In Gina Ulysse's Downtown Ladies, she continues to show how race/color, class, and gender intersect in the lived experiences of informal commercial importers, or ICIs, most of whom are black or colored and female. In the spirit of Judith Butler, who describes gender as a performance rather than a natural behavior based on sex in all its natural glory, Ulysse describes how women ICIs, and other Jamaican women and girls, are required to perform as "tuff" for assurance of survival in a patriarchal, male dominant, and racist society. What is of keen irony is how these women of color -- Black women, colored women -- are given a gender performance expectation that directly contradicts other notions of acceptable gender performance posited on those who are "women," especially when intersected with race and class.
The Cult of True Womanhood would have us believe that the natural behavior, or at least correct behavior but most accurately forced performance, of women would include such traits as domestic, demure, home caretakers, nurturing, moral, and intuitive, among others. Most notable of these traits is the notion of docility, which upon further examination is mainly perceived as normal behavior of white middle class women, whose docility is then positioned as a luxury. Staying at home while someone else, presumably a husband, earns the necessary income to maintain the home as well as possibly hiring out another person, often a woman of color and/or low socioeconomic status, to clean and cook for the home makes it possible for the cult of true womanhood to ever be close to reality. In order for these "true women" or "ladies" to exist, other women must be non-docile, including "tuff." The tuffness required of these women leads to another culted stereotype posited onto women, which may be called The Cult of Tuff Women, very muck akin to the Myth of the Black Superwoman. Ulysse describes it as tuffness.
In the Cult of Tuffness, ICIs and other Jamaican women, especially black and colored and those not of high socioeconomic ranking, must perform as tuff. It is less optional and more necessary in order to ensure survival, including the economic survival of ICIs. Ulysse shares how gender performance requirement of young Jamaican men affects the gender performance requirements of women when she describes the rude bwais persona. She lists high unemployment rates and lack of social welfare that create the needed performance of these young Jamaican men (167). In a person and group's decision to act tuff in response to poverty or violence that pervades their world and precedes their behavior, it is often a purposeful error to see their behavior as the cause rather than the effect of the already, always violent world in which they live. Such is the case with vendors, which definitely affect perceptions of ICIs. "[V]endors are framed as the source of violence rather than targets in needs of protection. (169)" In the Cult of Tuff Women, unlike in the Cult of True Womanhood, tuff women do not require protection. In fact, they are positioned in such a way that society needs protection from them.
Female attitudes are in response to masculine domination, as Ulysse says by stating, "Whereas masculinity is through the gun, female tuffness is expressed through embodiment of protective shields." These protective shields include a confident walk, back talking which often includes profanity, and seeing men as needing to be checked, rather than the ones who can dictate how a woman behaves. But tuff women personas intersect with class as well. Not all members of the Cult of True Womanhood are white middle class women. They can include middle class women of color. The Cult may also exclude white women who are poor or working-class. Its inconsistency lays testament to its mythical nature. ICIs when perceived as tuff women can then be viewed in such a way that the reality of their vulnerability cannot be included in the perception. For example, when travelling to Miami, Ulysse observes that ICIs carry cash, making them more vulnerable to being robbed. This example is just one of many in how our reality and world affects our behavior. Ulysse herself takes on a tuff woman persona to ward off street harassment, a persona she initially did not wish to perform.
Within the original cult, a woman's place was in the home. In Doreen Massey's "A Global Sense of Place", she points out how globilization has affected the meaning of place. "How in the face of all this movement and intermixing can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity?" But does any local place have only one particularity? Even Massey describes notions of supposed homogeneity of places. In the same place, people are positioned differently, affecting their reality, their very performance. Black women, including Caribbean women, are no more naturally tuff. We are not genetically predisposed to be superwomen. If society forces our behaving this way for our survival, it says more about the nature of society than the nature of women of color, including the nature of ICIs.
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