Opacity : Gender, Sexuality, Race and the Problem of Identity in Martinique

This series is a forum for the investigation and analysis of the contested terrain between culture, gender, and sexuality. Titles in the series can include (re)theorizations of gender in relation to, or its constitution through, sexuality, race, class, or culture, studies of sexuality and sexual identity that produce new understandings of gender, or new inquiries into culture, broadly defined, that raise competting implications for the ways in which we think about gender and sexuality in the contemporary social world.

In contemporary Martinique, performances of a particular racialized, heterosexualized masculinity prevail in both daily life and state-funded cultural programming. The centrality of these performances must be analyzed in relation to Martinique’s status as an Overseas Department of France and the fraught political, economic, and social effects engendered through this relationship. Contextualized in this particular neocolonial framework, this book examines multiple sites of masculinity in Martinique, ranging from privileged performances (such as state-funded theater productions) to disruptive performances (such as Carnival and the conversations of gay Martinician men). It breaks new ground in Caribbean studies by foregrounding (homo)sexuality as a key factor in understanding Caribbean socio-cultural processes and by providing a critical re-analysis of masculinity and identity through a performative analysis that foregrounds opacity – ambiguity, density, and incompleteness – in the production of any social categorization.