Love, Marriage, and Unequal Relations to Gender

Love, Marriage, and Unequal Relations to Gender
Name
Course
Professor’s Name
Due Date
One of the most explored areas of interest in gender studies is the construction of masculinity and femininity by men and women in a given culture, the interpretation of the existing ideology, and various ways in which attempts are made to either challenge or reinforce the paradigms in place in a process known as gender negotiation. Women who hold subordinate status in patriarchal systems have to negotiate for changes within the domestic space to improve their lives or that of their families. Gender negotiations are dynamic and occur at multiple levels within society. A common theme that has emerged in Caribbean Feminist works is the concept of love, marriage, and unequal relationship to gender. Most Caribbean countries including Barbados are characterized by the existence of hegemonic masculinity marked by men’s espousal and adherence to a strict masculine identity that largely ignores the inroads that women have made in education and labor participation. An analytical review of works by Patricia Mohammed, Rossi Granata, Mini Schipper, and Suzanne Leonard offers varying perspectives on how Caribbean women can approach gender negotiation in a society dominated by men.[Eudine Barriteau, "Women and Gender Relations in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean," In The Political Economy of Gender in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2001); 49.]
In “Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917-1947,” Patricia Mohammed theorizes that women were able to recognize and utilize resources available to them to contest for privileges within a patriarchal Indian system, in a manner that significantly shifted gender relations among married couples in the community. The overriding argument in the book is that pressure of any kind, especially the one applied by women in their spheres of control eventually contributes to shifts in ideology and practice in gender relations regardless of the dominance exerted by men. One of the identified pressures that contributed to the gender renegotiation was the scarcity of women in the community given that there were more men in the Indian community. The scarcity of women in the community meant that the community could not effectively maintain the normative gender relations as the numerical scarcity of women demanded a better approach that could have been used to entice women into marriage.[Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947 (Springer, 2002), 5.] [Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947, 15]
The effectiveness of numerical scarcity as a pressure point that led to gender renegotiations was enhanced by the increasing participation of women in the labor force. Women were assigned tasks alongside their women and the resulting money was paid into their hands. Notably, the labor participation varied given that men were given harder tasks than women. Mohammed explains that the unequal expectation among the two gender groups exposed men to adverse outcomes because of working in the field and translated into higher life expectancy for women. While the higher life expectancy h...