Caribbean Feminist Possibilities
On April 30th, 2024, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda hosted its first virtual teach-in titled “Caribbean Feminist Possibilities,” facilitated by Dr. Tonya Haynes.
In this interactive session, Dr. Haynes engaged participants to examine the liberatory possibilities of Caribbean feminist thought and praxis through the work of key feminist thinkers, scholars, and activists.
Key lines of inquiry Dr. Haynes pursued in this teach-in included:
What are Caribbean feminisms?
What are the radical possibilities of Caribbean feminisms?
When and why do/have Caribbean feminists retreat(ed) from those radical possibilities?
Do Caribbean feminisms confront their historical exclusions?
Is Caribbean feminism an elite project which requires letters behind your name (as one young activist said to me)?
Do we have the kinds of Caribbean feminisms we need for these times (of genocide, unrelenting sexual and gender-based violence, climate change, threats to queer and trans life and liberation, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, Indigenous dispossession, etc.)?
In this teach-in, we discussed the importance of Indigenous cosmologies and Caribbean feminist knowledge in conceptualising different ways of being human through the work of Andaiye, Honor Ford Smith, and Sylvia Wynter.
“There is always an excess that cannot be fully incorporated or assimilated into the dominant ways (of being human/woman) and this excess becomes apparent in ways we cannot anticipate or control.”
Access the session microsyllabus for the reading materials
Read the post-session handout here for more takeaways
About Dr. Haynes
Dr. Tonya Haynes is a Caribbean feminist teacher, scholar and lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies. Her doctoral students are researching women farmers’ citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago and Caribbean women’s digital lives.
She is co-editor (with Dr. Andrea Baldwin) of Global Black Feminisms: Cross Border Collaboration Through An Ethic of Care (Routledge 2023) and co-Principal Investigator (with Dr. Nicole Charles) of Diabetes and the Afterlife of Slavery in Barbados: Art, Archive and the Gendered Dimensions of Risk.
Tonya researches primarily in the area of Caribbean feminisms and Caribbean feminist thought. Her work is published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Social and Economic Studies, Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, Global Public Health, sx archipelagos, the Scholar and Feminist Online.
She has led a number of public scholarship initiatives aimed at capacity building for state functionaries and community activists and inclusive policy-making with LGBTQ+, disability rights and women’s organisations.
Tonya served as co-Lead Organiser of the inaugural Gender and Development Forum at the 15th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in October 2021. In 2022 she served as a Jury Working Group Member (Care Work, Decent Work and Informalisation) of the Global Women Workers Tribunal organised by International Women's Rights Action Watch.
Most recently, she chaired the Bajan Host Committee and was a plenary speaker at the 2024 Black Feminisms Forum hosted by the Black Feminist Fund.
