Performing Race, Gender, and Class

Gina Ulysse’s Downtown Ladies explores the legacy of Caribbean globalization through the eyes of women, more specifically, Jamaican Informal Commercial Importers (ICIs).  Ulysse explores how these women have to continually reconstruct their identities because of race, gender, class, and visibility.  For me, the first few chapters have clearly linked gender, race, and class to local and global economies.  She also uses her fieldwork as a means to position herself as a woman with Haitian roots, living in the United States, and studying in Jamaica.  I was happy to see her reference the “outsider-within” (pg 129), because that was the first thing I thought of while reading her introduction.

Downtown Ladies begins with a deeper look into what stereotypically makes up a lady/woman.  Lady designates a white female, and woman is used for black females and associated with savagery.  This chapter and portions of following chapters deal with performance.  Performance of femininity leads to being ladylike, but performance is not enough if you have a darker skin color.  What I find most interesting about many of the stories presented in Downtown Ladies is that this is not a story of these women necessarily trying to move up into what some would consider the white elite.  Rather they are simply trying to retain ownership of their trade.  Even those who do have middle class income remain within a stereotype of which they have little control. 

The third chapter appealed most to me.  I like the consideration of cross dressing across class, which I had never considered before.  I found it interesting that the ICIs would disapprove of certain things Ulysse wore that resembled “dem Rastas too much” (124).  The Rastafari condemned her short haircuts, and if in a head wrap she avoided “uptown places.”  By dressing a particular way as a dark skinned women, Ulysse says she troubled class boundaries and shows that these are indeed constructions.  I dress different ways depending on where I am going, but I have never considered the implications of doing otherwise.  This also ties into ideas of performance, and it makes me turn an eye inward to examine what am I performing and what does it say about me.

Briana Royster