The Cauxin-femme binary: Femme performativity as a response to violence in Guyana

The Caribbean region has a long history of violence and conflict due to colonization and contemporary neocolonial policies and structures. The region's political, economic, and social climate is overshadowed by activism that centers legal repeal of homophobic laws left intact by colonial powers. These movements have created a polarization between the mainstream groups seeking legal changes, and those who are denied and erased from these discourses. This article is an examination of lesbian, bisexual, queer and gay women of mixed-race middle-class status in the city of Georgetown, Guyana as they negotiate racialized heteropatriarchal violence, a space that offers a unique place in which to understand how different queer subjects experience violence within Guyana. This article examines a set of interrelated questions: In what ways do women who love women perceive their gender performances? In what ways is femme-ness embodied to resist violence and yet is a site of violence? The analysis reveals the ways in which women embody a strategic femme-ness in a political, racial, class, and gender hierarchical society. As the country becomes increasingly incorporated into a global queer culture, divisions within the queer community are further sharpened, with racial, class, sexual, gender, and regional boundaries shifting and forging new lived realities for queer subjects.