"This landmark book is a wonderful and rich account of Afro-Surinamese working-class women's sexual subjectivities in Suriname. The author offers an extensive and complex analysis that attends to the historical, religious, psychological, cultural and global elements that make up the lives of Afro-Surinamese women. By foregrounding the lives and voices of Afro-Surinamese women in their various selves and sexualities, this book challenges many of the current ideas about gender and sexuality in general, and about black women's sexualities in particular. Dr. Wekker brings critical new insights to issues of sexuality, marriage, and kinship. One of the first studies to provide an account of women's sexualities that incorporates both heterosexuality and same-sex sexuality, this book contests the Western sexual binary by demonstrating the continuity of sexual meanings and selfhood across women's relations with both men and women. This study uniquely situates women's same-sex relationships, the mati work, within the context of working-class familial and kinship practices. Finally, the book offers an unparalleled account of the transformations occurring as women migrants to the Netherlands navigate European lesbian identity in light of their own understandings of the mati work.

" -- Evelyn Blackwood, Purdue University and author of Female Desires: Women's Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures.