https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.

com/2011/08/15/midnight-robber-nalohopkinson/
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.oberlin.edu/stable/40027035?pqorigsite=summon&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Book of the Night Women
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/483216
Gender roles and categories are present within this society in order to
further order and control over individuals with less power. There exists
however a pushback against gender categories that have been designed to
maintain colonial order. Lilith in Book of the Night Women and Tan-Tan in
Midnight Robber both reflect this push back in their character development.
Despite the powerlessness they face in their colonial societies they are able
to find themselves and gain agency. These books reveal and examine the
sexual norms and expectations that are present within Caribbean society and
how individuals transgress these norms. These novels are exemplary of
Rosamond Kings analysis of literature that works to transgress sexual and
gender norms.
Tan-Tan embodies the Midnight Robber to empower herself after her abuse.

insistently minor status of trans people - both real and imagined. Reading a range of the literary
works, King argues that trans Caribbean people function as a catalyst for the "deliverance" (25) of
others rather than as protagonists in their own narratives of self-realisation. For her, this lateral
subalternity draws on their gender dissonance as a trope of outsiderness and also of moral
ascendancy that nevertheless undermines the novels' capacity to render a positive imagining of the
fullness of this group's lived experience (with the exception of Santos Febres's Sirena Selena).
Turning to popular culture, King observes how cross-dressing in carnivals and festivals is marked by
significant similarities across the region. These include the creeping conservatism to suit a tourist
market and a consistent figuring of the male transvestite performing "a poor, black, female buffoon"
(50) - a performance that serves to "reinforce heteropatriarchal masculinity" (50) more than to trouble
it. King's discussions here, and throughout, are attentive to the deeply ingrained class and race
hierarchies that infuse gender and sexual regulations. She exposes how the theoretical and fictional
potential of the trans continuum to highlight the inherently unstable and improvisational nature of

gender performance is currently more of a decoy to lived opportunities than a reflection of these. All
the same, her detailed summoning of the continuum and its long historical presence in the
Caribbean also signals the prospect for unfixing the gender binarism.
Chapter 2 takes up the trope of the open secret, el secreto abierto, in order to explore the complex
circumstance, common among Caribbean places, of 'known', but not publicly acknowledged, sexual
attachments between men. With attention to creative writing and visual culture in Cuba, Jamaica,
Haiti and Barbados, King makes it clear that this is not an equivalent situation to the closeted
homosexual in discourses from the global north. Importantly, this more subtle and supple negotiation
of sexual identities and sexual behaviours demands an understanding of the social weight of
prohibitions pertaining to "'unofficial official' gender codes" and of the risks involved in not sustaining
the strenuous construction of normative masculinity that often carries more social consequence than
do sexual acts (66). King's work here again examines the difference that social class makes to the
conditions and possibilities for gender and sexual freedoms. She also confronts the "popular myth of
the region's exceptional homophobia" that has become the norm of popular reporting and speaks of
the real challenge in "determining how to acknowledge real . . . homophobia without endorsing the
idea that the Caribbean is uniquely and exceptionally homophobic" (83).
In chapter 3, it is the myth of the invisibility and silence of women-lovingwomen that is interrogated in
a discussion of the unremarkable and unremarked intimacy amongst women in Caribbean societies
that can both obscure and deny same-sex desire and yet also allows its very real presence to exist in
often unnoticed ways. While a blindness to women's lives beyond heteropatriarchal expectations may
constrain the acknowledgment of samesex-loving women, King's analysis argues that the
multidimensionality of these women's subjectivities does find expression in literary works. Equally,
activism in this field works against single-issue identity politics to support attachments to wider
community and national belonging, and to bring into view an under- standing of the more diverse
realities and possibilities that already exist for loving and living as a Caribbean woman.
The transgressive woman as sexual agent is explored in chapter 4 with a rich discussion of women's
bildungsroman and female music artists whose bold and direct expressions of erotic autonomy and
agency have shown the potential - and the controversy - involved in reshaping the orthodox contract
between gender and national identity. Bringing the subjects of women's sexual agency and pleasure
to the fore, this chapter helps to make visible the equal and urgent need to challenge the
constraining of island bodies, whether these refuse to conform to "true oomanhood" (126),
hypermasculinity or non-heteronormativity.
In the final chapter, King enters further contentious territory by discussing interracial relationships
and the continued eroticisation of white women for Caribbean men, as well as the persistent
metaphor of interracial sex within a conquest narrative. Going beyond the obvious sexual double
standard for Caribbean men in terms of expectations around fidelity, King speculates how such
vectors of desire might be entangled with a politics of consolation resulting from "a spectacular
failure of Caribbean men's leadership" (194). It is a provocative line of thought and one that brings
the power politics of desire very firmly back into view.

What most distinguishes this book for me is its persistent foregrounding of imagination and an
emphasis on the possible. King ends her introduction by declaring that her approach "assumes that
sexual agency and erotic resistance are possible within the Caribglobal imagination and among
living, breathing, desiring Caribbean people" (19), and throughout the book her attention to these
people - both real and imagined - confirms this potential with an importantly panoramic perspective
of the region. While King does not hide from the challenges and threats to sexual minorities in the
Caribglobal, her determined sense of what has been, is and can be imagined, felt, known and lived
otherwise to these norms is deeply inspiring and instructive. In her own words, "what remains is for
Caribbean laws and hierarchies to catch up with the broad Caribbean imagination" (17).

InthispaperIwillexaminethecausesandeffectsofrepressedfemaleCaribbean
sexualityaswellhowwomenhaveclaimeditdespitesocialconstraints.InboththeHistoryof
MaryPrinceandMidnightRobber,MaryPrinceandTantanareunabletounabletofully
embraceandowntheirbodiesduetocolonization,andmoralconstraintsofsociety.However
bothareabletogaintheirownformsofliberationthroughtellingtheirnarrativesaswellas
acceptingtheirownbodiesinrelationtootherwomen.TheessaysIusewillsupportmy
argumentaswellasexplorehowsexualityisacontroversialtopictotalkaboutcurrentlyin
Caribbeansociety.Womenhavelearnedsexualityandownershipoftheirbodiesfromeachother
butthroughcolonizationtherehasbeenanattemptoferasureandshamefulnessinrelationtothe
blackfemalebody.Thisessaywillelaborateontheimportanceofclaimingsexualityfor
emotional,spiritual,andphysiologicalneeds.