Pimping and the deconstruction of the natural: A perspective from Saint Martin and Sint Maarten (SXM)

•A theoretical move away from representational politics is advocated.•This theoretical move mimics informants' manner of dealing with social categories.•Caribbeans uphold and at the same time deconstruct essentialist notions of identity.•Daring to sex freely helps to denaturalise categories of race, place, and ethnicity.

SynopsisIn this essay we contend that studying the practice of pimping (being pimped and positively pimping the categories with which one is pimped) may be a way for the Caribbean to speak to and assert a universal human condition: the role of sex in human history and human societies. A mighty and contestable view we admit in a time of the fetish of Difference often paraded under the politically suspect banner of culture. However, as the Caribbean is a place that demonstrates the ludicrousness of denying the transcultural knowledge that allows one to speak of and resolve the incommensurability of African, Asian, American, and European modes of being, so too it allows us to recognise that studying sex through the double edged practice of pimping opens our purview to seeing the human beyond the exclusivities of racial and ethnic speak.