Issue 17 (2026) of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies— organized by guest editors Keith E McNeal and Ponni Arasu around the topic “Sexing the Spirit in the Repeating Islands: Sex/Gender/Sexuality and Religion/Faith/Spirituality” — was published in September 2026 by the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies-St Augustine, and is available at https://journals.sta.uwi.edu/Ojs/index.php/958. The cover photo is by Chandni Kalu, “Mariamman/Kaliamman, The Shri Shakti Mariammaa Temple,” Ozone Park, New York, 2025.
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Here are excerpts provided by the editors.
Excerpt: Foreword – For Our Queer Feminist Foremothers, Ponni Arasu
… this special issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (CRGS) on faith, spirituality, and sexuality… began in a discussion with Dr. Gabriel Hosein about an apt home for my work with Tanty, the priestess at the Mariamman temple in Tunapuna, who (along with her Goddess) led me home to Sinnandappayi, my ancestor and family Goddess. It turned out that CRGS had not had a special issue yet on faith/spirituality.
… So, this issue became especially important for me as a way to create space to consolidate the work that has been done in this regard in the Caribbean, not by any means comprehensively, but as one attempt at this consolidation. My co-editor, Keith McNeal, is ideal as he is so well-versed in this field and was able to spread the news everywhere among stellar scholars who have now contributed to the issue and made it what it is. His diligence and immense hard work are clearly what have made this issue what it is. Meanwhile, I mostly learned as I read and edited the work of diverse scholars.
Excerpt: Afterword – Sexing the Spirit in the Repeating Islands, Keith E. McNeal
This special issue advances analytical and artistic thinking about sex, gender, sexuality, religion, faith and spirituality in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Our call posed the question of how we might put the study of faith, spirituality and religion on the one hand and the study of sex, gender and sexuality on the other into deeper, more dynamic, and fruitful conversation with one another in the region at this point halfway through the third decade of the 21st century? What is special, noteworthy, hidden, specific to the Caribbean, understood as ground zero for the colonial-modernist project, and what might the synergistic interdisciplinary study of sexuality, gender, religion, faith and spirituality in this region tell us about our past, present, and future? The Repeating Island trope appreciates the Caribbean region and its diasporic extensions as complex, reiterating, fractal assemblage animated by a panoply of shared patterns and structures endlessly counterpointed by a proliferating range of revealing sociohistorical idiosyncrasies, contingencies, and disjunctures. Oriented by this awareness, we summoned new conversations on the frontiers, interstices and nodes connecting sex/gender/sexuality and faith/spirituality/religion in this meta-archipelago. Sexing in the phraseology of “Sexing the Spirit in the Repeating Islands” refers to any experiences of the complex spectrum of sexually-differentiated human embodiment, to the multiplex gendered conceptualization of bodies in and out of varied sociocultural institutions and forms, and the simmering panoply of sexual desires, practices, and identities in human relations.
The issue and its separate articles are openly accessible and can be downloaded at https://journals.sta.uwi.edu/Ojs/index.php/crgs/issue/view/958
Issue 17 (2026) of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies— organized by guest editors Keith E McNeal and Ponni Arasu around the topic “Sexing the Spirit in the Repeating Islands: Sex/Gender/Sexuality and Religion/Faith/Spirituality” — was published in September 2026 by the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies-St Augustine, and is
