The University of the West Indies Centre for Gender and Development Studies Issue 3 – 2009
Politics & Passion: A Conversation with Gloria Wekker by Andil Gosine
(Wekker 2006), anthropologist Gloria Wekker broke new ground in presenting an analysis of Mati Work, a surviving historical practice among Afro-Surinamese working-class women who create families from relationships that are not limited to blood ties, or a choice between heterosexuality or homosexuality. Her account offered a rare, thoughtful consideration of a complex Caribbean sexual culture, and continues to challenge conventional knowledges and practices of researchers, rights advocates and policy makers engaged in the struggle or sexual justice. In April 2009, Professor Wekker and I met at her home in Amsterdam—where she is both Chair in Gender and Ethnicity Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Utrecht University and Director of the Centre of Expertise on Gender, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism—and shared our thoughts about some contemporary debates and questions her work informs and inspires.
Sex and sexuality are still not easily spoken about in Caribbean Gender Studies, despite contributions like yours and M. Jacqui Alexander’s that have invigorated the field. Why do you think that there is still not a broad and engaged conversation about sex among Caribbean feminists—especially one about same-sex sexualities, heteronormativity and sexual rights?
GW:
I think it’s broader than just Caribbean feminists, because I think it’s also true for African-Americanfeminists. Hortense Spillers’ observation in the early 1980s that black women are like “the beached whales of the sexual universe”, that they’re not speaking, but awaiting their verb, still holdstrue. Since that time I really don’t think that we’ve had much scholarship filling in that huge gap. Recently, I was looking at the book Longing to Tell: Black women talk about Sexuality and Intimacy2004) by Tricia Rose. But this is a bunch of interviews with women of different ages talking about their sexual experiences but it doesn’t really theorize anything. The same is true for Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories, edited by Rosamund Elwin (1997). However much I pain in them—but it doesn’t go very deep. I think Darlene Clark’s insights are correct when she talks about how come it became so important for black women to don a cloak of asexuality because of the history of black women being raped, black women being defined as unrape-able, always already ready to have sex. So black women decided they had to be asexual, to perform asexuality. I think
that has played a huge role for a long time.
When I think about the Caribbean specifically, I think there is also some of the same processes going on there. Religion also plays a part in making it not decent, not a decent topic to talk about it. There is still very much a sense that “nice girls don’t like sex, and nice girls don’t talk about sex.” We find moreof a sexual voice in literature, in fiction, but not so much in academic, scholarly work. The Politics of Passion provided a sexual voice for Afro-Surinamese women in academic literature, for the first time in this way.
GW:
And the book has sometimes been received in a hostile manner because of its representation ofsexuality. While Politics has been warmly and enthusiastically embraced by many different constituencies, I would say—in some of the talks I’ve given— for instance, for the Caribbean Studies
Association, some men have a very hard time dealing with the study because it depicts women in a way that doesn’t make them victims. Politicsgives agency to women, and describes how they ordered the world sexually. On some other occasions when I have given talks where the audiences largely were women, there has also been a hostile reaction. At one talk in Barbados, very religious women, middle-class women, for whom it was also very difficult to talk about sexuality, found it difficult to hear it addressed. In a limited sense, there’s truth in Peter Wilson’s thesis that “men go by reputation, and women go by respect.” And then there are, of course, the Afrocentric constituencies, who deny that same-sex sexualities are an African thing, so that all in all there are lots of different reasons for some hostile reactions to my book.
How were you able, then, to resist this contention, this pressure, in undertaking your own work?
GW:
First, I am coming from the Netherlands, coming from a sexual culture that has been very open in Amsterdam. I was socialized in this kind of cultural space in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, sex was very openly talked about and people were experimenting with new forms of being a sexual being. There was so much experimentation that jealousy was out of the question! When I then pursued my PhD in the United States, some people weren’t enthusiastic about my topic, and several people really implored me not to write so openly and centrally about sexuality—even some members of my committee. Rather than sex, they wanted me to focus my work on other ingredients that were also there, that I had collected data on: the economic side, howdid women survive, etc. But I felt like and insisted that sexuality iswhat I wanted to study. I came all this way to the United States because I couldn’t do it in the Netherlands, because there were no Black studies [t]here, and hardly any lesbian studies. But it’s this particular combination that enabled me to do this study, to produce a theory to think about black sexuality in the diaspora. I’m doubtful that I would have gotten the money and the mentorship that I got in the US. But the kinds of questions that I asked, and the fact that I was able to do that, put all the ins and outs of the issue on the table, so to speak—that is my Dutch background.
Your comfort with speaking about sex and sexuality is made known to readers quite early in The Politics of Passion, when you begin to describe your relationship with the text’s main subject, Juliette. Whenever I have used this book in graduate courses, students always linger on this aspect of your study, with some of them quite clearly anxious about it. Why do you think your frank and transparent explanation of your relationship generates this kind of response?
GW:
Well, a combination of reasons. One is of course there is still a positivistic atmosphere in which weoperate. We are still not supposed to have any personal biases, we are not supposed to show the “I” that is doing the research. The “I” should be bracketed, should be kept out of sight. In Politics, the “I” is not only showing herself but also really claiming that if you are transparent about the ways in which you position yourself, including the sexual positions you occupy, that you produce better knowledge. I think I’m showing that—that I couldn’t have known all the stuff that I’ve come to know about the Mati Work if I wouldn’t have had this relationship with Juliette.
It’s the positivistic climate that still surrounds us, and surrounds those students and produces us, but there is also a specific division of labour in which women anthropologists can talk about gender, but male anthropologists can talk about sex. So I’m breaking through those binaries in that I’mtalking about sex. Men have always been allowed to talk about sex that they’ve had in the field—starting with Malinowski, for instance. Other men have had the possibility to be sexual beings in the field. But when you look at some of the books that came out, let’s say, in the 80s about self and gender
and sex in the field—the books that anthropologists read toget to know more about how their colleagues act in the field, what it is like do field work, whether you are allowed to be a sexual being, this is the message thatyou get—you better not be sexual as a woman
