to importation of West African cultural values—but West African cultures are also very homophobic and endorse violence against gay people. You tie that African homophobia to the influence of modern Christian movements there, but isn’t it likely that anti-gay religious teachings took root because of an underlying anti-gay culture? Enslaved west Africans brought to the Caribbean could have brought more deeply anti-gay attitudes with them, and have that influence today’s culture, in the same way that west African rhythms influence Dancehall tunes today.

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Doctrix Periwinkle's avatar

Also I thought I should mention: The influence of Indian (here meaning Asian Indian, not indigenous Caribbean) culture on Caribbean culture is underappreciated by people who don’t live here. But many indentured servants from India were also imported to the Caribbean, obviously influencing food culture (this is why there are so many curries in Caribbean cuisine) and surely influencing other aspects as well. I don’t know if you want to pursue that line of inquiry when you’re looking into the homophobia of the Caribbean, but I think it’s worth considering.

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