An Ordinary Landscape of Violence

Women Loving Women in Guyana

By Preity R. Kumar

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana tells a new history of queer women in postcolonial Guyana. While the country has experienced a rise in queer activism, especially toward human rights efforts, members of the Guyanese queer community have also been victims of extreme violence. This book asks how a hetero-patriarchal state shapes queer and "women-lovin’ women’s" experiences, and how such women navigate racialized, sexualized, and homophobic violence. With a unique focus on the lives of queer women in Guyana, it reveals their manifold experiences of violence, explores regional differences, and shows their complicated understanding of what exactly constitutes “rights” and the limitations of those rights in their lives. While activism against violence is crucial, this book addresses not only the violence against women, but theorizes the intimate partner violence between women, and demonstrates the ways that violence is both racialized and sexualized.

An Ordinary Landscape of Violence is an urgent text! With her ethnographic study of women loving women in Guyana, Preity Kumar shifts the ground for confronting violence in the Caribbean and moves us beyond narrow frames of reference that cite violence as structural, institutional, embodied or interpersonal. The 'everydayness' and 'excess' of violence is presented at the intersections of, and beyond, complex systems of power and difference. A thoughtfully written interdisciplinary text, this is a must read across several fields and sites for the analysis of violence, coloniality, and change. Halimah A. F. DeShong, coeditor of Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality

In An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, Preity Kumar weaves a beautiful tapestry of the geography and landscape of Guyana, a country complicated by a colonial past and its on-going effects of racial, class, and heteropatriarchal violence. While centering the violence and trauma between women loving women, Kumar also gives us a glimpse of the ways these women negotiate spaces of pleasure. Beverly Bain, assistant professor of women gender and sexuality studies in the Historical Studies Department at th

PREITY KUMAR is an assistant professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Introduction: Babita’s Story 1
1 Statecraft and Affective Economies 33
2 Religious Affects: Fear and Shame 57
3 Queer in Berbice: Embodying Respectability 74
4 Between Women: Jealously, Desire, and Intimate Partner Violence 93
5 Still Life: Affective Landscapes of Death and Denial 111
Conclusion: Shallow Graves 129
Appendix 137
Acknowledgments 145
Notes 149
References 157
Index 177

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