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Abstract:
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This article examines suburban, adolescent Indo-Trinidadian girls’ engagement with gender-differential processes of modernization and creolization at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that girls’ experience of these processes should be understood in terms of their divergence, rather than their interlock. This divergence is a reflection of the globalized, Indian diasporic and locally racialized contexts within which processes of creolization and modernization are given meaning. Specifically, modernization’s associations with white metropolitan femininities and being up-to-date with everything, cool, and liberal enable these girls to legitimately negotiate and navigate ethnic, gender, age and generational boundaries regarding their personal choice, femininity, sexuality and participation in national belonging. This does not mean that girls do not reproduce patriarchal expectations of Indo-Trinidadian girlhood. Rather, it explains how and why they both contest and reproduce these expectations, and their understandings of the opportunities and risks involved |
