A Review of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana

An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana by Preity R. Kumar (Rutgers University Press, 2024, 183 pages)

A former British colony, Guyana is the only country in South America where, as of 2025, homosexual acts continue to be illegal. Employing ethnographic methods, through interviewing 33 women loving women (WLW), Kumar demonstrates how the realities of violence are a constant and embodied part of the lives of these women in the capital city, Georgetown, and in the rural town of Berbice. Born and raised in Berbice,  Kumar also reflects throughout the book on her own experiences as a WLW of Indo-Guyanese descent and as a researcher from North America.

Using a snowball methodology, she interviews women of varying racial and class backgrounds, looking at many different perspectives on how race and class privilege affect the experiences of WLW in Guyana. Through interviews, she explores Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, and mixed-race WLW’s relationship to colonial and interpersonal violence.

This groundbreaking book is as compelling as it is devastating. It was sometimes difficult to read because violence, including murder, domestic violence and suicide, is central to the narrative. This text is noteworthy because it remains one of the only anthropological or historical studies of queer women in former British colonies as well as in the broader Latin America and Caribbean region. Despite the advancement of the field of LGBTQ+ studies, monograph-length studies on queer women in the Global South continue to be rare.

The book is also unique for an academic text in its raw and personal perspective. Kumar opens and closes the book with distressing recounts of the closeness of violence against women and the fear she felt while engaging in her research, sharing that she often slept with a knife under her pillow. As she states, “I became attuned to the ordinariness of violence, how it was always present, looming, and lingering in the physical and affective energy of the landscape” (129-30). After moving out of the apartment that she lived in while conducting her research, she finds out that her previous landlord had murdered his wife years before and buried her under the building. In defining the affectual nature of violence, Kumar follows Binghamton University Professor Kerry Whigham’s theorization of resonant violence as an affective force, explaining that there is always a “potentiality of violence” lurking (11). Kumar also draws from postcolonial and decolonial theories, arguing that Guyana is an ongoing state of coloniality where violence is endemic, even in queer relationships.

Kumar’s interviewees illuminate the ways in which pervasive violence is embedded in the landscape of the lives of queer women. As Kumar states, “violence, especially sexual violence against women, is considered a typical expression of Caribbean masculinity. The poverty in Guyana, coupled with toxic masculinity, violence, and economic inequalities, coalesce to produce violence against women…” (41). To examine the role that religion plays in the lives of WLW, Kumar draws from Sara Ahmad’s theory of “affective economies” to demonstrate the ways in which homophobic religious discourse creates affects of “shame, disgust, guilt and hate” that make it hard for WLW to find familial, community, and self-acceptance (59). Rather than focusing her research on the capital city of Georgetown, Kumar seeks to understand what WLW’s lives in Berbice, a community of predominantly Indo-Guyanese, are like and, perhaps, what her life would have been like had she stayed.

She finds that a “politics of respectability” governs the lives of WLW of Indo-Guyanese descent in Berbice. Various of her research participants used the phrase, “It’s how yuh carry yuhself” to explain the divisions between their public and private lives and the pressure that they feel to keep their sexual identities hidden in private to maintain their family’s respectability. Kumar states, “Family status and respectability discourses produce a type of emotional violence in the lives of middle-class queer women, a deeply embodied violence that is never seen nor spoken of” (80). On the other hand, Kumar finds that working-class women in Berbice of various racial identities often find empowerment in marriage and motherhood because it gives them a kind of status in the community that makes their (often unspoken) sexual identities more acceptable. For some of the women she interviewed, they escaped violent relationships with men to then find intimacy with a female partner.

However, while some of her interview subjects left violent relationships with men to find healthier relationships with women, Kumar’s research reveals that the landscape of violence in Guyana permeates into WLW relationships. The chapters focused on intimate partner violence and suicidality offer a profound reflection on how violence is simultaneously connected to place, coloniality, and is often embodied by individuals and groups. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, Kumar finds that jealousy is the driving factor in intimate partner violence between women in Guyana and that intimate partner violence between WLW is tied to colonial constructs of race, gender and sexuality, including racialized ideas of certain groups of women, particularly of mixed-race women as promiscuous, as well as false ideas of bisexual women as more sexual than others.

The last thematic chapter of the book addresses the choice of suicidality by some WLW in Guyana. Kumar argues that with “ceaseless exposure to violence, suicide embeds itself within the psyche as a legitimate route in resolving life’s challenges” and can be seen as a “protest echoing visceral discontent with poverty, a faltering economy, and impact of mental health” (117). Through her interviews, she finds that for WLW, it can also seem like a way out of a life of a very difficult and repressed life. Through the stories and statistics recounted, Kumar clearly shows the psychic toll of living in a “landscape of violence.”

While Kumar briefly mentions the existence of LGBTQ+ and WLW organizations in Guyana, she does not discuss them in detail. I was left wondering if the organizations that exist could provide some buffer to the “ordinary landscape of violence” in Guyana? While I realize that Guyana has a different history than much of Latin America and that the official language varies from that in most of the region, much research on queer women in Latin America describes the positive influence of social movements on queer women and the broader LGBTQ+ community (For example, Howe 2013, Fuentes Ponce 2014, De la Dehesa 2010). These LGBTQ+ social movements have been local, national, regional and international in impact. Notwithstanding the devastating theme of the last thematic chapter and title of the concluding chapter, “Shallow Graves,” Kumar ends the book with an optimistic message of WLW living authentically despite the ordinariness of violence in their lives. Undoubtedly, Kumar provides groundbreaking ethnographic documentation of the experiences of WLM in Guyana as they relate to the ongoing violence of coloniality and patriarchy.

Lucinda Grinnell is the Director of the Writing, Reading, and Language Center at the Montgomery College Rockville campus and adjunct faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies and History programs. She has a Ph.D. in Latin American History, various publications in LGBTQ+ studies and history, and has lived in Mexico City and Nicaragua.

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