Introduction: Critical Currents in Dominican Gender and Sexuality Studies in the United States

In 2016 the seminal two-volume anthology Cien años de feminismos dominicanos: Una colección de documentos y escrituras clave en la formación y evolución del pensamiento y el movimiento feminista en la República Dominicana, 1865–1965, edited by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Elizabeth S. Manley, and April J. Mayes, was published by the Dominican National Archives.¹ The anthology attests to the long-standing collaborations that Dominican studies scholars located in the United States, many of Dominican origin, often sustain with the Dominican Republic; it also speaks to the current tendency in Dominican gender and sexuality studies, on and off the island, to seek out new archives and materials from the past and the present to broaden existing perspectives on Dominican formations of gender and sexuality—something that this Small Axe dossier speaks to as well.

Dominican studies is a relatively small but burgeoning field in the hispanophone studies world, with a strong current focus on Dominican conceptions of race, nation, and Dominican-Haitian relations. These questions became especially pertinent again with a notorious 2013 Dominican ruling that effectively denationalized thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans of Haitian descent. While Dominican-Haitian relations and the Dominican conceptions of race and national identity that underwrite them have received significant attention by scholars since long before 2013, the past few years have seen a particularly notable number of US publications. These include “The Challenge and Promise of Dominican Black Studies,” a special issue of the journal The Black Scholar, edited by Raj Chetty and Amaury Rodríguez, and the publication in English of Dominican sociologist Franklin J. Franco’s classic 1969 study, Blacks, Mulattoes, and the Dominican Nation, both in 2015.² Edward Paulino’s Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign Against Haiti, 1930–1961 and Lorgia García-Peña’s The Border of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, among others, were published in 2016.³ What emerges from these and earlier publications, including Ginetta E. B. Candelario’s Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, is the importance of considering the “triangle” of relations through which conceptions of Dominican blackness and anti-Haitian sentiments took shape, not only in relation to the Dominican Republic’s former colonizer, Spain, but also in relation to the strong presence of the United States from the nineteenth century on, including the US occupation of the country from 1916 to 1924.⁴

In this special section, Dixa Ramírez’s essay suggests that we do well adopting a triangular approach to questions of race and gender and sexuality. Specifically, she analyzes how early-twentieth-century images taken from a US “imperial gaze,” “whose foundations are white supremacist and heteropatriarchal,” “confirmed and contributed to the racialization and gendering of subjects who strayed from the white, masculine ideal of humanity.” Indeed, Carlos Ulises Decena and Fátima Portorreal Liriano similarly argue in their essay that such “triangulation” should be applied to “questions of identity formation,” including of race and sexuality, to think through the “multiple forces,” internal and external, “linked to the global economy in which Dominican society is embedded.” Questions about global and US influence in particular on Dominican society have tended to center on the late twentieth century and thereafter, often with a focus on migration and the growing Dominican diaspora in the United States. Yet, Danny Méndez, in his essay on the early-twentieth-century Dominican actress María Montez (1912–51), suggests, as does Ramírez, that such inquiries need to extend to earlier time periods as well.⁵

The historical time period that has received some of the most sustained scholarly attention from a gendered lens is the Rafael L. Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) and its legacies. Specifically, the dictatorship’s gendered language of patronage and politics and the performance of masculinity by the dictator, as well as their lasting effects, have been foregrounded in different ways by historians Richard Lee Turits and Lauren Derby, anthropologist Christian Krohn-Hansen, literary/cultural studies scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant, and myself, among others.⁶ Torres-Saillant in fact provocatively argues for the (homo)sexual dimensions of the Trujillato: “Trujillo erotizó a los varones dominicanos. Los poseyó, meta-sexualmente hablando. . . . La interacción del caudillo con sus hombres, tanto en el trujillismo de ayer como en el de hoy, se puede entender como una forma de sexualidad simbólica (metasexualidad).”⁷ The homo-sociality and homoeroticism of the Trujillato emphasized by Torres-Saillant, however, tends to be drowned out by the many anecdotal and literary accounts of the dictator’s voracious heterosexual exploits.

In line with this fascination is the attention paid to the life of the international Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909–65), who was briefly married to one of Trujillo’s daughters and had countless international romances and marriages, including to American heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. At least four existing biographies attest to the lasting draw of Rubirosa’s performance of heterosexual masculinity.⁸ I read Méndez’s recuperation of the work and life of the Dominican actress and Hollywood star María Montez as a welcome counterpoint to this androcentric focus. In fact, Méndez’s essay raises important questions about how Dominican femininity translates differently in the US context than masculinity and the different scripts attached to each—the savvy international playboy versus the “eccentric Latina spitfire,” both clearly circumscribed by race and class.⁹

The emphasis on Trujillo and “his men” has until recently sidelined the women of the Trujillato. Yet in the past few years, scholars in the United States and the Dominican Republic such as Candelario, Manley, Mayes, Quisqueya H. Lora, and Neici Zeller have insisted on foregrounding the role that women played not merely as passive victims but as political actors before, during, and after the dictatorship. In her recent book The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic, Manley analyzes women’s political participation in authoritarian regimes and the paradoxical progress women made under the Trujillato—which included the granting of suffrage in 1942—as well as during the first regime of Joaquín Balaguer (1966–78).¹⁰ In this Small Axe issue, Manley excavates the life and role of the particularly vilified Trujillista female politician Isabel Mayer, notorious for presumably procuring women for Trujillo and for hosting the party at which Trujillo supposedly ordered the Haitian massacre in 1937. Manley critiques the narrow focus on “saintly” Dominican women (such as the Mirabal sisters assassinated by the Trujillato) or “evil” women, such as Mayer, and argues for “a more nuanced reading of the female actors in authoritarianism” that allows for “seeing the women of the Trujillato as complex and contradictory historical actors.” These paradoxes and contradictions, as well as the legacy of women’s political activism being “tightly scripted around a highly traditional maternalism,” remain to be reckoned with more fully.¹¹

After the end of the repressive dictatorship, new political, labor, and rural organizations sprang up in which women also took on important roles in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet it was not until the 1980s, with the democratic opening after the end of Balaguer’s first regime, that the first broadly recognized generation of Dominican women activists and feminists consolidated. Alongside the reinvigoration of political opposition parties, labor unions, and civil organizations in which women took on notable leadership positions, the 1980s also saw the foundation of various gender-focused nongovernmental and other organizations whose programs, activism, and publications played a key role in creating a public and scholarly discourse on gender. Many of the leaders of these gender-focused NGOs and civil organizations are crucial figures in both the Dominican feminist movement and Dominican gender studies—true “activist-scholars” in the best sense. Centrally among them was, for example, Magaly Pineda (1943–2016), a feminist leader and sociologist who founded the Centro de Investigación para la Acción Femenina (CIPAF) in 1980, with a focus on gender and public policy, labor, and education.¹² Another key Dominican organization is La Colectiva Mujer y Salud, founded in 1984, led by important feminist activists and scholars such as Denise Paiewonsky and, currently, Sergia Galván, who has played an essential role in foregrounding the lives of Afro-Dominican women.¹³ The UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, whose main office opened in 1983 in the Dominican Republic, with a focus on producing research from a gender perspective, also has had a notable presence. The efforts of feminist leaders, scholars, and organizations led to a growing institutional recognition of gender, for example, through the creation of a master’s in gender and development at the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo in 1992. This important academic program, as well as its journal, Género y Sociedad, played a significant role in shaping gender studies in the Dominican Republic and its notable strength in the social sciences (while, arguably, Dominican gender studies in the United States has been more concentrated in literary/cultural studies).¹⁴

Other important institutional hallmarks are the formal creation of a state department for women’s issues (Secretaría de Estado de la Mujer in 1999, since 2010 Ministerio de la Mujer), alongside political inroads, such as the establishment of a “quota system requiring women to be 25% of the candidates in city council and Chamber of Deputies elections,” later increased to 33 percent. Yet there is ultimately no smooth narrative of progress toward gender equality to be told here, as political scientists Jana Morgan, Rosario Espinal, and Jonathan Hartlyn note: “During the early 2000s, some political leaders stepped back from active promotion of women’s participation in politics and embraced machista rhetoric.”¹⁵ Indeed, the new 2010 Dominican constitution analyzed in Ana-Maurine Lara’s essay here attests to this conservative turn and pinpoints the gender and sexual inequalities inscribed in it. The new constitution, as Lara notes, not only establishes that Dominican nationality is to be granted through blood relation jus sanguinis (rather than place of birth) but also puts in place one of the most restrictive antiabortion approaches in the world, one that does not allow abortions even to save the mother’s life.¹⁶ This attests both to the ongoing strong influence of the Catholic Church in the Dominican political sphere as well as to the lasting legacies of the “highly traditional maternalism” of the Trujillato discussed by Manley. Dominican feminist activists and scholars and women’s and other civil organizations continue to denounce and challenge this abortion law as well as the high incidence of domestic violence and femicides in the country.

In the 1980s and 1990s, alongside this crucial Dominican history of feminist civic and political activism and research, emerged a new generation of women writers who portrayed the lives of Dominican women in their narratives and defied narrow masculinist scripts. Writers such as Chiqui Vicioso (b. 1948), Angela Hernández (b. 1954), Martha Rivera-Garrido (b. 1960), Aurora Arias (b. 1962), and Rita Indiana Hernández (b. 1977), among others, challenged the Dominican male literary canon and have led to a new wave of literary studies scholarship in the Dominican Republic and the United States. Since the 1990s women writers from the Dominican diaspora, such as Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), Josefina Báez (b. 1960), Loida Maritza Pérez (b. 1963), Nelly Rosario (b. 1972), Angie Cruz (b. 1972), and Ana-Maurine Lara (b. 1975), also have played an important role in giving voice to Dominican women’s diverse experiences. Sharina Maillo-Pozo’s essay attests to the ongoing vitality of Dominican diaspora women’s writing and also highlights the shifting meanings of diaspora with generational change and the new racial and cultural identifications these are giving rise to.¹⁷

The transnational movement of diaspora and its gendered dimensions are only one of many new themes that emerged with the increasing globalization of Dominican society since the 1990s. In addition to producing a significant body of work on migration, scholars have focused attention on the gendered impact of neoliberalism, in particular through the new Free Trade Zones industries that employed a disproportionate number of women. Women’s new earning power raised questions, for example, about its impact on Dominican family structures (the conclusion: less than one might have thought). Another key concern has been the impact of the tourism industry—including sex tourism to the Dominican Republic, which has both reconfigured and reinstated existing notions of gender and sexuality—addressed by anthropologists such as Amalia Cabezas, Denise Brennan, Steven Gregory, and Mark Padilla.¹⁸

The twenty-first century saw a slow but significant increase in scholarship on Dominican LGBT experiences and organizations. One of the first publications that brought together scholars writing about LGBT themes in the Dominican Republic was a compilation of essays coordinated by Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco under the auspices of FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) for Vértice: Revista de ciencias sociales in 2005.¹⁹ Lamentably, the issue was available only briefly online and was not published in print. Decena and Portorreal Liriano’s essay here points to the foundational work of a Dominican scholar who has long addressed LGBT topics, the recently deceased sociologist Antonio De Moya, whom they rightfully call “the most important thinker on Dominican sexuality in the twentieth century.” Some of his key contributions were, as outlined by Decena and Portorreal Liriano, his analysis of Dominican masculinity, the highlighting of “the messy yet normative, conflicted yet prevalent role of bisexuality in the identity formation of Dominican men,” and his tracing of the “role of an emerging gay tourism” and male sex work in the Dominican Republic.²⁰ The crucial influence of De Moya’s work is attested to, for example, in the two existing scholarly monographs that have foregrounded Dominican LGBT lives, Mark Padilla’s Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS and Decena’s Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men.²¹

Alongside these publications in sociology, anthropology, and political science, there was also an increase in LGBT literary voices in the twenty-first century. First was the controversial Antología de la literatura gay en la República Dominicana, edited by Mélida García and Miguel de Camps, which included excerpts of homoerotic and homophobic scenes from Dominican literary texts. Yet despite its shortcomings, parts of it, such as Miguel D. Mena’s introductory essay, did suggest the many critical angles on past and present Dominican same-sex desires that have yet to be explored. In contrast is Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco’s edited anthology, Divagaciones bajo la luna / Musing under the Moon, to which self-identified Dominican lesbian women contributed creative and autobiographical texts. This work, together with Lara’s novel Erzulie’s Skirt, marked a new moment in LGBT representations in both the literary and the social realm.²²

Around the same time a number of new LGBT organizations, especially new trans organizations, emerged, and the annual Dominican Pride “Caravan” was established, as detailed in Rachel Afi Quinn’s essay. Quinn superimposes local Dominican strategies of negotiating same-sex desire with the discourses of the gay US ambassador James Brewster, who had arrived under Barack Obama’s administration in 2013. As Quinn notes, Brewster brought with him to the island a “model for gay rights” that does not translate into existing Dominican cultural norms, bringing up the key issues of “whether ‘coming out’ empowers or endangers LGBT people” and how homonormativity “colludes” with neoliberalism. Quinn’s argument might appear to be in tension with Lara’s emphasis on how activists in the Dominican Republic “have purposely used LGBT language to describe the movement for sexual and gender justice” and how LGBT serves as a “strategic universalism.”²³ Yet after more than a decade of working on representations of same-sex desire in Dominican literature and culture, I find that both positions hold true in the Dominican Republic. In fact, I consider it of crucial importance to expand our epistemological frameworks to be able to encompass precisely what may seem like incommensurate and contradictory positions in colonial and postcolonial societies under the aegis of US imperialism. Indeed, this stance is long prefigured in the work of De Moya, who, as Decena and Portorreal Liriano recount, found “no need to seek a resolution to contradiction because it was essential to learn to live with it as a condition of possibility for genuinely liberationist projects.”²⁴ I find it especially useful to think of multiple normative formations that impact expressions of Dominican gender and sexuality and, consequently, of multiple forms of pushing back and resisting these, some of which are outlined here in these essays, including, for example, Ramírez’s fascinating notion and hermeneutic of “monte refusals” that challenge “dominant ideas about who and what is modern.”²⁵

This sketch of Dominican gender and sexuality studies is inevitably a partial one, shaped by my own limited knowledge, disciplinary formation, and scholarly and personal interests. There are key areas of scholarship that are not represented, among them, for example, the area of religion and gender/sexuality, including Catholicism, Afro-Dominican religions, and Evangelicalism, such as Brendan Jamal Thornton covers in his Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic.²⁶ Another crucial area of scholarship is gender and sexuality in Dominican music, performance, and visual arts. Here, I am thinking of the work of ethnomusicologist Angelina Tallaj as well as of the scholarly interest in Rita Indiana Hernández’s music, performance, and videos (for example, Karen Jaime’s “Da pa’ lo do’: Rita Indiana’s Queer, Racialized Dominicanness”) and in Dominican visual arts (for example, Elena Valdez’s “Writing the Feminine: The Representation of Women in Contemporary Dominican Visual Art” and my “Jorge Pineda’s Queer Visualities? Postcolonial Sexualities and Normativity,” forthcoming in a Small Axe Visualities portfolio).²⁷

Overall, the following essays attest to the current vitality and multiplicity of approaches to Dominican gender and sexuality studies here in the United States. Despite the thematic and temporal diversity of focus, one can trace a few common denominators. For one, these essays attest to an emergent transnational Dominican visual studies (Ramírez; Méndez), alongside a more long-standing Dominican literary studies tradition. Furthermore, we see an increasing number of scholarly works on non-heternormative Dominican desires and practices (Decena and Portorreal Liriano; Quinn; Lara), reflecting the growing strength of Dominican sexuality studies. At the same time, these essays explore the constraints that the Dominican public sphere places on expression of gender and sexuality (Manley; Méndez; Quinn; Decena and Portorreal Liriano)—and the ways Dominicans negotiate them with savvy—as well as the confining scripts for the Dominican diaspora in the United States (Méndez; Maillo-Pozo).