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Expressions of ‘non-normative’ sexuality in the context of the Caribbean, due to its histories of colonialism and slavery, are often formulated around a binary: either considered to be trailing behind, in pursuit of more ‘progressive’ Western models of homosexuality; or branded a foreign imposition. I have argued thus far for a re-evaluation of the historic specificities and political nuances of gender difference within the region in order to better reflect upon the articulation and dissemination of local identities as performances of memory and resistance. My main focus in this chapter will be on the role of the film-maker as cross-cultural mediator of expressions of crossing, as they are overtly manifested through dress and the body in Haiti. Cross-dressing is understood here not as exclusively limited to gender transgression, it also includes crossing the persistent yet arbitrary categories of race and class which, from slavery on, have been constructed as mutually contingent in dominant colonial and imperial discourse. The Kreyòl term blan is used in Haiti to designate white foreign Others. This chapter is concerned with the blan artist-film-maker, whose uneven positionality – in which I also see myself, as blan researcher – is critically reassessed in order to trace the tensions and troubling elements of their ethnographic projects. While my intention is not to deny their (and my own) ‘movement towards the unknown other’, I do seek to situate their work, woven through with Haitian history, culture and spirituality, within a repeating history of anthropology predicated on what Michel-Rolph Trouillot termed ‘the Savage slot’ (2003).
Through a comparison of film-makers Maya Deren and Leah Gordon, both non-Haitian white women who have had long-term scopic relationships with Haiti and Vodou culture, I examine the white female gaze in this context. The particularity of this lens influences the specific forms of representational resistance that emerge and a politics of ‘looking back’, which since pre-revolutionary times has been a feature of anti-colonial contestation in Haitian culture. In a study of the white female gendered gaze (as opposed to the more widely theorised white male gaze) I consider the specificities of interactions between female blan (outsiders) and the black Haitian subjects they depict.
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