Her publications include
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (co-edited with
Chandra Talpade Mohanty);
Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World (co-edited with Lisa Albrecht, Sharon Day and
Mab Segrest); and
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred as well as numerous papers like "Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas" published in 1994 in the
Feminist Review. Her most recent publication,
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred, has garnered transnational attention.
Article summary M. Jaqui Alexander uses the legislation passed in the 90's to illustrate the ways in which colonialist and imperialist thought has been implemented in the Caribbean in order to promote institutions of patriarchal heteronomativity in the financially vulnerable Islands. These pieces of legislation, i.e. the Sexual Offenses Act and Structural Adjustment policies; while executed with good intentions, only serve to promote the fetishization and commodification of Caribbean culture and the Black bodies that reside there. At the time that Alexander was writing this article,
Trinidad and Tobago was going through financial crisis, which resulted in the island nation having to turn to the
IMF and
World Bank to help bail them out of the debt that they had accrued throughout this financial crisis. Because of this, the IMF and World Bank were given the leverage to be able to impose large scale structural adjustment policies upon the island nation and collect an absorbent amount of interest. This occurrence and the result is addressed in Alexander’s journal entry. The journal entry itself is split into five sections that address various issues that Jaqui Alexander has found regarding “the politics of law, sexuality, and postcoloniality” in the island nation.
Naturalizing Heterosexuality This section addresses the ways through which the Sexual Offenses Act, that was enacted in 1986, failed to promote feminism as it was intended. Instead, while the Act strove to protect women who fell victim to marital domestic violence, not only did it fail to explicitly name such acts as rape but it also failed to protect women who did not own physical property; those that were not economically beneficial were not deemed worthy of the same protections. Along with this failure, the Sexual Offenses Act introduced sodomy law to the island nation, effectively conflating violent heterosexuality (rape and violent assault) with consensual same sex relations through the lens of criminality, as well as serving to naturalize heterosexuality by deeming any alternative sexual practices (non procreative) as “unnatural” and “perverse”. Heterosexuality was economically efficient and any non procreative sex acts, those that colonial rule saw as performed by same sex couples and criminals (prostitutes and perverts), were economically inefficient and went against the naturalized heterosexual ideals.
State Nationalism and Respectability, Black Masculinity come to power 1962, 1972 M. Jaqui Alexander uses this section to address the way that colonial rule naturalized whiteness through the simultaneous racialization and sexualization of black bodies. Colonial ideas of nationalism necessitated a nuclear family model that relies on strict gender binaries and imported strict family structures to the Caribbean through imperialism, thus schooling respectability into the emerging black middle class. After colonial rule, black masculinity was forced to prove itself through the policing of sexualized bodies and lead to what was seen as overly aggressive black males attempting to claim the spot as head of the household.
(Inter)national boundaries and strategies of legitimation Alexander notes the effects of the financial crisis through the way that the structural adjustments, which were meant to privatize the market and reduce the public sector in order to reduce foreign debt outside of the IMF and World bank, have effectively forced more of the population into poverty and therefore forced more women into the workforce to add income to their household. Not only this but the struggles that male breadwinner have to keep their families from poverty have given rise to more women headed households. This result is addressed in section four, State nationalism, globalization and privatization, where the effect of women taking on public responsibility has added fuel to the proverbial fire. This is because the ways that the State legislates against women’s bodies while simultaneously relying on the sexualization of women’s bodies for the “political economy of desire” (economic gain), has fed into the fetishization of Caribbean culture through the role of
cultural tourism. Making “Caribbean culture” into a commodity that can be bought and shown off.
Mobilizing Heterosexuality Jaqui Alexander uses this last section to establish the correlation between monogamous heterosexuality, nationhood, and citizenship. She calls on feminist movements to analyze the patriarchy not only in terms of gender (masculinization) but also in terms of sexuality (heterosexualization). She also highlights the fact that the patriarchy cannot be dismantled and decolonized without addressing the ways certain bodies have been “ideologically dismembered,” through legislative, religious, economic discourses, the Body has been made to be inherently racialized and sexualized for the purpose of patriarchal benefit. ==References==