BY Alicia Haynes
Self-care has been widely advocated in feminist spaces, both formal and informal, as key to survival in contexts marked by escalating social, political, and environmental crises. Yet survival itself remains fraught, as many Caribbean activists continue to feel the weight of exhaustion and emotional fatigue from their investment in political work. Survival is complex, situated at the intersection of personal struggle, unpaid labour, collective resistance, and systemic oppression. We Caribbean feminists are in constant negotiation with capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems that attempt to erase feminist ethics of care and undermine efforts to render women’s experiences visible.
To “figure” survival requires dual attention: both the structural conditions that shape prospects for social mobility and the intimate, everyday practices through which women sustain themselves. Caribbean feminists grapple with imperial legacies and capitalist logics embedded in development policies that deepen inequality, particularly for women at the economic margins. These policies exacerbate care burdens, stripping women of the time and energy needed for practices that could preserve physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Survival, in this context, is interwoven with ideological underpinnings that shape whose lives are valued, whose labour is exploited, and whose presence is exoticised. Historical colonial constructions of servitude and of Black women’s bodies as labouring, unfeminine, and hypersexual continue to shape contemporary perceptions, mirrored today in mass media, tourism initiatives, and social media landscapes (Kempadoo, 2004; Navarro, 2021).
Climate change further compounds this precarity for Caribbean women, many of whom rely on blue-green economies as sole income earners in their households. Rising sea levels, coastal privatisation, and restricted access to public spaces erode not only livelihoods but also communal sites where women gather and engage in restorative practices. These social and environmental disruptions deepen gendered divisions of power and commodify Caribbean shores, binding survival to contested ecological and social landscapes. Many women “make do” with limited resources as a strategy of endurance, demonstrating the creativity and resilience embedded in everyday practices of survival.
Violence against women further impedes survival. Although Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is global in scope, violence in its many manifestations is regionally pervasive. While global estimates suggest one in three women experience GBV, in the Caribbean, the rate is approximated at one in two, in particular for countries like Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada, with many cases undocumented (UNDP, 2023). Violence persists in concert with economic, health, and social inequalities, sustaining women’s vulnerability. Women often bear the compounded burdens of silence, backlash, fear, daily harassment, and sexual trauma, concomitant with the social expectation to provide care work, all within volatile contexts. Halimah DeShong (2017; 2015) a lead scholar on GBV in the Caribbean, ties its prevalence to discourses that seek to police women and limit their mobility across social spaces while minimising the severity of men’s abuse. These stark realities galvanise feminist organising, from the establishment of shelters and safe houses to regional advocacy campaigns.
Caribbean realities do not exist in isolation. From a transnational feminist perspective, survival in the region resonates with broader struggles against intersecting oppressions while retaining its distinct historical and cultural specificity. It is layered and constituted by ongoing efforts to resist, rethink, and reimagine what survival can mean for diverse peoples situated at multiple intersections across geopolitical contexts. Makeda Silvera (1992), in her autoethnography, highlights the conditions and features of women’s survival in mundane reality. In so doing, Caribbean women negotiate contradictions in identity, reimagine home both locally and in the diaspora, and cultivate community despite dominant discourses that invisibilise gender-expansive people. In this light, survival entails an unpacking of once-esteemed values and confronting vulnerabilities arising from complicity with religious scripts, gender nonconformity, economic precarity, and exposure to violence. Silvera (1992) also foregrounds women whose presence embodies feminist values, even when they resist the label “feminist”, illustrating that survival is both reflexive and ambiguous. Caribbean women enact agency through the pursuit of economic and sexual autonomy, thereby disrupting imposed categories. Their practices of survival, however precarious, gesture to a refusal to be confined by marginalisation in a world not built for them to thrive. Survival is thus both personal and collective, instructive and theoretical. It is enacted in small, daily practices of care, retreat, and connection as well as in public-facing political and creative acts that resist erasure and exploitative structures.
Personal and political struggles of survival are further complicated by global economic shifts and digital forces that reshape how women live, work, and sustain themselves. The commercialisation of “self-care” has stripped the practice of its political grounding, recasting it as an individualistic pursuit detached from material struggle. Influencer culture amplifies this depoliticisation, promoting curated lifestyles as aspirational while masking the labour, heteronormative ideologies, capitalist structures, and class privileges underpinning them. For Caribbean women, survival in digital spaces is ambivalent, where geo-blocking restricts monetisation, adopting middle-class aesthetics becomes the main business strategy to attract sponsorships, and professing no political stance often becomes a necessary tactic to increase audience engagement. Simultaneously, violence remains a persistent thread in online spaces. Caribbean women continue to experience harassment, stalking, and misogynist backlash through comment sections and direct messages, shaping how they engage with audiences while attempting to remain safe. Survival in these spaces is entangled with social and economic inequalities, magnified in digital environments where visibility offers both opportunity and risk.
While capitalist interests often undermine the radical potential of survival, Brittney Cooper (2018) reminds us that “eloquent rage” can be employed as a form of political survival. Although the rage and despair tethered to women’s lived experiences cannot be quelled, survival as strategy informs how women navigate hostile environments through confrontation and other indirect forms of activism and retreat. Caribbean feminists enact this praxis, where art and healing circles become spaces of refuge, solidarity, and counterdiscourses that bring visibility to women’s issues. Caribbean feminists have long built networks of resilience, exemplified by grassroots collectives like Red Thread in Guyana, which have woven together struggles against sexual violence and socio-economic marginalisation into a praxis centering community-building, political visibility, and women’s labour as crucial sites of agency.
Transnational digital campaigns such as #LifeInLeggings and #SayTheirNames amplify visibility around sexual harassment and violence against women, galvanising feminist solidarity across borders (Haynes, 2024). This momentum carries forward to younger generations of feminists, including collectives like Feminitt and Caribbean Feminist, who organise teach-ins and collaborate with non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations to sustain feminist responses to urgent issues, including period poverty and international solidarity movements such as support for Palestine. These initiatives demonstrate that survival is co-constructed through personal care, community solidarity, and political mobilisation. Conversations within Caribbean feminist communities continue to foreground women’s livelihood, economic precarity, and the demand for inclusive development policies that account for the most vulnerable. In this context, reproductive justice, sexuality, and women’s safety must remain central within a pervasive culture of violence. Survival, therefore, collapses past, present, and future, revealing persistent patterns of harm alongside acts of resistance that transcend geopolitical borders. Digital spaces, despite their surveillance and censorship, have become a connective organ for feminist praxis. They allow feminists transnationally to bear witness to one another’s struggles, amplify marginalised voices, and build solidarities that transcend geographical location. These spaces hold transformative potential precisely because they enable marginalised communities to define their own narratives, counter the sexism embedded in mainstream discourse, and carve collective identities necessary for survival.
We are inseparable from our survival strategies. Survival in a Caribbean and transnational feminist praxis must forge material and political conditions that centre methods of collective care, solidarity, and strategic resistance. It requires deliberate, politicised practice and ongoing negotiation that refuses to separate the personal from the political. Survival is tiring, uneven, but it signals possibility through the creation of generative spaces where women can thrive.
As Toni Morrison (2001) reminds us,
“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances.”
In this sense, survival is not merely endurance but the ongoing construction of alternative ways of existence under unlikely conditions. For me, survival is relational and collective, a space of resistance and becoming, and a reminder that even when the struggle feels endless, the act of persisting carries its own radical, transformative power.
References
- Cooper, B. (2018). Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. https://books.google.com/books?id=XNcuDwAAQBAJ
2. Deshong, H. (2017). “The Will to Forget” : Silence and Minimisation in Men’s Talk on Violence Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies 42(3). 42, 86-102.
3. DeShong, H. A. F. (2015). Policing femininity, affirming masculinity: relationship violence, control and spatial limitation. Journal of Gender Studies, 24(1), 85-103. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.833087
4. Haynes, A. (2024). Hashtag Counterpublics: #LifeinLeggings as Feminist Disruption Hashtag Counterpublics: #LifeinLeggings as Feminist Disruption to Mainstream Public Media Discourses to Mainstream Public Media Discourses. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 26(3). https://doi.org/https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol26/iss3/9
5. Kempadoo, K. (2004). Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor. Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?id=ITAa2k1rJ_sC
6. Navarro, T. (2021). SUNY Press. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/9781438486048
7. Silvera, M. (1992). Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians. Feminist Studies, 18(3), 521-532. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178080
8. Williams, Juan. 2001. A Conversation Between Toni Morrison and Frank McCourt. The
Connecticut Forum in Hartford, CT.
9. Spotlight Initiative, UNDP (2023). Situation Analysis of Citizen Security in The Caribbean: A
Spotlight on Gender-Based Violence and Family Violence.