By Aaron Kamugisha
By now we wonder if the “male marginalization” theories, which first appeared in the Caribbean in the 1980s, can be considered discredited. Subjected to a searching critique by Caribbean scholars, it seems evident that the idea of male marginalization ironically ignores an obvious male privileging by Caribbean societies and their political and economic leaders, and is based on the denial of full equality and citizenship for Caribbean women.
Further, because it accepts as natural both the old colonial idea of a gendered order and the suggestion that conflicts between men and women, as we continue to transform gendered relations in the Caribbean, are normal the male marginalization theory stands in the way of what C.L.R. James once called the battle for fully human relations between men and women. Mistakenly placing men and women at two opposing ends of a scale is taken for granted, while the problems that Caribbean women face – which include gendered violence, poor access to reproductive health services, lower wages for comparable work, higher rates of unemployment, and the disproportionate burden of caring for families – are hidden and ignored.
It is the Caribbean’s version of the global backlash to 1970s feminism, and by now deserves a tombstone.
If male marginalization is forgotten, and the disturbing tendency of all-male groups to mobilize on the basis of “male rights” is exposed as the prop for male privilege that it is, the question of Caribbean men’s relationship to Caribbean feminist practice still remains.
Activism to achieve rights across an array of struggles always requires similar kinds of work – meetings, petitioning, lobbying state managers, contributions of time, money and expertise, the ethical use of power and privilege to advance common interests in both institutional and personal settings.
Yet the compelling changes that we need to make in the arena of gendered struggles seem to demand even more. What we are really struggling for is a transformational approach that requires unthinking the ways in which men instinctively respond to gendered phenomena in their intimate lives. Or put differently, there is a question here about the hearts of Caribbean men.
The difficulties here are immense. C.L.R. James, most appreciated for his understanding of cricket, seems to put it best. Writing on the surface about the cricket code, he declared in Beyond a Boundary that
“there is a whole generation of us… who have been formed by it not only in social attitudes but in our most intimate personal lives, in fact there more than anywhere else. The social attitudes we could to some degree alter if we wished. For the inner self the die was cast.”
For James, the socialization that his generation experienced from games like cricket came at a price. That price was a set of colonial expectations that men would fashion themselves as men by methods that severely restricted their ability to live a fully human relationship with a woman. His insights are compelling because they go far beyond the divisiveness of the “battle of the sexes” to the emergence of two essential assertions.
Men’s socialization as men emerges as a problem. It is also a problem that we are all a part of since both men and women reproduce hierarchical, gendered social relations even though in the end they do not benefit women. Men’s social attitudes need to be, and can be changed, although only with earnest struggle. But it is in the inner self that the greatest battles, and the most agonizing defeats, and yet, compelling victories, might be won.
James somewhat sadly suggested that “for the inner self the die was cast” but well into his 80s he continued to puzzle over the problem of gendered relations and his experiences with women.
It remains up to Caribbean men to recognize a simple but compelling truth – that structures of patriarchal power that dishonour and silence over half of Caribbean populations pose the greatest ethical question to contemporary Caribbean societies, and ultimately prevent Caribbean men from recognizing their own full humanity as relatives, partners, colleagues and friends.
Aaron Kamugisha is a Caribbean citizen and currently a postdoctoral fellow in African-American Studies at Northwestern University. This article is part of a knowledge-sharing initiative supported by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
