What Caribbean Feminist Political Anthropology does with Blind Meni and an Elephant

This article challenges androcentrism in Caribbean political anthropology and political science, highlighting how it invisibilises masculinist hetero-patriarchal resilience in Anglophone Caribbean statehood. It argues for regendering both Caribbean political science and political anthropology to a greater extent than undertaken to date in order to counter the misrecognition, of what politics is and how it is constituted, that comes from gender blindness. Drawing on approaches foundational to both feminist political anthropology and Caribbean feminist scholarship on politics, it highlights the themes and analytical intersections as well as key critiques of the state and citizenship that become visible through such a regendered lens. The article then outlines an example of Caribbean feminist political anthropology thematically defined by transnational Caribbean feminist struggles in relation to elections and campaigning, policy-making and implementation, constitutional law, state bureaucracy, and civic and political leadership. Methodologically, these themes were treated, not as 'different parts of the elephant', but as connected instantiations of contemporary masculinism governing the multi-issue lives of Caribbean women. Drawing on the study, Negotiating Gender, Policy and Politics in the Caribbean: Feminist Strategies, Masculinist Resistance and Transformational Possibilities, the article therefore presents both a critique of and an alternative to the paucity of approaches which are blind to the elephant in the room in Caribbean politics and therefore fail to regender the androcentrism and masculinism in thought and power to which Caribbean feminists have been pointing all along.