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20.12.2016
A Conversation with Gloria Wekker
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
19.12.2016
Review: Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion
Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the
Afro-Surinamese Diaspora . New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 313 pp. (incl.index). ISBN 0–231–13162–3, $69.50 (cloth); ISBN 0–231–13163–1, $27.50 (pbk)
Within the rising field of sexuality studies, including black sexuality studies,it is rare to find an academic text that prioritizes the erotic subjectivities of working class black women. Gloria Wekker’sThe Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora
is a groundbreaking book that situates black women’s same-sex loving sexuality, known as ‘the mati work’, as central to our understanding of the self-making of sexual identities and practices as they travel the networks and spaces of the African Diaspora. Wekker’s work provides crucial interventions in the fields of sexuality studies, queertheory, and black cultural studies of the African Diaspora as it makes visible Afro-Surinamese Creole women’s same-gender relationships. Not only does Wekker challenge the historical invisibility of black women’s sexuality within Euro-American discourse, but her deeply researched and immensely engaging ethnography shows us a roadmap for the future of sexuality studies.
As one of the few full length historical or sociological studies on the sexual lives of Afro-diasporic women, The Politics of Passion takes on a complicated set of debates, including how to write about black women’s sexuality in ways that account for difference without re-pathologizing an already stigmatized and marginalized population. Wekker’s project is invested in attending to the myriad negations of black women’s sexualities from scholarship; following Hortense Spillers, Wekker posits: ‘the social scientific study of black women’s sexuality remains a gaping wound’ (p.76). Furthermore, Wekker is critical of the ways in which most scholarship on black women’s sexual lives has focused on the devastating history of systemic and epistemic violence, whilst the ‘inner sexual lives of black women, how they think about themselves sexually, remain a mystery’ (p.76). Wekker utilizes Surinamese Creole working-class women’s own linguistic and spiritual language to unveil the mystery and illuminate a deep structure of love, kinship, labour, and survival that forces us to rethink
the study of black women’s sexuality. Wekker’s work takes on the problem of how to write about same-gender sexualities of women who do not identify with Western conceptual frameworks of lesbianism, and how such a problem intersects with categories of race, ethnicity, class, and nation. She successfully deploys Afro-Surinamese women’s own concept of ‘mati work’ or ‘matism’ as a way to articulate a complex, flexible gender and sexual system that defines sexuality in terms of women’s agency and behaviour rather than as essentialized identity. With this move, Wekker critiques ‘GLBTQ studies’ for its participation in privileging the hegemonic Western ‘static nature of sexual identity’, by positing that mati work is ‘seen by its practitioners as varying, versatile sexual behavior: no real, authentic, fixed self is claimed’ (p.173). Wekker’s original research on the mati work provides an exciting paradigm shift for scholars wanting to investigate how minoritarian subjects articulate their sexual agency. Wekker conducted an extensive ethnographic study over the period of a decade where she travelled from the Netherlands to Suriname. Of the many relationships she cultivated with research informants, Wekker’s relationship with Misi Juliette Cummings proves most central to this project. The author formed a deep, loving intimacy with the octogenarian Creole Book reviews working-class Paramaribo native, and her fascinating oral history of Misi Juliette’s life reveals the profound complexities of the mati work and Wekker’s personal relationship to it. Misi Juliette’s narrative makes legible the ‘politics of passion’ of Creole working-class women in the mati work – that is, we learn the intricate contours of accepted sexual behaviour and values that inform the everyday lives of mati. Afro-Surinamese working-class women’s same-sex relationships are based on labour – the labour of caring for women emotionally, physically, financially, and psychically. Indeed, the mati work is as much an intricate system of kinship and care among women as it is about sexual desire and pleasure. Misi Juliette’s life story illuminates how mati negotiate both same-gender and cross-gender loving relationships inside and outside of institutions like marriage, and how matism is a lifelong labour of love and survival rooted in a West African ‘cultural archive of sexual subjectivity’ (p.2). Matism must be understood in terms of social labour, mutual obligation, and sexual pleasure in the context of the feminization of poverty in the globalizing Dutch Caribbean. The final chapter examines Afro-Creole women and the politics of sexual globalization. Wekker shows that these women’s sexuality is constructed not just through local dynamics of gendered political inequality and uneven economic development, but also by global contexts of imperialism and sexual discourse. Focusing on Suriname and the Netherlands as postcolonial spaces, Wekker compares lesbianism and the mati work and asks ‘what happens to the mati work when it moves into former metropolitan space’, and how is mati work in Suriname then ‘influenced by the traveling discourses [of] mati who are on the move transatlantically’ (p.225)? Considering how globalization affects the sexual subjectivities, relationships, and discourses of black women in the African Diaspora, Wekker’s work is defining a new and important field of study. Hopefully, other scholars will follow her lead.
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG
University of California at Santa Barbara
Afro-Surinamese Diaspora . New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 313 pp. (incl.index). ISBN 0–231–13162–3, $69.50 (cloth); ISBN 0–231–13163–1, $27.50 (pbk)
Within the rising field of sexuality studies, including black sexuality studies,it is rare to find an academic text that prioritizes the erotic subjectivities of working class black women. Gloria Wekker’sThe Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora
is a groundbreaking book that situates black women’s same-sex loving sexuality, known as ‘the mati work’, as central to our understanding of the self-making of sexual identities and practices as they travel the networks and spaces of the African Diaspora. Wekker’s work provides crucial interventions in the fields of sexuality studies, queertheory, and black cultural studies of the African Diaspora as it makes visible Afro-Surinamese Creole women’s same-gender relationships. Not only does Wekker challenge the historical invisibility of black women’s sexuality within Euro-American discourse, but her deeply researched and immensely engaging ethnography shows us a roadmap for the future of sexuality studies.
As one of the few full length historical or sociological studies on the sexual lives of Afro-diasporic women, The Politics of Passion takes on a complicated set of debates, including how to write about black women’s sexuality in ways that account for difference without re-pathologizing an already stigmatized and marginalized population. Wekker’s project is invested in attending to the myriad negations of black women’s sexualities from scholarship; following Hortense Spillers, Wekker posits: ‘the social scientific study of black women’s sexuality remains a gaping wound’ (p.76). Furthermore, Wekker is critical of the ways in which most scholarship on black women’s sexual lives has focused on the devastating history of systemic and epistemic violence, whilst the ‘inner sexual lives of black women, how they think about themselves sexually, remain a mystery’ (p.76). Wekker utilizes Surinamese Creole working-class women’s own linguistic and spiritual language to unveil the mystery and illuminate a deep structure of love, kinship, labour, and survival that forces us to rethink
the study of black women’s sexuality. Wekker’s work takes on the problem of how to write about same-gender sexualities of women who do not identify with Western conceptual frameworks of lesbianism, and how such a problem intersects with categories of race, ethnicity, class, and nation. She successfully deploys Afro-Surinamese women’s own concept of ‘mati work’ or ‘matism’ as a way to articulate a complex, flexible gender and sexual system that defines sexuality in terms of women’s agency and behaviour rather than as essentialized identity. With this move, Wekker critiques ‘GLBTQ studies’ for its participation in privileging the hegemonic Western ‘static nature of sexual identity’, by positing that mati work is ‘seen by its practitioners as varying, versatile sexual behavior: no real, authentic, fixed self is claimed’ (p.173). Wekker’s original research on the mati work provides an exciting paradigm shift for scholars wanting to investigate how minoritarian subjects articulate their sexual agency. Wekker conducted an extensive ethnographic study over the period of a decade where she travelled from the Netherlands to Suriname. Of the many relationships she cultivated with research informants, Wekker’s relationship with Misi Juliette Cummings proves most central to this project. The author formed a deep, loving intimacy with the octogenarian Creole Book reviews working-class Paramaribo native, and her fascinating oral history of Misi Juliette’s life reveals the profound complexities of the mati work and Wekker’s personal relationship to it. Misi Juliette’s narrative makes legible the ‘politics of passion’ of Creole working-class women in the mati work – that is, we learn the intricate contours of accepted sexual behaviour and values that inform the everyday lives of mati. Afro-Surinamese working-class women’s same-sex relationships are based on labour – the labour of caring for women emotionally, physically, financially, and psychically. Indeed, the mati work is as much an intricate system of kinship and care among women as it is about sexual desire and pleasure. Misi Juliette’s life story illuminates how mati negotiate both same-gender and cross-gender loving relationships inside and outside of institutions like marriage, and how matism is a lifelong labour of love and survival rooted in a West African ‘cultural archive of sexual subjectivity’ (p.2). Matism must be understood in terms of social labour, mutual obligation, and sexual pleasure in the context of the feminization of poverty in the globalizing Dutch Caribbean. The final chapter examines Afro-Creole women and the politics of sexual globalization. Wekker shows that these women’s sexuality is constructed not just through local dynamics of gendered political inequality and uneven economic development, but also by global contexts of imperialism and sexual discourse. Focusing on Suriname and the Netherlands as postcolonial spaces, Wekker compares lesbianism and the mati work and asks ‘what happens to the mati work when it moves into former metropolitan space’, and how is mati work in Suriname then ‘influenced by the traveling discourses [of] mati who are on the move transatlantically’ (p.225)? Considering how globalization affects the sexual subjectivities, relationships, and discourses of black women in the African Diaspora, Wekker’s work is defining a new and important field of study. Hopefully, other scholars will follow her lead.
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG
University of California at Santa Barbara
18.12.2016
Sexual Globalization and Homonormativity: The Case of Suriname
By kirsten9011 March 26, 2014
In their joint article, Haritaworn and Bacchetta rightly ask: ‘Who is left behind when the North goes global?’ They focus primarily on the intersections of gay politics and nationalism. For me another issue came to mind, namely the sexual globalization that is going on in much of the Southern hemisphere at this moment. The emancipatory LGBT-movements are largely fashioned around homonormative, Euro-American discourses about same-sex sexuality. This is deeply problematic in the light of expressions of sexuality that do not fit in this narrative. The position of Surinamese WSW (women who have sex with women) in Suriname can serve as an interesting example of a North-South axis of dialogue, in which conceptions of diaspora, ethnicity and class play important roles.
Trough extensive anthropological field work, Wekker shows that a mati wroko (mati work) is deeply embedded within Suriname Creole culture. She describes the lives of mati (‘friends ), women who have sex with both women and men. In this context, men provide for children and (occasionally) money, but do not live with the woman and the children. Parallel on this, women engage in physical and emotional relationships with one another. They provide for their own livelihood and often raise children together. This practice finds its origin in West Africa and other forms of it can be found in other parts of the world, such as Ghana and the Caribbean islands. Mati work is a black working class practice and finds its roots in Winti religion, which is typical for this group of people in Suriname. Women who engage in mati work are believed to be carried by a masculine spirit who becomes jealous when the women fall in love with another man (Wekker 2006).
Mati work is profoundly different from the Western discourse on lesbian sexuality. In mainstream Western discourse gone global, sexuality is framed in an essentialist way: one ‘is’ gay or straight. In the case of gay sexuality, this is framed as a personal trait that one discovers at a certain age and that, often after personal struggle, is followed by a coming-out, so that the LGBT person can ‘be his/her true self’. In other expressions of same-sex sexuality, however, this is not the case. Mati is described in a verbal form: a woman ‘does’ mati work. In this way, mati work is unattached to identity.
In today’s Suriname, however, there is a growing tendency away from mati work and towards a more Euro-American discourse on female sexuality. This can be illustrated by the website of WomenSWay, a gay rights foundation that was founded in 2008 in Paramaribo. The members describe themselves not as mati, but as lesbian or bisexual. They make use of typical symbols of the global LGBT movement, such as rainbow flags and the coming-out narrative. It is also interesting that their site is written in Dutch and not in Sranantongo. In the light of these development, Wekker asks what will be the future of mati work:
If globalization continues to accelerate, will these [mati] practices continue to frame the ways in which Afro-Surinamese women both in Suriname and in the Netherlands think about themselves and shape their subjectivities, or will they eventually become black ‘lesbians’? Will they come to think of sexual activity as sexual identity? (Wekker 2006).
Another important factor is the role of the Dutch-Suriname diaspora. Some of the activists in Suriname are returnees who have lived in the Netherlands for a while. Also, in the Netherlands, there are now some Surinamese voices in mainstream LGBT politics. These factors complicate the multiplicity of Surinamese WSW identities and expressions even more. We could ask ourselves: Are these examples of neocolonization and erasure of indigenous practices, or is this a question of emancipation trough global means?
Bacchetta, Paola and Jin Haritaworn, ‘There Are Many Transatlantics: Homonationalism, Homotransnationalism and Feminist-Queer-Trans of Colour Theories and Practices’ in: Kathy Davis and Mary Evans, Transatlantic Conversations (Ashgate 2011) 127-143.
Wekker, Gloria, The Politics of Passion. Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York 2006).
PS Artikel ZiZo Suriname april 2013Some time ago, I wrote an article about the position of Surinamese ‘women who love women’ for ZiZo Magazine, a Flemish magazine about LGBT-rights and culture. For this article, I spoke with different activists. It is written in Dutch and in a mainstream LGBT framework, but maybe you will find it interesting.
PS 2: Book tip! Zami, A New Spelling of My Name (1982) by Audre Lorde describes the coming of age of a young Caribbean-American woman, who discovers her love for women without molding herself into mainstream white gay politics and experience. The novel is an exciting read and a fascinating example of the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.
In their joint article, Haritaworn and Bacchetta rightly ask: ‘Who is left behind when the North goes global?’ They focus primarily on the intersections of gay politics and nationalism. For me another issue came to mind, namely the sexual globalization that is going on in much of the Southern hemisphere at this moment. The emancipatory LGBT-movements are largely fashioned around homonormative, Euro-American discourses about same-sex sexuality. This is deeply problematic in the light of expressions of sexuality that do not fit in this narrative. The position of Surinamese WSW (women who have sex with women) in Suriname can serve as an interesting example of a North-South axis of dialogue, in which conceptions of diaspora, ethnicity and class play important roles.
Trough extensive anthropological field work, Wekker shows that a mati wroko (mati work) is deeply embedded within Suriname Creole culture. She describes the lives of mati (‘friends ), women who have sex with both women and men. In this context, men provide for children and (occasionally) money, but do not live with the woman and the children. Parallel on this, women engage in physical and emotional relationships with one another. They provide for their own livelihood and often raise children together. This practice finds its origin in West Africa and other forms of it can be found in other parts of the world, such as Ghana and the Caribbean islands. Mati work is a black working class practice and finds its roots in Winti religion, which is typical for this group of people in Suriname. Women who engage in mati work are believed to be carried by a masculine spirit who becomes jealous when the women fall in love with another man (Wekker 2006).
Mati work is profoundly different from the Western discourse on lesbian sexuality. In mainstream Western discourse gone global, sexuality is framed in an essentialist way: one ‘is’ gay or straight. In the case of gay sexuality, this is framed as a personal trait that one discovers at a certain age and that, often after personal struggle, is followed by a coming-out, so that the LGBT person can ‘be his/her true self’. In other expressions of same-sex sexuality, however, this is not the case. Mati is described in a verbal form: a woman ‘does’ mati work. In this way, mati work is unattached to identity.
In today’s Suriname, however, there is a growing tendency away from mati work and towards a more Euro-American discourse on female sexuality. This can be illustrated by the website of WomenSWay, a gay rights foundation that was founded in 2008 in Paramaribo. The members describe themselves not as mati, but as lesbian or bisexual. They make use of typical symbols of the global LGBT movement, such as rainbow flags and the coming-out narrative. It is also interesting that their site is written in Dutch and not in Sranantongo. In the light of these development, Wekker asks what will be the future of mati work:
If globalization continues to accelerate, will these [mati] practices continue to frame the ways in which Afro-Surinamese women both in Suriname and in the Netherlands think about themselves and shape their subjectivities, or will they eventually become black ‘lesbians’? Will they come to think of sexual activity as sexual identity? (Wekker 2006).
Another important factor is the role of the Dutch-Suriname diaspora. Some of the activists in Suriname are returnees who have lived in the Netherlands for a while. Also, in the Netherlands, there are now some Surinamese voices in mainstream LGBT politics. These factors complicate the multiplicity of Surinamese WSW identities and expressions even more. We could ask ourselves: Are these examples of neocolonization and erasure of indigenous practices, or is this a question of emancipation trough global means?
Bacchetta, Paola and Jin Haritaworn, ‘There Are Many Transatlantics: Homonationalism, Homotransnationalism and Feminist-Queer-Trans of Colour Theories and Practices’ in: Kathy Davis and Mary Evans, Transatlantic Conversations (Ashgate 2011) 127-143.
Wekker, Gloria, The Politics of Passion. Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York 2006).
PS Artikel ZiZo Suriname april 2013Some time ago, I wrote an article about the position of Surinamese ‘women who love women’ for ZiZo Magazine, a Flemish magazine about LGBT-rights and culture. For this article, I spoke with different activists. It is written in Dutch and in a mainstream LGBT framework, but maybe you will find it interesting.
PS 2: Book tip! Zami, A New Spelling of My Name (1982) by Audre Lorde describes the coming of age of a young Caribbean-American woman, who discovers her love for women without molding herself into mainstream white gay politics and experience. The novel is an exciting read and a fascinating example of the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.
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