Introduction

Summary

Dans le monde où je m’achemine, je me crée interminablement.

[In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.]

Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs

On 28 April 2014 the Martinique-based organisation KAP Caraïbe, which offers ‘Konsey, Aide, Prevansyion’ [Advice, Help, Prevention] to sexual minorities on the French Caribbean island, lodged a formal complaint against the social networking site Facebook at the crown court of the capital, Fort-de-France. Their protest came in response to the Facebook page ‘Les masques tombent’ [The masks are falling], set up by a user on the 29 March to ‘out’ men in Martinique who allegedly have sexual relations with other men. According to several metropolitanbased media sources, these ‘outings’ were published on the social media network after a mobile phone belonging to a homosexual travesti, or cross-dresser, found its way into homophobic hands (see Challier, 2014). The phone contained messages archiving a number of liaisons between the biologically male travesti and various self-proclaiming ‘heterosexual’ Martinican men. The messages were then reposted on the Facebook page inciting homophobic comments, several of which were posted in Martinican Creole. This case demonstrates the complexity of sexual and gender identity in the francophone Caribbean, where gendered behaviour and expressions of sexuality have historically been framed along a continuum of visibility and invisibility. Gender identification and desire is articulated first and foremost in relation to the whole community, meaning the individual must learn to ‘brandir la pancarte d’hétéro’ and ‘rester dans la discrétion totale’ [brandish the hetero placard; remain totally discrete], as a Martinican interlocutor, Fabrice, explained during my interview with him in Fort-de-France in 2012. This covert-overt continuum is further complicated in France's ‘overseas departments’ of Martinique and Guadeloupe as it is recast through the private-public binary of French political thought and republican universalism, which does not recognise group identities in political representation. The Facebook page highlights how the anonymous and fluid nature of digitised spaces can enable acts of masking, but also violent acts of unmasking and moments of hypervisibility for men who desire men in these French-owned Caribbean territories.

The duality of this virtual space of possibility recalls Cuban writer and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo, who reminds us in his seminal study of Caribbean culture, The Repeating Island, that the Spanish verb ‘revelar’ can mean both to reveal and to re-veil (1992: 215).