Solidarity, Sort Of.

In Gina A. Ulysse’s Downtown Ladies: Informal Commerical Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica, she discusses the intersectionality experienced everyday by women in Jamaica serving as Informal Commercial Importers, or ICIs. Race, gender, class, and color are working together to distinguish the amount of “womanhood” a woman has. What does this mean? What makes someone less of a woman? The barriers that social constructs place on American women also “plagues the Caribbean. Bleaching creams, hair straighteners, and hair extensions are just as popular in Africa, indicative of white bias and Afrophobia there too” (Ulysse 119). Afrophobia, Ulysse argues, is directly linked to class and socioeconomic status. Hence the intersectionality.

            One part of Downtown Ladies I found particularly interesting was in Chapter 4, when Ulysse recounts stories told to her from different ICIs about how they evade—or try to evade—customs. Again, class comes into play here (possibly directly related to color and gender) by which women are able to use their personalities and status to prevaricate any duties. The risks involved are minimal, but they certainly do exist. So why are these women engaging in risky behavior? Again, I think it has to do with the value Caribbean society places—or does not place—on women. Women find intrinsic value in their contribution to the economy, no matter how big or small, that may not be recognized in other ways.

            To me, this epitomizes feminism. Taking the current patriarchal hierarchy and redistributing it so that women are recognized as more valuable, offering meaningful contributions. This idea is somewhat reiterated in parts of the article by Violet Eudine Barriteau, The relevance of black feminist scholarship, a Caribbean perspective. Barriteau quotes Barbara Ransby’s idea that one “of the strongest ideological tenets around which black feminists have organized ‘is the notion that race, class, gender and sexuality are co-dependent variables that cannot readily be separated and ranked in scholarship, in political practice, or lived experience’” (Barriteau 15). One thing I did find confusing in Barriteau’s article was the concept of feminism “placing race at the centre” (Barriteau 21). Is this the key to creating the solidarity feminism so desperately needs?