Customer Reviews

Pleasures and Perils: Girls' Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture (Series in Childhood Studies) (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies)

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Debra Curtis's 'erotic ethnography' of sexually explicit narratives from her informants on Nevis is one of the best learning experiences I've had from a class text. Her objective analysis of coercion, agency, and sexual economics is urgent and powerful. It also deals with conflicting discourses of Christian chastity and public health initiatives that teach nothing in the larger context of violent gender power relations, and the consequences of that on Nevis can be taken as an example for our own culture. Pleasures and Perils exposes the complicated relationships between discourse and sexual agency, the fluidity and malleability of sexuality within a culture and throughout a subject's life, and sexuality as a site of multiple contradictions. Curtis's argument that sexuality is compelled by and compels economics by girls being encouraged to conflate commodity desire with sexual desire resonates worldwide. The reality of sexual violence on Nevis is hidden under a 'blame the victim' mentality, and the Christian-based remonstrances of 'she deserved it' mirror the social situation in North America, and, like Curtis, I believe it relates to imagery in mass media and pornography. Pleasures and Perils is an informative and thought-provoking read, and a very valuable resource.