Women Lovin' Women: An Exploration of Identities, Belonging, and Communities in Urban and Rural Guyana

Over the last decade, there has been a surge of LGBTQ human rights movement and activism in the Caribbean region. Guyana, located in South America, and woven into the anglophone Caribbean, is not outside of these shifts and changes occurring in the broader region. Despite the vast research on non-normative sexuality in the region, little is known about the perspective and experience of Guyanese women. This dissertation concerns itself with the sexual praxis, identities, and conceptualizations of LGBTQ rights from the perspective of women who love women (WLW) and LBGQ women in Guyana. This work has three central aims: to investigate the ways in which the intersecting factors of race, class, gender, and space operate to construct and inform womens identity and positionality in urban Georgetown and rural Berbice; to examine the different manifestations of violence within a heteropatriarchal society; and to assess the impact of transnational LGBTQ rights on womens understanding of same-sex marriage and citizenship. To answer these questions, this study utilizes qualitative methods, namely in-depth interviews and participant observations with thirty-three Guyanese women in urban Georgetown and rural Berbice. An analysis of the interviews yields that the womens lives are deeply complicated by their racial, gender, class and spatial positions which, at times, reinforce and challenge our assumptions about their sexual identities, praxis, community and being out and proud in urban and rural spaces. The interviews further reveal and depart from heteropatriarchal theorizations of violence and offer an affectual counterpoint to understanding violence. The final part of this study demonstrates the contradictions in experiences embedded within LGBTQ rights as human rights, particularly same-sex marriage and citizenship. Overall, this dissertation argues that there needs to be a sustained analysis and attentiveness to ways in which differences of race, class, sexuality, gender, and regional positionalities are embodied and shape the lives of WLW and LGBQ women. This study adds nuances to our understandings of who WLW and LGBQ women are in Guyana and simultaneously illuminates the structural socio-political and economic context that impact lives.