Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the frontier might help to theorise gender by reflecting on ‘fits’ possessing Indigenous schoolgirls in Guyana. Rather than explaining this phenomenon, I dwell on a central facet of its experience - that is uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how the frontier, as an unstable edge, a zone of potentiality, trauma, transformation, and struggle (Tsing 2005), might help to theorise gender. It does so by reflecting on ongoing ‘fits’ possessing young Indigenous women resident in state-run secondary schools in Guyana’s ‘hinterland’, an occurrence which produces shock and disruption. Rather than attempting to explain the cause of this phenomenon, I dwell on a central facet of its experience - that is uncertainty. How might frontier economies and the construction of young women’s bodies be drawn together and apart, each characterised in turn by respective uncertainties and ongoing contestations between insides and outsides, produced intentionally or otherwise?