Full Description
Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women's quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women's challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Trinidadian Language
Prologue
Part I: Introduction and Methodology
1 Introduction: Erotic Cartographies and the Decolonial
2 Subjective Mapping: Queer Decolonial Methodology
Part II: Confronting Binaries: Space, Gender, and Social Class
3 Being in Public: Queer Transnational Subjectivities
4 Contesting "Home": Unsettling Public-Private Boundaries
Part III: State, Religion, and Personhood
5 Religious Nationalism: Its Roots and Fruit
6 "Dealing Up with the Spirit": Spiritual Knowledge and Erotic Fulfillment
7 Conclusion
Appendix 1. Analytics Used for Maps
Appendix 2. Bio-Data of Research Participants
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
