Marriage Equality and Non-Sovereignty: The Ambivalent Achievement of Gay Rights in the Dutch Caribbean, 2007-2012

• In Event: New Critical Frameworks for the Queer Caribbean

Abstract

In 2012, the tiny Windward island of Saba became the site of the first ever same-sex marriage officially performed in the Caribbean. Heralding the occasion, the international gay press linked the triumph of marriage equality on Saba to the island’s new political status as a municipality of the Netherlands. Indeed, rather than following normative models of decolonization resulting in national independence, the islands of the former Netherlands Antilles have insisted on maintaining ties with the former metropole, a connection that has shaped sexual politics in the transatlantic Kingdom of the Netherlands. This paper considers the role that sexual politics played in determining the uneven incorporation of three Antillean islands into the Netherlands. With the impending and willful incorporation of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba into the Dutch state in 2010, Dutch politicians controversially insisted the islands legalize same-sex marriage. Yet, as Dutch leaders improvised the terms of Caribbean integration, they excluded their new Caribbean partners and invested in notions of sexual rights while circumventing others; namely, the extension of equal rights to social welfare rights. Analyzing parliamentary and press discussions in circuit between the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean, I argue that the way in which sexual freedoms were won in the Dutch Caribbean problematically rendered incommensurable the laudatory goals of sexual progressivism and anti-imperialism. This research illustrates the pivotal role of sexual politics in the re-fashioning of the Dutch state, and suggests that debates about sexual morality have helped to define the boundaries between autonomy and integration in the non-sovereign world.

Author

• Chelsea A Schields, Graduate Center, CUNY