(Re)covering Women: The State, Morality, and Cultural Discourses of Sex -Work in Cuba

Abstract

This project addresses how the Cuban Revolution's traditional Marxist approach to societal change prioritized class and subsumed other categories of difference. Through an ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices surrounding the body and sex-work, I explore how categories of difference (race, gender, sexuality), considered to be the effects of capital by the Revolution, are lived, experienced, negotiated, and played out in everyday Cuban life, as well as re-inscribed by the State itself. I address the ways in which institutional change translates into the daily lives of Cubans to consider how the pursuit of equality is affected or inhibited by cultural beliefs about racialized and gendered bodies. Examining how the body is constructed and imagined in different social locations, I historicize how gender, race, and sexuality are culturally defined, shaped, and woven into the fabric of Cuban society. By focusing on social spaces beyond the institutional realm I investigate how ideas and values of the body relate to the ways in which Cubans experience revolutionary changes to argue that despite state efforts and structural changes race, gender, sexuality are powerful intersecting cultural notions that have and continue to shape oppressions and disparities in Cuba. I interrogate daily practices to explore the tension between institutional and cultural change, elaborating how institutions, social practices, and values/meanings are overlapping processual systems that work in tandem to create or hinder efforts toward equality. I utilize the body as a powerful site of cultural production to explore cultural values discursively as well as power and inequality at the material level, advancing a broader anthropological understanding of identity, power, and social relations in the Caribbean.