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Faith Smith, ed., University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2011, 292pp.,
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3113-5
, $35.00 (Ebk)
The term sexual citizenship has come about in recent years as a tool for conceptualising the ways in which bodies are marked and policed in relation to particular sexual practices (both sanctioned and unsanctioned). A strange fusion of public and private, sexual citizenship stages the right to collective belonging in terms of everyday activities, namely, those found in the intimate domain of sex. Although the concept has primarily been used in the context of political and social science discourses, Sex and the Citizen deploys its framework in relation to cultural discourses and productions. Taking her cue from M. Jacqui Alexander's 1994 article 'Not just (any)body can be a citizen', Faith Smith has produced a collection of essays and creative work that addresses the relationship between 'sex' and 'citizenship' in a specifically Caribbean cultural context. While citizenship is used in its 'broadest sense' of 'affiliation with one of the region's territories', 'sex' is also expanded to encompass the variable ways in which sexed and gendered bodies interact and perform in differently coded spaces.
In the volume's introduction, Smith clearly sets out the book's aim in terms of uncovering the various ways in which the Caribbean has been 'languaged by sex',...