Haynes, Alicia
MPhil Student @ Institute for Gender and Development, Nita Barrow Unit
Bio
Alicia Haynes is an MPhil student at the Institute for Gender and Development, Nita Barrow Unit. She has previously held the positions of Chair of the IGDS Staff/Student Liaison Committee and MPhil/Ph.D. student representative. By profession, she is a trained educator who teaches Literatures in English, Communication Studies, and Drama at CSEC and CAPE. She holds a B.A. in Literatures in English with First Class Honours from The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and M.A. in Sexual Dissidence with merit from the University of Sussex. While living in the UK, Alicia worked briefly as a researcher with the organisation Not Buying It, contesting the sexual exploitation of underage girls in sex ads in mainstream newspapers in the United Kingdom. Her research interests span Caribbean women writers, dancehall culture, queer theory, gender performativity, and digital cultures.
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Research Area and Interest : Caribbean women writers, dancehall culture, queer theory, gender performativity, and digital cultures
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- Summary: Shifting Gender Landscapes is a qualitative study that explores how Caribbean feminists delineate digital platforms as sites that may extend their political aims of advocacy and activism. Feminist discursive practices that simultaneously engage and focalize shifts in gender ideals, community-building, and justice-oriented political practices will be examined. Social media converges space-time dynamics and lived reality with the virtual. I will therefore investigate enabling modes of sexism and violence that pervade in a digital public space, intrinsic to the cultural experiences of Caribbean women and associated ramifications. Close analysis will foreground how Caribbean women engage in on-offline public spaces on their terms and resist acts of violence, although social expectations persist, given historical underpinnings and structured axes of power, that are specific to the geopolitical Caribbean. I centralize social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as online publics constituted by private affairs, various mainstream publics, networked publics, and counter-publics, characteristic of Caribbean cultural dynamics. Empirically, publics, counter-publics, and private spaces convene around digital fronts. Digital social space will be conceptualized to complicate ideas of a public that incorporates other publics, is fluid, transient, divergent, conflicting, unstable, and diffuses power in a dynamic, ambivalent ecosystem. This frame will offer insight into how discourses emerge, circulate, take precedence in a digital age, run parallel, and disrupt mainstream knowledge as women’s vulnerabilities are made visible. My arguments will offer a layered, interconnected view of the importance of digital spaces to Caribbean feminist activism and consciousness-raising around women’s issues.
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