Rosamond S. King’s Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination was recently published by University Press of Florida. David William Foster, author of São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production, says that the book is “Outstanding. One of the best examinations of the dissonance between official sexual ideologies and actual social and cultural practices I have had the pleasure of reading.”

Description: In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. Analyzing the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture, King skillfully demonstrates how many individuals contest traditional roles by maneuvering within and/or trying to change their society’s binary gender systems. These transgressions have come to better represent Caribbean culture than the “official” representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes.

Unique in its breadth as well as its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial relations, transgender people, and women’s sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. Additionally, King explores the paradoxical nature of sexuality across the region: discussing sexuality in public is often considered taboo, yet the tourism economy trades on portraying Caribbean residents as hypersexualized. Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures attempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.

Dr. Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer and artist. Her scholarship on Caribbean and African culture and sexuality has been widely published. She has received numerous honors, awards, and fellowships, including the Fulbright. King’s community and professional service have included being a board member of the Organization of African Women Writers, the Audre Lorde Project, and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She is also a poet and performer whose poetry has appeared in more than a dozen journals and anthologies. She teaches in the English Department at Brooklyn College.

[Social Media: #IslandBodies     @RosamondDrKing @floridapress] For interviews and appearances contact Rosamond S. King at rk@eatingartist.com or www.rosamondking.com Contact for review copies: Rachel Doll, rd@upf.com or 352-392-1351 x

For purchasing information, see http://upf.com/book.asp?id=KINGX004 or http://www.amazon.com/Island-Bodies-Transgressive-Sexualities-Imagination/dp/0813049806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401597807&sr=8-1&keywords=Island+Bodies%3A+Transgressive+Sexualities+in+the+Caribbean+Imagination