2024/11/01 by Francina Cousins · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/01417789241289357
openalex publication_date 2024/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article analyses the representation of the sexual bodies and erotic desire of Jamaican black women in selected poems by Tanya Shirley. It draws on postcolonial feminist theories and Caribbean and diasporic cultural studies, especially Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic as power, as it analyses idiosyncratic sources and strategies of women’s erotic empowerment. In her poetry, Shirley is careful to highlight the volatility of eroticism as a force that can both empower and imperil women. She also erotically empowers frequently neglected attributes of female subjectivity such as the fat female body and the stereotypically nurturing characteristic of women. Moreover, Shirley pays homage to Jamaican working-class women who cunningly deploy their erotic power in response to socioeconomic and gender oppression in the problematic and nuanced contexts of Caribbean gender politics. Through these rhetorical and thematic strategies, Shirley illustrates various uses of the erotic as a template for Caribbean women’s poetics. This model rejects both pathologised and respectable renditions of Caribbean black women’s sexuality as evidenced in historical discourse and earlier works by women writers, insisting, instead, on an assertive and celebratory female eroticism.