small axe 31 • March 2010 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2009-040 © Small Axe, Inc. Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy Michelle V. Rowley Defning, rather than defnition, because the latter does not exist as a reality except by and through our collective system of behavior, systems which are themselves oriented by ordering modes of knowing or epistemes of each human system. —Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain individuals of the possibility of achieving that status producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender As academics, our disciplinary training grants us some degree of vision, but does so with profound conditions of myopia. Myopia, somewhat ironically, is the very source of mainstream disciplinary power. Among the narratives of (post)modernity’s engagement with discipliniza- tion has been an insidious contraction of the category human and counterdiscourses that aim to “facilitate structural failures in some of foundationalism’s most heinous formations— racism, patriarchy, homophobia, ageism.” 1 Caribbean feminisms tell such a story. Caribbean 1 Elizabeth Pillow and Wanda St. Pierre, eds., Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. Small Axe Published by Duke University Press