Eve Mann: »Chi Chi Badman« Pt. 1
posted on December 21st, 2010 by Eve in Jamaican Style, Mann´s World
Some days I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I fell asleep for too long and woke up in a strange time warp where nothing makes sense. To be honest I feel like that old man shaking his fist saying, ‘Hey you crazy kids turn that garbage off and pull your pants up!’
There is this phenomena set to music by Beenie Man and further defined by Dr Imani Tafari-Ama [Blood Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica's Poverty Line, 2006, Chapter 6, pages 219-220] that I grossly need help understanding. That is, the phenomena of the Chi Chi Badman. Tafari-Ama states;
In most every way, these Chi Chi Bad Men or bad Chi Chi Men are the ultimate binary opposition to emerge from the concrete jungles of Kingston’s urban slums… No sociologist was able to predict that the product of the most violently antagonistic and consistently anti-homosexual discourse in the ghetto – the bad boy gunmen- who are supposedly the very antithesis of anything queer, gay or funny, would suddenly and voluntarily switch their sexual orientation to become the very kind of persons that they had previously hated so passionately – batty men. [...] In effect, they have become lower class male prostitutes who service upper class gay men for top dollars.
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