Indigenous Sexualities: Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies and the Radical Politics of Scholarship

This essay offers a critical engagement with Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014), arguing that King enacts a ground-shifting interdisciplinary and translinguistic approach to the study of Caribbean sexualities and gender explorations. King's work is notable for its bridging of the divide between scholarship, literature, and activism, producing new understandings of transgression and agency that challenge both those who see the Caribbean as homophobic and those who see gender-nonconformity and sexual freedom of expression as global North–influenced corruptions. The essay explores the implications for King's conception of the “Caribglobal” and for her expansive and nuanced explications of the ways Caribbean peoples engage with gender, sexuality, visibility, and community belonging.