Mother, Daughter, Slave, (Re)sist(e)r? The Female Body in Antillean Visual Commemoration

Mother, Daughter, Slave, (Re)sist(e)r? The Female Body in Antillean Visual Commemoration

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Women and femininity have historically been excluded from representation in cultural read more production from the French Caribbean.This marginalisation is evident in public memorials throughout Martinique and Guadeloupe, which predominantly encapsulate and perpetuate narratives of (White) male agency and (hyper-)masculine resistance to slavery.This paper identifies three major typologies of femininity in Antillean memorialisation: women as national allegory, as passive supporters of heroic men, and as resistors in their own right.

These portrayals will be analysed to reveal the allegorising and stereotyping click here of femininity, its instrumentalisation for the accomplishment of political goals, the objectification and eroticisation of the female body in these works, and its potential as a subversive irruption into the male-dominated domain of public memorialisation.