Streetwalking

LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic

Ana-Maurine Lara

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978816510
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic is an exploration of the ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer persons exercise power in a Catholic Hispanic heteropatriarchal nation-state, namely the Dominican Republic.Lara presents the specific strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in their struggle for subjectivity, recognition, and rights. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, film and video, and interviews, LGBTQ community leaders teach readers about streetwalking, confrontación, flipping the script, cuentos, and the use of strategic universalisms in the exercise of power and agency. Rooted in Maria Lugones's theorization of streetwalker strategies and Audre Lorde's theorization of silence and action, this text re-imagines the exercise and locus of power in examples provided by the living, thriving LGBTQ community of the Dominican Republic.

Part I

Street Smarts

As I was taught by my queer elders, in order to know where I am going, I need to know where I came from and where, exactly, I am standing. Walking through the streets of La Zona and beyond—to other less formal, unpaved streets, or streets locked in by high-rises, or streets that are really roads and paths to mountains—I am consistently reminded that the D.R. is a Catholic Hispanic state. Whether because of the multiple times that Christians bless me from point A to point B, or because of the ways God is invoked in day-to-day interactions, or because of the presence of multiple churches, crosses, and other markings of Christian presence—for any of these reasons and more, I am reminded time and again that European Christianity was imposed on indigenous lands and has transited and continues to transit through indigenous and black bodies. We cannot deny that Christianity took root through the processes of European settlement, invasion, and conquest. We also cannot deny that indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have incorporated Christianity into their being, their personhood, their communities, and their ways of life.

Many LGBTQ people are Christian; they are people of faith and, oftentimes, of deep faith. As a non-Christian scholar and author, therefore, there exists an ethical imperative to interrogate my own positionality and its limitations (my biases). That said, I am confounded, personally, by what it could look like to imagine Christianity as a faith that is not implicated in ongoing imperial expansion and the racist, homophobic, misogynistic violences that accompany these political, economic, and social processes. To imagine that, for me, requires imagining and attending to conversations with Christians who seek to unsettle the violence of Christianity’s past in the process of shaping decolonized futures as well as with those Christians who advocate for women and LGBTQ peoples’ human and civil rights at the intersections of faith. Even then, the question still remains for me: When so many other spiritual and religious traditions exist, why do LGBTQ people continue to practice and have faith in Christianity at all?

J. Lorand Matory reminds me that Christianity has deep (temporal, cultural, and spiritual) roots throughout Africa. Speaking specifically about Oyo-Yoruba cultures, Matory posits that “interaction among [Christian, Islamic, and orisa] religions is a constituting dynamic [of orisa worship] . . . which resists being classified as fixed and bounded” (2005, 67). To speak, therefore, of African and Afro-diasporic religious and spiritual traditions is to also speak of foundational Christian and Islamic beliefs as central to those practices. If we are to take this claim at face value and pair it with Matory’s simultaneous proposition that gender in the Oyo-Yoruba cultures signifies completely distinct relationships of power than those produced through colonialism in the Americas, we are able to trace the spaces of tension where those distinct relationships of power (say, in the figure of the iyawo) clash and intersect with Christian colonial biblical binaries and presumed heterocomplimentary. If, however, we take Matory’s claim about the centrality of Christianity to Oyo-Yoruba cultures and pair it with Oyèrónk

Oyěwùmí’s claim that “western gender categories are presented as inherent nature (of bodies) and operate on a dichotomous, binarily opposed male/female, man/woman duality in which the male is assumed to be superior and therefore the defining category” (1997, 4), then we are required to consider the drastic effects of Christianity’s transit through Yoruba cultures on terms that unsettle any claims to gender as an applicable analytic category. In other words, we must consider “the ways in which ‘gender’ was (re)constituted in and through the practices of colonialism, colonial violence, and the racialized relation to bodies of color” (Méndez 2015, 102) in the shaping of the fundamental questions with which we attempt to approach Yoruba lives and experiences. The tension produced through the distinct viewpoints represented by Oyěwùmí and Matory is productive in expanding the terrain by which we might come to conceptualize our streetwalking experiences in the New World.

The New World was constituted explicitly through Christian colonial violence in ways that the Yoruba people—and African peoples more broadly speaking—were not. The dispossession and decimation of indigenous peoples in the Americas through invasion and conquest and the subsequent importation of millions of peoples from Africa and the violent ontological restructuring of personhood produced through the Middle Passage are Christian enterprises that locate Christianity within a different set of historical relationships than those that might emerge through indigenous Yoruba worlds. Whereas my biases generate personal questions about Christianity’s liberatory potential in the context of streetwalking, my training has taught me to attend to the ways in which my interlocutors produce meaning, knowledge, and relationships. In that process, I must also attend to the context in which these productions of meaning, knowledge, and relationship take place. For my interlocutors, many of whom are LGBTQ persons of Christian faith, the pain, hurt, and loss produced by the homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia of Christian institutions and leaders have produced erotic orientations rooted in alternative epistemologies of personhood. These alternative epistemologies emerge from embodied experiences, producing powerful discursive and collective strategies with which to confront the violence emerging from these institutions.

Given all this, the work of this book is not to produce a direct dialogue about what unsettling Christianity could look like. Rather, it is to share the stories of LGBTQ activists in the D.R. as a way to generate further thinking about liberation. I begin by first presenting the context in which LGBTQ activists in the D.R. operate. The conversations presented in this section, “Street Smarts,” highlight the ways in which Christian coloniality and Christian fundamentalisms are interwoven with colonial and contemporary nation-state apparatuses in the production of what I call sexual terror. Applying Foucault’s archaeological approach to change and transformation (2010, 166–177), this text brings to light some of the presumptions that presuppose Christian salvation as a component of incremental rationalized Enlightenment and the instantiation of the liberal individualized subject and as markers of progress. This interweaving between religious philosophy and political thought and institutionalization has produced conditions that directly diminish and threaten the lives of LGBTQ peoples. These are the epistemic grounds on which racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies; binaries; categories; and identities came into being. They are our collective inheritance and what my interlocutors grapple with—and in turn what we must grapple with—on the path to transforming silence into power.

I have divided this section into two chapters. The first chapter, “Christian Coloniality,” provides a discussion and theorization of Christian coloniality. I locate Christian coloniality within the slow, centuries-long processes of colonialism’s reformulations of meaning. While it is important to consider that Hispaniola was a marginalized colony within the broader Spanish Empire, it is also important to consider that it was a significant rehearsal ground for the implementation of colonization, settlement, encomienda, sugar cane plantations, cattle ranches, cimarronaje, revolution, nation-state building, authoritarianism, U.S. imperial expansion, and neoliberalism. Today, LGBTQ people suffer under the accumulated weight and palimpsestic force of Christian coloniality as it manifests through the Catholic Hispanic nation-state of the Dominican Republic. This chapter describes the structures of power that shape the backdrop for streetwalking.

The second chapter, “Sexual Terror,” illustrates the myriad ways in which Christian coloniality sustains and produces homophobic and transphobic violence. Definitions of sexual violence are often constrained to violence produced through sexual acts: for example, sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape, and incest. Here I discuss sexual terror as the completely encompassing modes of violence that permeate the social body, striking against those whose desires, feelings, and erotic dispositions do not conform to Christian colonial morality—in particular, Christian colonial ideas of biblical manhood and womanhood. By theorizing sexual terror, I draw attention to the structural ways in which LGBTQ personhood is restricted and produced.

Chapter 1

Christian Coloniality

In her essay “My Worlds Will Be There,” published as part of the collection I Am Your Sister, Audre Lorde writes,

I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living. Social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, as we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will, within that feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, “Why don’t they?” And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change. (Byrd, Betsch Cole, and Guy-Sheftall 2009, 162)

There is a horror to knowing that my life is at risk simply for being who I am. There is a horror to knowing that my lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and intersex friends’ and loved ones’ lives are at risk simply because they are who they are. There is a horror in knowing that there are families, communities, institutions, and nation-states that don’t care whether we live or die, and in some cases, they participate in perpetuating the very violence that leads to our premature and often terrifying deaths. There is a horror, there is a horror, there is a horror.

And so I am moved—as a scholar, an artist, an activist, a healer—to attempt to grasp the root causes of this horror. I feel deeply that my life and the lives of other LGBTQ people have inherent value. I feel this way in a world that does not reflect that sentiment back to me. Therefore daily I must draw from the deep fountains of joy, of love, and of my capacity to question in order to articulate my inherent sense of self-worth and of value for myself and others. I must know this. Actor and director Laurie Carlos once said to me, “You just have to know you are brilliant.” I said back to her (yes, I did), “But how do we know we are brilliant if no one told us so?” She said, “Well you just know. You’ve just got to know.” I responded, “But what if we’ve never been told that?” And she closed the issue by stating simply, directly, “Well I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” What does it mean to walk in the world knowing we are brilliant? And what are the forces that prevent us from knowing this?

Attempting to find the root causes of my horror and to take up Laurie Carlos’s call to know our brilliance as who we are in the world are the two clashing emotional sources informing my theorization of Christian coloniality as presented in this chapter. I will first locate Christian coloniality within the slow, centuries-long processes of colonialism’s reformulations of meaning, first by focusing on the idea of “gay marriage.” This conversation about gay marriage in the twenty-first century leads us to unearth the various formulations of morality in the context of producing the human, which I then follow up by theorizing the Catholic Hispanic nation-state and its historical applications of Christian colonial morality in the management of public spaces and the production of specific kinds of human citizen subjects.

What’s Gay Marriage Got to Do with It?

It was June 2013, and I was in the D.R. when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was announced. The Supreme Court’s decision effectively made it illegal to deny marriage to same-sex couples, opening the way for what is commonly referred to as “gay marriage.” I heard about the decision first from my Dominican LGBTQ activist friends and interlocutors. In that moment, they were preparing for that year’s Caravana del orgullo. They were paying attention to what was happening in the U.S. because President Obama had just appointed an openly gay ambassador to serve in the D.R. Much of the political content of the Caravana that year was in support of the appointment. In addition, some Dominican LGBTQ activists were considering gearing up for their own campaign for gay marriage. By 2013, there had been several successful court rulings on gay marriage throughout Latin America. In 2010, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission had ruled on a case in Chile and “urged the Chilean state to adopt legislation, policies, and programs to prohibit and eradicate discrimination based on sexual orientation” (Díez 2015, 1). A year before in Argentina, a judge had expanded marriage to include LGBTQ couples. And also in 2009, Mexico City’s assembly approved “reforms to the city’s civil code allowing for same-sex marriage” (2). These successful cases and the U.S. Supreme Court decision could potentially serve as a model for local activists to propose and fight for legislation even as it became fodder for Dominican Catholic-Evangelical protests. Dominican LGBTQ activists argued that if large democratic governments like Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and the U.S.—which for so long had opposed gay civil rights—were suddenly allowing gay marriage, then anything was possible.

But Dominican LGBTQ activists were not only paying attention to what was happening in the secular courts of Latin America and the imperial courts of the north. They were also paying attention to the Vatican’s response. Just earlier that year, Pope Benedict XVI had stepped down, and Pope Francis had taken his place. LGBTQ activists across Catholic countries everywhere were watching to see how this new pope would respond to the abuse of children by priests; they were also looking to see what Pope Francis would say about homosexuality and gender identity. His track record as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, demonstrated that he was both religiously and politically adamant about his opposition to gay marriage and ambivalent about the place of homosexuals in God’s plan. A letter leaked to the Argentinian press in July 2010 stated, “This [battle for gay marriage] is not just a simple political battle; its aim is to destroy God’s plan . . . it is not a mere legislative project (this is only its instrument), but rather a strategic move by the father of all lies, who aims to confuse and trick God’s children. . . . Here we also see the Devil’s envy, by which all sins entered the world, which aims to destroy God’s image: man and woman who have a mandate to grow, to multiply and have dominion over the earth” (TN.com.ar 2010; emphasis in the original). The letter circulated not only within the Argentine press. It spread across networks of feminist and LGBTQ activists throughout Latin America. If this was the archbishop’s position in Argentina, what would be his position as a religious and political leader of the international Catholic Church?

On March 13, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was selected as the new pope of the Catholic Church under the religious name of Pope Francis. Pope Benedict XVI’s (Ratzinger’s) resignation in February was surprising to most of the world and came at the tail end of a range of Vatican financial scandals and over a decade of pedophilia scandals (Horowitz and Goldstein 2018). I was with Marivi, a Catholic woman and highly esteemed educator in the D.R., when the news of Benedict’s resignation was announced. When I asked her about the state of Catholic life in the D.R. and about rumors that the church was losing followers, she responded, “Yes, it’s true. In my lifetime, the majority of my friends have left the Catholic Church. Many of them are in Evangelical churches.”

For many Dominican Catholics and former Catholics with whom I spoke, Pope Benedict’s resignation represented their own pena (sadness, shame) at the state of the church: their own self-understanding as belonging to a church in crisis—a church that has shaped them in fundamental ways but no longer corresponds to their own or others’ lived realities, values, or expectations. This pena was mediated by arguments that positioned Ratzinger as an intellectual—someone who could have potentially engaged with the world as a modern rational thinker. From this perspective, his downfall resulted from insufficient flexibility before a theological position within an institution that was being challenged by shifting social norms. But this argument sometimes undergirds a desire for a more fundamentalist Catholic presence in the face of the shame and problems within the priests’ ranks.1

The homosexual was a central preoccupation of Pope Francis’s leadership as archbishop.2 As demonstrated by numerous articles and protests in Argentina, he was one of the primary political opponents to gay marriage. His efforts in 2010 to use the moral authority of the church to pressure the Senate’s political decisions on gay marriage were made visible through leaks to the media. Rather than recede into the church, his public attacks against LGBTQ activists became even more visible and open. Despite the pressure placed by the church on the Argentine Senate, they approved legalizing gay marriage in July 2010.

After he was ordained as pope, he led the rites of Holy Thursday—what I learned is a reproduction of the biblical story of Jesus’s washing of the apostles’ feet. I was with my friend Gerardo, a former priest who was now openly gay and out of the priesthood. We were watching the rites on television. He commented to me his shock at Pope Francis’s actions, and we discussed the contradictions symbolized by the pope’s actions on this day:

Gerardo: He went to the jails to wash the feet of the young men. I get goose bumps. That is a very powerful statement that he’s making. He says that the Church has to go to the margins.

Ana: He talks about margins, but he’s a huge homophobe.

Gerardo: Yeah? Well, the church will never accept gays.

Ana: But how can he defend the margins and not those who are marginalized, like gays? As a cardinal in Argentina, he really showed himself, you know?

Gerardo: He’s Francis—his flock is among the poor. And besides, he can’t do or say what he did or said when he was cardinal. He’s a pope now. We have to wait and see what he does with the issue of gays.3

I had offended my friend’s sensibilities. He was deeply moved, as a former priest, by the pope’s humility as demonstrated by his actions on Holy Thursday. For him, this represented a radical shift from Benedict XVI’s theology and overall approach to human suffering. He commented to me that it confirmed his deep faith in the church as an instrument of Christ’s love and Paul’s teachings. That I would question the pope’s integrity on the basis of his stance on homosexuality was offensive and beside the point for him. The church would never accept gays, and this issue did not rest on the leadership of one person. My question and concern were irrelevant. But also, from the perspective of a person of faith—his and others—religion and sexuality are personal. As personal matters, they are supposed to exist outside the realm of public debate. The incursion of the church and state into the personal space of religion and sexuality, therefore, lies at ...