"Straighten Up Yu Argument": Language as Shibboleth of Jamaican Masculinity

Jacqui Alexander has asserted that citizenship in the Caribbean is located "within heterosexuality and principally within heteromasculinity":18 the people within the Jamaican state seem to be increasingly verbalising this exclusion of homosexuals as a marker of sovereignty. [...]homophobia now represents opposition to the imperialism of Euro-American countries that insist, for example through the "Stop Murder Music" campaign, on the eradication of homophobia from Jamaican music and culture more generally.^ Transgressive masculinities in Jamaica Overt expressions of homophobia have no doubt been influenced by the increasing profile of transgressive masculinities in Jamaica's public sphere in the last decade and a half. [...]in September 2009, high school administrators were reported to have asked a well-known young deejay to leave the premises because his "pants [were] too tight for school".? Interviewees also avoided words referring to the posterior, as position and as anatomy. [...]they would not "go back a no man [go behind any man] " because this would imply they desired anal sex. Susan Phillips, in her study of these Californian gangs, argues that what she calls "linguistic avoidance" is "a creative, if deadly, arena of gang behaviour that crosses over in speech and writing".62 One of the strategies of gang members was the rejection of certain words and letters both in speech and writing that putatively referred to their enemies. [...]Crips, whose distinguishing colour is blue,63 would not say or write the word red, because that was the colour worn by their enemies, the Bloods.