The Opacity of Desire: Queerness, Postcolonialism and Diasporic Belonging in Guadeloupe

Abstract

This article addresses the seemingly invisibility of queerness in the Caribbean context, which is often believed to result from a deeply homophobic and bigoted insular milieu. This invisibility has less to do with self-loathing, shame, and hiding than with a voluntary gesture toward ambiguity, subtleness, and alteration. I demonstrate that queerness in Guadeloupe is generally not conceived as a sexual and political identity that should be loudly and proudly reclaimed, but rather as both a practice and an effect of an uncertain and impure reading that I call the peu-dit (little is said) or ‘PD’. This ‘little said’ opens up meaning more than it forecloses it as it traces an affective and alternative cartography that irremediably correlates racial and queer formation with continent and island-making. This ethnography is both an inspiration and a call to decontinentalise our standpoint, and to orient ourselves towards an archipelagic and counter-imperial queer thinking.