Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

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In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. She analyses the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture to show how many individuals contest traditional roles by manoeuvring within and/or trying to change their society’s binary gender systems. She skilfully demonstrates that these transgressions better represent Caribbean culture than the official representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes.

Unique in its breadth and its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial relations, transgender people, and women’s sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature.

Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures attempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.