Caribbean feminisms and public gender policies: working with CEDAW in Trinidad and Tobago

Caribbean feminisms are distinctly transnational. Feminist demands originating within newly independent, democratic development states have highlighted unequal gender norms as intertwined with dominant social hierarchies based on race, ethnicity and class. On the global level, Caribbean feminists have, together with voices from other parts of the Global South, shaped gender equality frameworks by highlighting the intersectional needs of most of the world’s women, thereby challenging “gender-only” thinking. This paper asks how these intersectional global frameworks have influenced gender policies in the Caribbean and zooms in on governmental and societal engagement with the Women’s Rights Convention (CEDAW), the most persistent global gender equality mechanism. It first gives an overview based on regional reporting patterns and then presents a detailed longitudinal analysis of one case, Trinidad and Tobago, with a focus on the constructive dialogue between the government, the CEDAW Committee, and civil society actors. Through a discursive analysis, it teases out core concerns and contested understandings in the dialogue as well as resulting policy initiatives and their trajectories. This paper is part of a broader project on Caribbean engagements with global gender equality norms that uses the lens of norm translation as conceptual framework.