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Queer affirmations: negotiating the possibilities and limits of sexual citizenship in Saint Lucia

Amar Wahab

Between 2012 and 2013 the Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights (hereafter Envisioning) Caribbean team conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with members of Saint Lucia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community. Their experiences, which are examined in this chapter, constitute an archive of LGBT lives, which counters the Saint Lucian nationalist heteronormative archive, as well as the epistemological hegemony of the Global North.

Although the different forms of anti-queer animus in the small-island state should be borne in mind, my analysis also pushes for a wider understanding of the production and regularised disposal of marginal populations in Saint Lucia as part of a complex global phenomenon. As such, I draw on the interview data to open up the messiness of truth-making, suggesting that discourses about ‘state-sponsored homophobia’, ‘LGBT identity’ and ‘human rights’ must incorporate a deeper understanding of the ways in which queer Saint Lucians critically respond to multiple vulnerabilities under global neoliberalism. The chapter begins by considering three contextual strands: the impacts of global neoliberalism in Saint Lucia, the state-sponsored production of legal homophobia and the ‘queerness’ of the island state as it manages its sovereignty in tension with global discourses of ‘homophobic Saint Lucia’. It continues with an examination of the interview data that register the impact of anti-same-sex sentiment on queer Saint Lucians. At the same time, the data open up interesting opportunities for thinking beyond dominant constructions of ‘homophobic Saint Lucia’. As such, the final section draws on the epistemological richness of the interviews to productively challenge the discursive frames of both Saint Lucian nationalism and global LGBT human rights projects, while recognising that the agency of researchers and interviewees is also deeply conditioned through the very discourses that organise such projects.

Producing vulnerability: Saint Lucia and neoliberal globalisation

As a small island nation state that emerged from the gripping force of colonialism in 1979 – more than a decade after many other Anglo-Caribbean states achieved independence – Saint Lucia was thrust into a new era of vulnerability and precariousness within a moment of accelerated global capitalism, while at the same time struggling to determine the terms and conditions of national selfhood. As such, the context in which we can make sense of non-normative gender and sexual citizenship, ‘homophobia’ and ‘human rights’ cannot be divorced from the wider tensions that characterise the struggle between self-determination and neoliberal globalisation for Saint Lucia. While much of the discourse around the vulnerability of small island states has tended to focus on issues such as climate change and economic precariousness, little scholarship focuses on the impact of both nationalism and globalisation on the creation, intensification and normalisation of social vulnerability in Saint Lucia.

In this regard, Tennyson Joseph’s (2011) careful and insightful analysis demonstrates how Saint Lucia’s post-independence project, increasingly affected by the forces of global neoliberalism, can be characterised as one of ‘tentative anti-colonialism’, resulting in the ‘limited sovereignty’ of the nation state. According to Joseph (ibid., p. 187):

The exploration of the independence experience of Saint Lucia reveals that much of the politics revolved around tensions between the local demand for sustaining the economic and political objectives that had given rise to nationalism, on the one hand, and the imperative of adjustment to the largely external demands for adjustment of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, on the other.

Joseph’s investigation of each epoch of post-independence political rule shows the constantly shifting and at times contradictory allegiances to ‘the global’ and ‘the national’ that make economic and political vulnerability a constant. Whereas Joseph does not undertake a deep investigation of the social implications of the numerous vacillations that occur as a result of this struggle, urgent questions need to be asked about how the vulnerabilities produced from this struggle are distributed across the national population through a neoliberal ideological calculus of determining social assets and liabilities. What Joseph’s work allows us to rethink is the limiting discourse suggesting that sexual citizenship and ‘homophobia’ are state-sponsored affairs, for his analysis of the increasing shift from the welfarist to a managerialist approach by the state reflects the terms and conditions under which the small island nation state is limited in its capacity to respond to the pressures of global neoliberal capital. In fact, Joseph claims that ‘under neoliberal globalisation the state has been reconfigured through ideological, economic and political (including military) means to serve as a facilitator of the interests of what William Robinson (2006, p. 10) calls a “transnationalist capitalist class, overturning the previous Keynesianism that had facilitated a more equitable distributive and social function for the state.”’

Even more interesting is that Joseph shows that even under leftist governments (for example, by the Saint Lucia Labour Party between 1997 and 2006) which developed ‘socialist alternatives’, the Saint Lucian state could do only so much to buffer itself from its expectant role as a ‘facilitator of global capital’ (2011, p. 7) within the context of ‘deepening globalization’ (ibid., p. 188). Focusing on the debilitating transitions of the island’s once-dominant banana monoindustry to the more recent diversification into tourism and service-sector industries, Joseph shows how the state’s more managerialist approach has opened up Saint Lucia’s ‘sovereignty for sale’ (ibid., p. 167). Such neoliberal deresponsibilising of the state has also entrenched and normalised precariousness in highly material ways. In fact, in their final report Kairi Consultants (2007) found that poverty had increased to 28.8 per cent of the population, with 40.3 per cent deemed economically vulnerable (especially in the more rural sections of society). Moreover, the process of deepening globalisation in Saint Lucia (from the 1990s onwards, through to the 2008 global economic crisis) has produced an increasing disconnect ‘between the interests of the weaker sections of rural society and the broader goal of the economic development of the state’, that has resulted in increasing ‘popular disillusionment’ (Joseph, 2011, p. 189). Further, there has been a widening and normalisation of marginality – under global neoliberal control – that has reframed citizenship as intensely competitive and treated vulnerability through a neoliberal logic of disposability.

The seminal work of M. Jacqui Alexander (1994) in the context of Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas is quite instructive in this regard, as it links the governance of sexuality (especially the naturalisation and renationalisation of heterosexuality) to the social implications of recalibrating the postcolonial condition under structural adjustment (an earlier incarnation of neoliberal global control) in the Anglo-Caribbean. For Alexander (ibid., p. 16), structural adjustment policies aimed:

to impose a set of lending arrangements that would ostensibly reduce the foreign debt through a combination of economic measures to accelerate foreign investment, boost foreign-exchange earnings through export, and reduce government deficits through cuts in spending (McAfee, 1991, pp. 67–79). In particular, the programmes have been organised to reduce local consumption by devaluing currency, increasing personal taxes and reducing wages. The economy becomes privatised through state subsidies to private vendors, lowering taxes and providing tax holidays for foreign multinational corporations, expanding investments in tourism, dismantling state-owned enterprises, and curtailing the scope of state bureaucratic power by reducing the workforce and reducing the social wage – those expenditures for a range of social services for which the state had previously assumed some responsibility.

Alexander has demonstrated how the shifts to private capital accumulation, the increasing economic control by global capital and the resulting ‘super-exploitation’ of the proletariat – under structural adjustment – have created a crisis of state legitimacy. In the Saint Lucian context, Kairi Consultants Limited (2007) found that with growing vulnerability, poverty and indigence, especially in rural society, family dynamics were often negatively affected in ways that severely strained heteronormative gendered expectations and relations. The study claims that ‘there is a link between poverty and the inability of males and females to perform adequately their gender roles assigned them by their society’ (ibid., p. xxii). Whereas this analysis reiterates a cis-normative logic of neoliberal productivity, it does point to the need to consider the intricate connection between class, geopolitics and gender in mapping out the terrain of vulnerability. Moreover, the report also cites high unemployment among Saint Lucian youth, the socioeconomic degeneration of rural society and the emergence of an informal income-generating sector, including an underground drug-trafficking and crime-based economy, as factors leading to vulnerability. The report claims that Saint Lucia, ‘like the rest of the Commonwealth Caribbean, is only slowly adjusting to the reality of radical changes in external conditions, which make it imperative to organise its work-force for as orderly a withdrawal as possible from declining actors and for a shift to new activities’ (ibid., p. xxxi). As a result, ‘there is evidence of conditions of anomie in some of the marginalised urban communities. All of this has exacerbated other socio-cultural problems: there is segmentation of labour markets that exclude women, including single mothers as heads of households, and the decline of the extended family has left many of the elderly living alone’ (ibid., p. xxx). Although the report cites the impact of globalisation on the creation of marginality within Saint Lucia, it constructs the nation state – not global neoliberal capital – as the problem, for which the only response is for Saint Lucia to ‘shift to a higher productive platform’ (ibid., p. xxxi).

The inability to self-discipline under global conditions has also had implications for rising violence as a way of addressing vulnerability, whereby violence has become a survivalist mechanism of social control between different marginalised populations. In a Transnational Institute study on drug markets, youth and crime in Saint Lucia, Marcus Day (2014, p. 5) claims that

there is a distinction between violent behaviour that is deemed morally repulsive and punishable by the state, such as murder and rape, and behaviour that, while criminalised, enjoys the approval of large sections of the population. Examples of the latter include most extrajudicial killings of ‘bad boys’, homophobic violence, corporeal punishment of children and domestic and gender-based violence.

Day’s report also provides glimpses into the rise of a neoliberal police state in Saint Lucia where the state has increasingly resorted to ‘extreme use of force’ to control drug-related gang wars. What both of the above studies highlight, despite their inattention to sexuality per se, is that the highly precarious socioeconomic context of Saint Lucia is a result of global and transnational phenomena. Although much more research is needed to understand how these vulnerabilities are translated, transferred and addressed through prevailing discourses of gender and sexuality, the above analyses push us to rethink ‘homophobia’ or anti-queer animus as informed by and formulated in response to this complex and globally manufactured context.

State-sponsored legal ‘homophobia’

Many of the legal codes that organise and discipline national-normative sociality in postcolonial Saint Lucia have been inherited and revamped from the very same British laws that governed the plantation colony before political independence. In fact, Lennox and Waites (2013, p. 5) have pointed out that a significant number of postcolonial states, once under British rule, continue to criminalise same-sex behaviour between consenting adults. According to United and Strong (2011): ‘The legal structure of St Lucia has been inherited from British colonialism and although our constitution has enshrined within it the principles of equality and non-discrimination of all persons, it is not the reality. St Lucia stands as one of the many countries in the world today which still criminalises same-sex acts between consenting male adults.’ Legal homophobia in the island state is anchored in a wider context of state-sponsored homophobia that is fundamentally tied to Saint Lucia’s Constitution (1979, revised 2006), which deliberately excludes gender and sexuality in all of its clauses, including those regarding ‘fundamental rights and freedoms’ and ‘protection from discrimination’. Moreover, Saint Lucia’s Criminal Code¹ (Act 9 of 2004, effective 1 January 2005) explicitly criminalises ‘homosexual’ conduct under Chapter 2, Part 1 (‘Offences against the Person’), Sub-Part C (‘Sexual Offences’). Section 133 of the Code on ‘Buggery’ states:

(1) A person who commits buggery commits an offence and is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for − (a) life, if committed with force and without the consent of the other person; (b) ten years, in any other case. (2) Any person who attempts to commit buggery, or commits an assault with intent to commit buggery, commits an offence and is liable to imprisonment for five years. (3) In this section ‘buggery’ means sexual intercourse per anus by a male person with another male person. (p. 95)

Whereas this definition of buggery appears to target only same-sex anal acts between males, the previous section (132) on ‘Gross Indecency’ implicitly criminalises same-sex acts between women.

Across the Anglo-Caribbean, the legalisation of homophobia continues to be institutionalised as part of postcolonial moral governance through national constitutions and more recent revisions of the British legal codes contained in the Offences against the Person Act (1861). Even more problematic is the selective revising of this act in the postcolonial context, which has hypervisibilised homosexuality as a priority criminal offence (in some cases equating same-sex activity with rape and thus refusing to recognise same-sex subjects as capable of rationalising consent). At the same time other forms of sexual behaviour originally criminalised in the act were deprioritised – especially those linked to heteropatriarchal privilege (see Alexander, 1994; Tambiah, 2009; Robinson, 2009; Wahab, 2012). This postcolonial project of recalibrating and legislating social norms in the interest of national solidarity does not relate only to the explicit recriminalisation of homosexuality, but also involves an overhauling of several legal codes related to the governance of intimacy, social and biological reproduction, and therefore the widening legitimacy of various forms of heterosexual conduct and heteronormative relations. In fact, Tracy Robinson (2009, p. 4) claims that ‘the region-wide overhauling of laws dealing with violence against women and the family over the last 25 years revised the focus and boundaries of authorised sex and sharpened the notion and danger of the homosexual other . . . The spectre of “the homosexual” is, legally speaking, a relatively modern one.’ While Robinson here seems to rely on one of poststructuralist scholar Michel Foucault’s major contributions to the history of sexuality,² in the postcolonial context it also takes on a different nuancing. Robinson investigates the ways in which sexual offences laws and family law reforms have attempted to redistribute justice by recognising categories such as ‘common law unions’ and ‘visiting relationships’ (that were previously positioned as racialised threats to the moral integrity of colonies) as a reflection of the seemingly progressive character of postcolonial modernity. This has had the effect of not only reinstating heterosexuality as the norm, but also legitimising a range of kinship forms that were previously marginalised under colonial rule (and remain somewhat stigmatised).

In this regard, heterosexuality has been increasingly mobilised by the postcolonial state, especially as a discourse with the potential to collectivise and nationalise diverse forms of kinship and intimacy, with a view to widening the terrain from which to responsibilise citizens. This logic presents heterosexuality as crucial to both national solidarity and a sense of sovereignty that is decidedly anti-colonial. Interestingly, Robinson (2009, pp. 4–5) recognises in post-1980s legal reforms in the Anglo-Caribbean a more complicated recalibration of gender and sexuality as postcolonial disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms:

This specialized vocabulary of Caribbean conjugality, valorizing heterosexual reproductive intimacy, becomes a signifier of Caribbean authenticity. One consequence of this is that the homosexual is now more discernible as the counterpoint to the reproducing heterosexual citizen. These law-reform initiatives in criminal and family law professed to have the improvement of the status of women as their focus. They, unfortunately, demonstrate how impoverished notions of gender equality have become a modern mechanism for ‘redrafting morality’ and re-entrenching erotic autonomy.

Although these legal changes are calibrated in various ways by different nation states, it is important to recognise that they do not necessarily reflect the autonomy of postcolonial nation states to draft and enact them. We must enquire about the ways in which global neoliberal politics have affected postcolonial nation-state making and have redrafted/redirected their own biopolitical projects in problematic ways. For example, it is important to situate critically the ‘wave’ of legal reforms around sexuality, conjugality and kinship – which Robinson identifies as beginning since 1980, within the period of IMF/World Bank-orchestrated structural adjustment – that revised the conditions of self-governance within the region. Jacqui Alexander has attended to the complexities of this kind of contrapuntal questioning in her exploration of sexual citizenship in Trinidad and the Bahamas, linking the legal revisions around gender and sexuality to wider considerations/currents/shifts in the political, social and cultural arenas as a result of the accelerated globalisation of neoliberal governance.

‘Our destination will not tolerate it’: queering Saint Lucia

While the above discussion depicts the Saint Lucian state as actively engaged in straightening (that is, heteronationalising) its citizenry, the increasing importance of tourism to the small island economy has reimaged the postcolonial state as a queer(ed) figure under the forces of global capital. For instance, whereas the Saint Lucian government has been reluctant to investigate the murders of several of the island’s gay-identified men, the state has paradoxically become responsibilised to publicly address homophobic violence when the targets are legal non-citizens, especially white gay male tourists. This raises the question: Under what national and global conditions is the state responsibilised to address homophobia at the same time as it institutionalises the silencing of homophobic violence as a form of national responsibility?

In March 2011, three white gay American men from Atlanta were robbed and allegedly beaten in the rural town of Soufriere. Within days, news of the incident went into global circulation on LGBT websites such as Advocate.com (linked to ‘the oldest and largest gay magazine in the United States’) and Pink News.com (touted as ‘Europe’s largest gay news service’). The news was also spotlighted in some of the regional newspapers, such as the Jamaica Observer. The article from Advocate.com Editors (2011) reads: ‘According to the victim’s account, Michael Baker and his boyfriend Nick Smith were in the shower in the evening when they heard their friend Todd Wiggins scream in another part of the house. Baker emerged to find masked men beating Wiggins, and he and Smith eventually were tied up and beaten, too. The men hiked down a mountain barefoot to escape after their attackers left’. As a result of this public outing and shaming of Saint Lucia as homophobic – by LGBT watchdogs in the Global North – the Saint Lucian government was forced to respond publicly and officially to an issue that it has historically tried to silence or stymie any legitimate public discussion about. This led to an official apology – circulated through social media – made by St Lucia’s tourism minister, Allen Chastanet, to the three men. The apology also included the government’s claim that ‘the attack on three gay visitors to the island appeared to be perpetrated by individuals whose views do not reflect the sentiments of the majority of law abiding citizens’ (Jamaica Observer, 2011b). The tourism minister further insisted that ‘the southern Caribbean island is safe for gay visitors’ (ibid.).

These remarks made by the state suggest that it recognises homophobic violence – in the global arena – only when it does not implicate the national consensus (that is, the perpetrators are a few bad individuals) and when the targets of homophobic violence are white tourists. Even more, the claim that the island is ‘safe for gay visitors’ represents a form of global image management by the government of Saint Lucia, which has become increasingly dependent on tourism. Indeed, one Jamaica Observer article (2011a) reported that ‘tourism officials are this week arranging meetings with the visitors to do some damage control’. In this move to avoid damage to its respectability on the international scene, the small island state constructed the three white gay American men not only as the ‘real’ victims of homophobic violence, but as benevolent subjects undeserving of such violence. Tourism minister Chastanet remarked that ‘one of the men who had become very attached to Saint Lucia was in the process of raising funds to help slow learners in the various schools on the island’ (ibid.). In addition, the Saint Lucian police informed the public that some of the perpetrators were arrested and the stolen items recovered – a move which contrasts sharply with the state’s silence around violence against Saint Lucian LGBT persons.

The Saint Lucian government’s official statement continues: ‘Whether or not this crime was motivated by anti-gay sentiment, or during the course of robbery, it is nonetheless unacceptable behaviour and our destination will not tolerate it. Our enforcement authorities are pursuing this matter relentlessly’ (Geen, 2011; emphasis added). This statement is particularly interesting as it represents the double consciousness of the postcolonial state. While the Saint Lucian state is invested in conditioning the impossibility of same-sex sexuality, intimacy and relationality within the nation, it must simultaneously learn to see and conduct itself through a white Western self-disciplinary gaze, that is, as the object of intervention. It is significant that the tourism minister refers to the island as ‘our destination’ – not ‘our country’ – which signals the limits of self-definition and state legitimacy conditioned through the touristic gaze. As such, the ‘queerness’ of the Saint Lucian state – represented by its paradoxical permissiveness and prohibition of homosexuality/homophobia – cannot be assessed as only a product of the state’s autonomy and agency. Across the many reports of the incident in regional and international online media, no mention was made of how Saint Lucia and other small island states are situated by hegemonic touristic discourse, let alone the links to global and transnational circuits of neoliberal governance that unevenly distribute risks and vulnerabilities – only to code them as intrinsic properties of the postcolonial condition. This is not to suggest the false consciousness of Saint Lucians, but the need to scrutinise the renaturalised imperial relations of tourism as something that small island states – such as Saint Lucia – cannot refuse. It is this tentativeness of the nation state – one that selectively hypervisibilises and invisibilises homophobic violence and calculates which kind of violence is worthy of national justice – that suggests the need to rethink ‘homophobia’ in Saint Lucia as informed by discursive currents operating within and beyond national borders.

The archive of experience: LGBT Saint Lucians speak out

To suggest that the rich and complex testimonies provided by interview participants constitute a kind of queer/LGBT archive is both encouraging and problematic. What these testimonies make possible is an incitement to discourse, as a way of contesting and remembering the official story of Saint Lucian nationhood. From a feminist and queer perspective, which views the experiences and voices of the marginalised as a unique political vantage point from which to critique hegemonic norms, the research participants are engaged in ‘turning history upside down’. This is not just because they are telling their stories, but because, in doing so, they unsettle, question and reframe the problem space of public political life in the Saint Lucian polity. Across most of the interviews, participants spoke strongly and passionately about their experiences of discrimination and stigma and in some cases, violence, either because they were queer-identified or suspected of not conforming to normative codes of gender and sexuality. In many cases, bodies read as gender non-conforming were automatically presumed to be sexual outlaws and therefore marked for various forms of disciplining. While the discussion below is representative of a range of homophobic experiences of participants, it is worth noting that they cannot be made meaningful only within Western conceptions of ‘homophobia’ – as my later discussion will reveal. It is important to recognise these testimonies as belonging not only to a ‘Saint Lucian LGBT archive’ but to a global archive of the conditions of (im)possibility of certain bodies/subjects and relations.

Many of the participants³ recounted experiences of homophobic insults and discrimination in public (including shared family spaces and situations), implying that these occurrences are not isolated, but have become a normalised feature of queer habitus within Saint Lucia. One of them, Vincent McDoom⁴ – a gay-identified man – demonstrates how homophobia has been an integral part of the socialisation process:

My abuse started . . . as a child because I was very different and very unique the way I was. You know? And society was very abusive . . . in name calling, in bashing. You know? And it’s not easy to be a child when you’re different and you’re at school. I was abused already by the school children . . . I was also abused verbally at home, I was also abused verbally, you know, by society.

Additionally, he recounts how his father forced him to ‘walk like a man’ – a form of gender disciplining that was aimed at enforcing reputational heteronormative masculinity:

I remember once . . . my dad he looked at me and he said: ‘Could you come here?’ And I came to him and he was like: ‘No! Go back and come’. And I was like going, ‘What for?’ And he was like, ‘I asked you to walk, come here!’ And I said, ‘I am walking to you . . . ’ He tell me, ‘Well, I don’t like the way you’re walking. You know you’re walking like a woman’. You know, so walking like a woman or walking like a man, it gets you from point A to point . . . it gets you from point B from point A. You know, for me as a child that’s what was important. It was not the way I got there. It’s the fact that I got there, you know what I mean?

In addition, McDoom recounted how gender-based policing is attached to non-normative bodies as a way of orienting such bodies as proper objects of knowledge and control. In doing so, he seems to suggest that the regulation of bodily conduct is routinely expressed through an aversion to ‘the feminine’. The following narrative is instructive in this regard, as it demonstrates the power of gender policing to stymie the agency of other orientations of knowledge and desire that are projected as threatening to normative gender logics:

When I was a child my grandmother, she used to be a seamstress and . . . she went to see a friend of hers, who was another seamstress and she would go to see her to ask for advice on certain things she was doing that she could not complete and this lady’s name was Ms X . . . I accompanied her to . . . see this woman and what happened was . . . when I stepped into this lady’s, you know, I discovered my vocation. In fact, you know, and I knew that was the job I wanted to do, but as a child . . . I did not know the terminology of this job, and this job was a designer in fact that as a child I knew I wanted to be . . . ; but Christmastime comes around, you know, and the family gathers and . . . start asking questions and saying, you know, ‘What would you like to do or what would you like to be when you get older?’ I was very happy, you know, I was just waiting my turn for me to say what I wanted to be when I get older and it was very funny . . . my brothers wanted to be a mechanic like my dad, my cousins wanted to be, you know, a nurse or a fireman or a mason and when it was my turn I was so happy – I just blurted out I wanted to be Ms X . . . I was not saying that I wanted to be a woman, I was saying I wanted to do the job she was doing, but unfortunately my family . . . thought that I wanted to be gay.

Another participant, Jessica St. Rose,⁵ expressed experiences of homophobic discrimination in public:

I have never been really stigmatised or discriminated . . . at my workplace. But in the public I have been. People have threw remarks at me, call me names, especially when, well I would take part in living singing. And take part of the carnival activities and whatnot, and I would be on the stage. People would be standing and while calling me names and whatnot . . . but that didn’t really deter me . . . because I was kind of used to that already.

Yet, she continued, it became clear that the stigma of non-normativity had negatively affected her work and career as a public performance artist:

I had a situation where once I got into this commotion, this fight, and it was opening night for my calypso tent. And the tent leader, he didn’t want me to perform. He felt that, me performing onstage would be a bad thing, because of my image and like how people look at me out there. He thought that it, I would be causing a scene onstage, since we want some people would throw bottles at me. I guess he was trying to protect me maybe. But then ‘some people pretending’, he said. But I felt that wrong thing and I was like: ‘No’.

Not only is this testimony reflective of the homophobia she faced in her performance work, but it indicates how non-normative bodies are constructed as liabilities and threats to cultural capital.

A range of respondents also claimed that they chose not to ‘come out’ because they experienced pervasive levels of homophobia and they did not want to jeopardise the respectability of their family members (despite the fact that some of these same relations had at times been the perpetrators of homophobic discrimination). Yet many of these respondents also gestured to the ways in which their non-normative gender and sexual identity became an open secret. One of them, Anonymous1,⁶ illustrated well how social associations can generate stigma and surveillance in the public sphere:

I remember a sister in the church calling me. We were very, very close, and she told me that she heard something in a store, and it seems like I had just passed by, and two people saw me passing, and she was also in the car . . . they started a conversation about me saying, you know: ‘That girl is a lesbian, that she’s with that butch girl’. And then she called me to find out whether it was true. So of course back then I denied it because I was on the down low I guess at that time, I denied it and that’s how I started to know, you know, people were talking. My mother used to hear things, I used to reach places that I have never been, you know, did things that I have never done. My sister, of course, have asked the question, the fellas in the CDC [Castries Development Council, Saint Lucia] used to ask, you know, or call me names, and my sister would deny it because I am denying it, so everybody denied it back then.

Whereas these testimonies represent highly material expressions of gender surveillance and punishment, some respondents interestingly claimed that homophobia is a more recent phenomenon in Saint Lucia. For example, Damon O’Donnell⁷ observed: ‘What I do remember . . . that there wasn’t any violence . . . what we now call homophobia . . . it was really a kind of curiosity of people not understanding what was it about . . . having a real negative connotation, which it does today’. Another interviewee, Dr Marie Gradison Didier⁸ – a medical professional working in the field of sexually transmitted diseases for over 20 years – also remarked: ‘When I first came to Saint Lucia I didn’t sense that level of homophobia . . . I didn’t sense that anger and then I began to sense a deep anger . . . I found there was a shift’. Not only do these testimonies contest essentialist constructions of Saint Lucia as transhistorically homophobic, but the shift identified is curious, as it implies the need to consider the context in which the discourse of homophobia became viable and mobilised. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is important to ask what types of vulnerabilities emerged in this moment to make the discourse of homophobia ideologically and materially feasible as a national-normative mechanism of social control.

Beyond the search for ‘tolerance’

Within Western homonationalist discourses, Global South nation states, such as Saint Lucia, have been projected as spaces saturated by homophobia, requiring urgent Western LGBT human rights intervention because they supposedly do not possess the capacity for tolerance. The discourse of tolerance is not only a national fiction in Western nation states, but it also masks a wider discussion about the conditions under which queer subaltern subjects and populations exercise agency within more complicated social structures. Much scholarship has emphasised the reputation/respectability paradigm as a central analytic in understanding moral governance within the Anglo-Caribbean. Whereas reputational discourses – resisting the Eurocentricity of respectability – were mobilised and capitalised on at the time of independence across the region, many postcolonial nation states, under the control of a ‘nationalist-modern middle class’ (Scott, 1999, p. 93), paradoxically reimagined their futures through the lens of respectability. As such, the national-normative referent of respectability has predominantly conditioned all official norms, including those attached to discourses of gender and sexuality. Although little scholarship on the region has attended to the importance of the reputation/respectability paradigm in organising sexual conduct, the LGBT subjects interviewed in Saint Lucia suggest that this discourse operates simultaneously as a conditioning aspect of both homophobia and tolerance of gender/sexual non-normativity. This is distinct from the way in which tolerance is conceptualised in the Global North where LGBT-tolerant nation states are projected as exceptional spaces where structures of homophobic hate are categorically absent. Instead, the Saint Lucian interviews suggest the need for a more complicated discourse about the conditions of tolerance that structure both the liveability and vulnerability of queer Saint Lucian subjects. The point here is not a culturalist (racialised) argument about the radical difference of ‘Saint Lucian tolerance’ but that tolerance is not unproblematic, as it is projected within Western discourses.

Many of the interviewees highlighted the disciplinary effects of public respectability – as a vector of nation-state homophobic governance – but they also pointed to ways in which self-surveillance in the service of public respectability averted their being categorically marked as non-citizens. For example, Anonymous1⁹ emphasised the importance of safeguarding family respectability: ‘So, you could pretty much say that because of the fact that I was on the down low, I had to pay that money ’cause I would have been outed, I would have been put out of the religion and my mother would have been put to shame, so she had to pay it’.

Another respondent, Anonymous2,¹⁰ emphasised respectable self-conduct in public as a way of averting hypervisibility and violence: ‘They [society] accept me because I behave myself . . . I have no problem. I just drive through society, I don’t go where I don’t belong to it, that people disrespect me because people are very, very ignorant, especially uneducated one; you don’t belong there – don’t go there!’. Whereas this respondent stressed the importance of the spatial conditions of self-regulation, another interviewee, Anonymous3¹¹ emphasised the labour of self-conduct along norms of gender/sexuality, although he pointed out that this is no guarantee of averting scrutiny:

I believe, as a gay man, even in public there is a way to conduct you[rself ]. You can’t . . . believe that you are more woman then man and you[r] gay don’t impose on people, although you are gay, but still it gets bullied or so on. I believe it have to do with how you carry yourself and how you see yourself . . . you don’t just push onto the people faces, and if you gay, you need to be careful and do not let your family to hate other person because they will hate you . . . It’s not really easy for us, in order to survive it, mentally you have to be strong, you have to be strong with your head. It’s difficult on day-to-day basis for most person, even for me to some extent, because you get bullied. People don’t use buses because you are gay, people cast remarks, persons looking down on you. It’s disheartening sometimes. So you just have to [do] what you have to do; you have to live, no matter what!

Some respondents also claimed that their status as a contributing member of society helped to avert homophobic scrutiny and foster their acceptance in society, reflecting the point of many scholars that discourses of respectability are deeply structured by class and status. Vincent McDoom,¹² for example, identified how market-based status could become a vehicle for tolerance:

Homosexuals are creative, you know? So, if you are creative with yourself, put that creative aspect into something that is tangible and make it work for you and make it allow others to accept you. One of the reasons why women accepted me, and the Saint Lucian public accepted me beforehand in Saint Lucia, was because I was talented; because I was a very, very good dressmaker. And what did I do? I dressed the most prominent men and women in society.

Anonymous2¹³ – an upstanding public figure – also spoke about his financial investments in the wider community: ‘I have no problem . . . I know I have the privilege to do things for people . . . now, I am . . . gay but I sponsor . . . football, I am the one who sponsors football. When I came here, and they have big football matches and so forth . . . I saw the condition the fellas was playing in . . . piece of trousers and I said no, no, no, no, no, I sponsor over $40,000 worth.’

Although the homonationalist resonance of this claim seems evident, especially as these testimonies seem to suggest that acceptance/liveability requires tangible investments in normative society, they also provoke questions of how the forces of capitalism have served to structure respectability. This structuring requires the bordering of those who are not only undeserving of tolerance and acceptance, but for whom vulnerability is naturalised because they are multiply marked as insurgent. Interestingly, some of the same voices quoted above, reproduced ‘the homophobe’ as belonging to ‘the ghetto’. One respondent, Anonymous1, claimed that the ‘majority of the gay community . . . avoid the ghetto areas . . . that’s where the bad boys are . . . so to avoid discrimination to avoid any confrontation people stay off those streets’.¹⁴ Similarly, Anonymous4 remarked: ‘Especially if you’re in a street event, you get different persons from different class, and you get persons from the ghetto, who believes that this song¹⁵ is actually telling them what to do’.¹⁶ Anonymous5¹⁷ also raised the issue of class when identifying the perpetrators of both homophobia and misogyny:

There are some men. I would call them . . . I could just call them men that don’t have class . . . Don’t have anything to do but just to smoke and do whatever it is. These kind of men will see me places and call me zami . . . and lesbian, and I’ll be like, yo, I could put a bread on my mother’s table, I know every month I getting a salary . . . So don’t try to go and call me lesbian . . . at the end of the day when I passing in the corner, I’ll see you’re bending over for another fella, just for what? A dollar?

Although these voices might be read as belonging to the archive of ‘Saint Lucian homophobia’, they also signal the ways in which queer Saint Lucian subjects perform and contest respectability, thereby complicating any singular reading of national-normative citizenship. In doing so, they activate, mobilise and complicate the class-based structure of respectability and become participant to the remaking and redistribution of vulnerability. This is obviously problematic, since these testimonies reproduce the cisgendered, class-centric and heteronormative conditions of national belonging, but at the same time these testimonies provoke a conceptual shift from assessing subjects within the limited frame of ‘tolerance/non-tolerance’ to a more complicated understanding of how agency is conceptualised within the context of vulnerabilities.

Tacit recognition

One of the primary epistemological features of global LGBT human rights discourse is the presumption that the freedom of LGBT subjects depends on the legalised public visibility of non-normative sexual identities. This legalistic condition has grave implications for how we think about the archive of queer history in the Global South. Nation states marked by legal homophobia are often misrecognised as excessively heteronormative/homophobic and, by default, without histories of non-normative sexualities, intimacies, desires and so on. In fact, both postcolonial nation states and global LGBT human rights advocates sometimes paradoxically help to construct queerness as outside the boundaries of the nation state, as such effacing the possibilities of non-Western practices of recognition (of non-normative sexualities). Additionally, if both sets of discourses reiterate the need for a fixed subject – identifying as LGBT – the possibility exists that they do not recognise more complex forms of relationality and intimacy related to sexuality and desire, which are not only about ‘sexuality’ per se. The work of Carlos Decena is quite instructive in this regard. In Tacit Subjects (2011), Decena’s analysis of the lives of gay Dominican men in New York demonstrates that their families have a tacit understanding of the sexuality of these men, and, as such, they do not necessarily have to conform to a Western LGBT subjectivity which is crucially hinged on coming out. Decena does not read this uncategorical response by gay Dominican men as false consciousness or evidence of ‘Dominican homophobia’, but as a more complicated and strategic negotiation of a range of relations related to minimising vulnerability. According to Decena (ibid., back cover), an explicit coming out by these men would jeopardise the crucial bonds with family and community they depend on to buffer the vulnerabilities of migration to New York (especially racism). In addition, Decena does not romanticise these subjects as outside of power and politics. Instead, he analyses these subjects as situated within the contrapuntal politics of transnational relations, suggesting that these tacit subjects ‘contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York’ (ibid., back cover). Decena’s work shifts the analysis away from fixed identity claims and ‘coming out’ to the possibilities of different forms/practices of same-sex recognition.

What was immediately apparent in many of the Saint Lucia interview transcripts was the tacit refusal of respondents to reproduce a simplistic story of same-sex animus in the island state. In fact, some responses suggest there is a publicly acknowledged history of same-sex intimacy and relations (despite being officially unacknowledged). Anonymous2¹⁸ claimed, ‘When I was growing up, they had stigma, but it wasn’t something that was embarrassing, and you grew in it . . . and the elderly person that was gay, they knew how to carry on themselves’. Another interviewee, Anonymous1,¹⁹ recounted: ‘My mother used to send comments . . . “not because I’m not speaking doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on”’. Both these quotes not only acknowledge the existence of social practices of tacit recognition, but also respond critically to Western discursive presumptions about the ultra-heteropatriarchy of the Global South. They also contest Western hegemonic constructions of ‘the postcolonial homophobe’ as operating under false consciousness. In addition, some responses resonate with Walcott’s ‘queer poetics’ (2009), suggesting an epistemological shift away from dominant Western identity categories and away from the disciplinary pressure to self-name. For example, Kenita Placide²⁰ remarked that people would say ‘she is that way’ – gesturing to an orientation instead of an identity. She also sidestepped the identity trap to reference herself through her practices (that is, doing, not being): ‘I do not call myself a lesbian. I say that I love differently’. These comments are not about making the case for cultural exceptionalism (that is, Saint Lucian sexuality as radically different), but they provoke a need to understand the more complex historically and socially constructed practices of selfhood and community in Saint Lucia.

Moreover, as opposed to the common perception that same-sex sexualities are oppressed in Global South countries (see Pew Research Center, 2014) and any possibility of agency is denied, some respondents spoke about the ways in which they resist and contest the authority of national heteronormative discourse. For instance, Anonymous1²¹ recounted how she refuses to play ‘the truth game’ with her mother, who has repeatedly questioned her about her sexuality: ‘I don’t want the effort. So I, I think I will continue deny, not deny, but I’ll continue not answering her when she asks the question, where my sister has stopped completely’. Not only is her refusal to respond a refusal of the heteropatriarchal call to self, but the silence that is returned and imposed opens up a space of ambivalence that can be counter-disciplinary and counter-pedagogical. Whereas this and many other responses demonstrate that same-sex subjects are aware of the possibilities of multiple forms of resistance, it is also evident that normative society has strategically managed the tacit recognition of non-normative gender and sexual identities. For example, related to claims of some upper-class gay men in Saint Lucia, that their status as contributing members of society helped them avert homophobia, some entrepreneurs have also seen the value of queerness in terms of capital accumulation. Vincent McDoom²² recounted how his non-normative gender performance was not solely a liability, but spectacularised as an asset to his employer: ‘[The business owner] understood what was happening . . . he understood that a feminine-boy attract women. And because a feminine-boy attract women, what he did was he gave me a job trying on shoes you know which girls came into the shop and they did a fabulous job you know buying the shoes that I was wearing . . . I felt like I was the attraction at the circus’. These testaments open up a messier picture of sociality involving non-normative subjects, beyond the dominant discourses of legal-categorical recognition and tolerance.

‘Small places, big lessons’: returning the gaze

The final section of this chapter focuses more directly on the epistemological reorientation begun in the prior two sections – a return of the gaze northwards from the Global South. This reorientation is located within a wider political project concerned with decolonising queer studies, especially questioning the cross-cultural translatability of Western-centric understandings of sexuality and gender. Critical of the limitations of both postcolonial and queer studies, William Spurlin (2001, p. 200) suggests that ‘transnational, queer inquiry should enable Western queer studies to radically interrogate and transform the lenses through which it reads and appropriates desire, queer identity, and sexual difference, and to self-reflexively examine its own imperialist and homogenizing impulses made possible through globalization’. I suggest that undoing the coloniality of queer studies also entails speaking back to centres of queerness by those in the Global South who simultaneously dis/identify with Western conceptions of queerness. As many scholars have pointed out, global LGBT human rights discourses that emerge predominantly within the West not only universalise its epistemology about sexuality and sexual freedom (for example, through discursive constructs such as ‘the homosexual’, ‘coming out’ and ‘discrimination’) but, in doing so, they effectively rationalise an imperialist drive to civilise the Global South (imagined as essentially repressed and therefore incapable of rationalising sexual freedom). Joseph Massad (2002) sees this as the work of what he calls ‘the gay international’ – a group of LGBT activists/organisations in the Global North, acting in conjunction with conservative governments to save helpless queers, victimised by their own national communities in the Global South. In a similar vein, Bacchetta and Haritaworn (2011) – building on Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism (2007)²³ – also discuss homotransnationalism as a form of global governmentality. These scholars scrutinise the epistemological frames that organise global LGBT human rights discourse (as homonationalism goes global) and demonstrate how even racialised others within the Global North are called into homonationalist projects. Yet, very little work has focused on the complicated agency of sexual and gender minorities within the Global South, who cannot be viewed simplistically as ‘victims’ of global homonationalism, but subjects who simultaneously identify and disidentify with the Western-centric rubric of gender and sexual liberation. Along this line of critique, I am interested in scrutinising the Envisioning interviews to think critically about the questions asked (developed by Envisioning participants in Saint Lucia and Canada); the epistemological premises; how they frame the truth of inquiry (that is, about both homosexuality and homophobia in Saint Lucia); and how they constitute the subjects we come to know and recognise as authentic – who, in turn, cannot refuse the call to authorise certain truths and their presuppositions. My interest comes from the work of Michel Foucault, for whom all methods of inquiry – with their own conventions for knowledge production – legitimise the legibility of their speaking subjects and truth effects. The discussion below reflects the complex agency of those in the Global South who are always already interpellated into global homonationalist projects to simultaneously reinforce and contest Western-centric framings of gender and sexuality.

As discussed above, the determination of whether or not Saint Lucia is tolerant of LGBT persons frames a highly limited understanding of same-sex relationality and desire in postcolonial nation states. Whereas the discourse of tolerance – as a gauge of modernity – has been framed in the West through decriminalisation, anti-discrimination legislation, rights to same-sex marriage and the recognition of coupled same-sex unions, the interviewees’ responses above demonstrate the need to historicise Western discourses of tolerance at the same time as they call for a more historically nuanced and contrapuntal analysis of vulnerability in a global context. In other words, this question must be asked: How does the postcolonial condition, continuously being remade within and responding to the context of global neoliberalism, allow us to reconceptualise the im/possibilities of certain forms of social relations and politics? In posing this question, we might not only situate the ‘discourse of tolerance’ as a Western disciplinary mechanism, but also open up the possibilities of understanding queer Saint Lucians and normative Saint Lucians as having parallel and shared vulnerabilities under global neoliberal hegemony. For example, what might it mean to recognise queer Saint Lucians as having a shared political itinerary with working-class Saint Lucians – who, in many cases, are projected as the authentic homophobes? If we continue to investigate the Western-centric single-issue politic of ‘sexuality’ through the human rights rubric, how would these seemingly distinct populations arrive at a more complex and shared understanding of the conditions under which they are denied citizenship? These are not only difficult questions to attend to in concrete ways, but are methodologically challenging, since they require an epistemological shift that transcends the blueprint of rights-based discourses.

Throughout most of the interviews, respondents were asked about one of the most powerful features anchoring the global LGBT human rights discourse: coming out. Although many of them spoke about this experience – whether or not they chose to come out, whether they navigated coming out in particular scenarios, how they came out, how they were outed, and so on – some of the responses were ambivalent about this demand for knowledge and its authorising subject. For instance, Anonymous4²⁴ was asked, ‘How it was for you as a young person, coming to the knowledge that you represented something that the rest of society did not accept?’ Responding with a sense of disorientation and as such, disorienting the interviewer’s frame of questioning, the interviewee replied: ‘How will I answer this question? How do I go about this? . . . I wouldn’t say that I had the opportunity to come out, because I haven’t really thought of me as being different from anybody. I live my life openly, I do not answer to anybody as to my sexuality or what it is. So, basically there’s not a coming out, or if you want to say that I have been out, then maybe I have been out − all my life’. If ‘coming out’ is one of the central tenets of gauging tolerance, then this response not only opens up a great ambivalence about the traction of such a discursive logic, but it also refuses the binary distinction between public and private that is heavily embedded in the coming out narrative and the discourse of tolerance that this narrative supposedly anchors. The response does not fall into the seductive trap of matching a predetermined answer to the question (thereby validating the question), but it almost makes a mockery of the question as a viable technique of truth-seeking.

On another occasion, Vincent McDoom²⁵ – an expat who lives in Saint Lucia and France – reproduced the idea that the island lags behind the Western world in LGBT human rights:

Saint Lucia is no longer Saint Lucia. Saint Lucia is part of the growing world. You know? And Saint Lucia has to keep up with what’s going on, and you know somehow Saint Lucia must keep up with what’s going on if Saint Lucia wants to be part of the future, you know, in this world . . . When I left Saint Lucia, you know, France gave me something that Saint Lucia never gave me: France gave me a voice. You know? Not only did France give me a voice, France gave me visibility, and that visibility somehow or the other you know we must bring it back.

While this comment seeks to locate Saint Lucia (through the culturalist discourse of ‘Saint Lucian homophobia’) in global disciplinary time, it is necessary to inquire critically into the power of such a construct to make Saint Lucia legible. In other words, is this teleological narrative of coming out (in France instead of Saint Lucia) reflective, more so, of the dominant discursive practice of ‘locating homophobia’ (Rao, 2014), or is this a powerful discursive prompt that queer subjects, desiring legibility, cannot refuse?

In addition to questioning the saliency of the coming-out narrative, some participants also opened up ambiguity about self-identification and self-naming, especially in terms of categories based on sexual object choice. For example, instead of referring to persons as partners or as girlfriend/boyfriend, responses such as that of Anonymous4:²⁶ ‘I just used to talk about friends’ or Anonymous1’s ‘we are friends’²⁷ not only represent a hesitation to self-name through Western categories, but also articulate a refusal to distinguish sexuality from sociality. The following excerpt from an interview with Kenita Placide²⁸ also registers a meaningful apprehension about uncritically adopting Western-generated categories and, even more, the need to think of self through predetermined categories:

MARIA FONTENELLE: And are you a lesbian?

KENITA PLACIDE: Funny, your question asked by many but answered to few. I don’t believe I carry a label, nor do I identify as . . . I just love differently to what cultural norms accept.

MF: What . . . do you think it is restricted to have a label?

KP: I think basically labels just bracket persons, box them, and I think that basically to accept or to wear a label is to allow yourself to be defined by other persons and not necessarily by yourself, and it is one that I always dared to be different, so why do I definitely need to put a tag as to who or what I am? It doesn’t matter.

In addition, although some participants did self-identify as gay or lesbian, they also queered these categories in terms of how they predominantly align gender with sexuality and desire. This creative, yet still problematic, thwarting of the gender/sexuality logic is illustrated in this statement by Vincent McDoom,²⁹ who identifies as ‘gay’:

I am a boy and I look like a girl, and many of the men who are interested in me are straight men. The majority of them . . . because the normal homosexual man does not want to be with me, he’s interested in another man. You know? He does not want anything feminine about the man that he’s going out with. You know, you have to put things back into context, and that’s why I say in Saint Lucia we have it all confused. You know what I mean? So, because you are a feminite, the normal homosexual guy who is enjoying the image of hetero-normal looking man, even if he’s gay . . . he does not even want to be seen with somebody like me.

The respondent’s claim about the confusion of gender/sexual desire in Saint Lucia prompts the need for more ethnographic investigation into the ways in which bodies and their relationalities – through desire – do not necessarily conform to the categories and conventions of global LGBT human rights logic. For although Western categories such as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ have appeal in the Saint Lucian context, they may have localised inflections of meaning.

If some of the responses either refused the demand for self-categorisation or troubled the discursive meanings attached to identity categories, then others equally questioned the analytic of homophobia. For example, Anonymous4³⁰ recounted that when she came out to her family, they reacted with: ‘We knew that already’. As already discussed above, this tacit public knowledge and permissiveness of non-normativity troubles culturalist discourses about the ultra-homophobia that is not only attached to non-Western nation states, but especially racialised populations. This race thinking, under the banner of ‘culture’ – the racialisation of homophobia – is evident in one interviewer’s questions:³¹ ‘How much do you think our culture has been an African-based community? How much do you think that has to do with the attitude towards LGBT in Saint Lucia?’ One might argue that this question – posed by one queer Saint Lucian to another – is an attempt to open up a space of critical contemplation about the complicatedness of queer agency within postcolonial Saint Lucia that requires further investigation. Some interviews entailed a parallel move to authenticate the subject of homophobia through the lens of gender. For example, Anonymous1 was asked: ‘Do they [lesbians] have it easier than the gay men, or do they have it just generally easy? And why is that?’³² The presumption that gay men are the true targets of homophobia not only reflects the problematic homopatriarchal preoccupations of global LGBT human rights discourse in general, but it also presumes that there is a fixed/authentic public knowledge and recognition of ‘homophobia’. The response below is quite instructive, as it highlights how same-sex animus and misogyny are mutually constitutive, yet naturalised for non-normative women. Anonymous1 recounts her experience trying to obtain help from policemen to remove her belongings from a dwelling she had shared with her ‘ex’:

My ex and I was going through some problems, and I needed to get my stuff out of the house. And we went to the police station and, you know, there’s this back and forth, and the police just laughed. And, you know, it was like a joke, what was going on ’cause I was declaring all I want is my stuff, and she was declaring the stuff is hers, so we went . . . we had that back and forth. And the police just sat down laughing, you know, taking the situation as, you know, nothing. And, until to the end of it we . . . the police came to a decision that they will help me go and get the stuff out of the house ’cause she agreed to it. So they escorted me to the house. And while they were driving they said, ‘But why are you going to take your stuff out of the house? You know, you’re a lesbian and will go back anyway, so I don’t see the point. You know, today or tomorrow you’re going to be back.’ And I was like: ‘But, you know, that’s what I want. Whether I go back or not has nothing to do with you. At this . . . present time, this is what I want to do. I want to take my stuff.’ Later on they, that, the same two guys who saw me, you know, they came out and said, you know, he says: ‘So what happened?’ And he’s laughing, you know. ‘So, did you go back?’ you know. I said, ‘No. Whether I go back has nothing to do with you.’ You know, every time he sees me, you know, he says so . . . he always asks, ‘So where’re you at now?’ You know, so it’s like it was never taken seriously what happened. It’s like two women just fighting, you know, this is what’s going to happen, rather than if it was a woman and a man, you know, there would be some, I think, I can be wrong, but I think they would have taken it a little more seriously than two women.

The response suggests that the multiple meanings of same-sex animus from different intersecting positions of gender, sexuality, class and so on need to be considered, as opposed to re-anchoring the privileged optic of ‘homophobia’ through which mainly gay men emerge as subjects deserving justice. Maya Mikdashi’s (2011; her italics) critique of the Western discourse of homophobia is compelling in this regard: ‘The experience of homophobia as the primary discrimination one faces in life is usually the mark of an otherwise privileged existence. For the majority of people in the world, oppression, to paraphrase Edward Said on culture, is contrapuntal. It moves, is multi-directional, it is adaptive, and it forms a terrain of interconnected injustices.’ If injustices are interconnected, then the global discourse of sexual freedom would do well to think more widely about the sources and vectors of oppression.

In addition, the limiting presumption that legal justice is the answer to sexual oppression was implicit in some of the interview questions, such as: ‘Do you think that the laws currently on the books in Saint Lucia impact on the attitude and the behaviour of the police force towards LGBT people?’³³ The testimony excerpt above not only sheds light on the oppressive effects of social laws (that is, patriarchy), but it also comments critically on the limited capacity of legal reason to calibrate and deliver social justice. Rather than prioritising a legalistic rights-based approach to social justice, it might be useful for global LGBT human rights discourses to demand that postcolonial justice be recognised as a core principle of its political itinerary. This could open up a more meaningful discussion of justice beyond the currently prioritised legal domain. In doing so, homonationalist Western nation states would also be challenged to rethink the terms and conditions under which some in the LGBT community claim sexual freedom. Similarly, in postcolonial states, such as Saint Lucia, a more meaningful conception of oppression and justice would require rethinking the complexities around Western-generated LGBT human rights discourses such as ‘state-sponsored homophobia’ and ‘religious homophobia’. In this vein, many of the interviewees were asked about or themselves identified religious homophobia as a primary vehicle of repression. For instance, Anonymous4 was asked: ‘Do you think that religion has a role in actively promoting stigma and discrimination?’ Another question posed, to McDoom, was: ‘How much do you think your views are shaped by the fact that you grew up in Saint Lucia, in our very Catholic society?’³⁴ Although homophobic religious discourse, without a doubt, wields a powerful influence on the production of injustice, there is also a need for a more meaningful understanding about the role of religion in Saint Lucia as a way of complicating what we mean by the word ‘homophobia’. This is not a call to romanticise or endorse religion, but more a concern about how a focus on the repressive force of religion (and this is a highly racialised discourse) masks the violent, debilitating, restructuring and destroying effects of neoliberalism. Perhaps, as a way of rethinking the im/possibilities of sexual freedom, more complicated questions should be asked about the historically nuanced contracting between state and religion in postcolonial Saint Lucia, and the ways in which this contract has predetermined the conditions of normative citizenship and national consensus. This would not only shed light on why anti-same-sex animus has gained traction as a mode of control over certain bodies and relationalities, but might also push us to complicate this contracting between state and religion within a context of globally and locally produced vulnerabilities. This might lead to a shift in thinking from the ‘perpetrator/victim’ binary that structures global human rights discourses to looking at sexual oppression as inextricably linked to the very neoliberal modernity from which global LGBT human rights have emerged.

While I have offered two distinct and seemingly opposing discursive strands of homophobia above – one that mirrors ‘homophobia’ as a Western truth effect and another that contests this impetus to signify the Global South in the homonationalist Western imagination – my aim in doing so is to push for a constant questioning of what constitutes the archive of same-sex experience. I would hope that the evidence of homophobic experience would not be prioritised as the only authentic archive or conveniently slotted into ‘country profiles’ by mechanisms of homo-transnationalist governance (for example, immigration and refugee boards) in the Global North, but instead be held in tension with a constant scrutiny of the governing epistemological frames of the latter. It is by negotiating across this tension that the archive of non-normative Saint Lucian experiences around gender, sexuality and so on can remain politicised and become a vital tool for decolonising dominant ways of understanding gender and sexuality within and across the Global North and South.

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Documentary film

Telling Our Stories (Saint Lucia Portraits section) (2014) (Saint Lucia and Canada: United and Strong Inc. Saint Lucia and Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights), available at: http://envisioning-tellingourstories.blogspot.com (accessed 12 Apr. 2018).

Extracts are cited from interviews with: Vincent McDoom, Jessica St. Rose,

Kenita Placide, Damon O’Donnell, Marie Gradison Didier, Anonymous1,

Anonymous2, Anonymous3, Anonymous4 and Anonymous5.

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1 Government of Saint Lucia’s 2005 Criminal Code is available at: www.govt.lc/media.govt.lc/www/legislation/Criminal%20Code.pdf (accessed 7 Mar. 2018).

2 In his four-volume lifework Histoire de la sexualité, begun in 1976.

3 The participants named in this chapter provided signed consent for their given names to be used in any publication or distribution of the interview. In instances where they chose to remain anonymous, or in cases where the author felt that revealing their names could perhaps expose participants to certain risks, the code ‘Anonymous#’ is used for their interview data.

4 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, United and Strong and Envisioning. An excerpt is included in the Saint Lucia Portraits section of the Telling Our Stories (2014) documentary series.

5 Interviewed on 16 Jan. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, United and Strong and Envisioning.

6 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

7 Interviewed on 27 Nov. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

8 Interviewed on 21 Nov. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

9 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

10 Interviewed on 10 Jan. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

11 Interviewed on 16 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

12 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

13 Interviewed on 10 Jan. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

14 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

15 Referring to Caribbean music with homophobic lyrics.

16 Interviewed on 4 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

17 Interviewed on 9 Jan. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

18 Interviewed on 10 Jan. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

19 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

20 Interviewed on 5 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

21 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

22 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

23 Homonationalism refers to the assimilation and subsequent depoliticisation of gays and lesbians into national-normative machineries within the Global North.

24 Interviewed on 4 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

25 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

26 Interviewed on 4 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

27 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

28 Interviewed on 5 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

29 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

30 Interviewed on 4 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

31 Maria Fontenelle in her interview with Anonymous4 on 4 Dec. 2012, as above.

32 Interviewed on 4 Feb. 2013 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.

33 Maria Fontanelle in her interview with Anonymous4 on 4 Dec. 2012, as above.

34 Interviewed on 31 Dec. 2012 by Maria Fontenelle, as above.