Queer Caribbean Homecomings: The Collaborative Art Exhibits of Nelson Ricart-Guerrero and Christian Vauzelle

Queer Trajectories

Though there is a long history of reading sexuality and sexual practices as indicators of a society's "primitive" or "advanced" status, it seems surprising for such a link to reappear in international gay and lesbian discourses, which historically have had to contend with precisely such problematic categorizations of homosexuality as either primitive underdevelopment or modern degeneracy. Yet several scholars who explore sexuality in the context of globalizing processes coincide in detecting an "inextricable link" between "modernity, development and sexual politics."¹ In his book The Globalization of Sexuality, Jon Binnie problematizes how "rights around sexual diversity become a marker of a nation's level of development. . . . tolerance and recognition becomes [sic] a measuring point of a nation's success at developing."² Besides legal recognition of sexual diversity, a society's "level of sophistication and development" tends to be detected through markers such as the "establishment of a lesbian and gay community and movement" and "public affirmation of sexual preference" that come to indicate a "liberated gay consciousness."³

Measured against these markers, the Dominican Republic emerges as a particularly "backward" country, notoriously lagging in its development toward "modernity" not only in comparison with the United States and Western Europe but also in comparison with other Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Argentina.⁴ If one takes political organization as an indicator, for example, the first, and so far only, official gay pride march took place in 2001, in the capital, Santo Domingo; the needed police permit for such an official public demonstration has not been granted since then. Also, the only officially registered nonprofit organization dedicated specifically to the LGBTQ community is ASA (Amigos Siempre Amigos), whose purpose since 1989 has been to offer AIDS prevention programs for men who have sex with men and to care for those living with AIDS. No other government-recognized LGBTQ organizations have existed so far; unofficial organizations have formed at different times but have disappeared after relatively brief periods.⁵ Venues and vehicles for public affirmation and recognition of gay and lesbian identities are thus limited, leaving the Dominican Republic far behind on the plotline of the developmental narratives that underwrite much of international sexual politics.

This "chronopolitics" of development also structures perceptions of queer migration or "sexile" in the burgeoning field of migration studies.⁶ In their essay "Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality," Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan describe how the "tradition-modernity divide at work in the study of sexuality" is also present "in the literature on migration and refugee asylum."⁷ Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr., the editors of Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, similarly find that "the majority of accounts of queer migration tend to remain organized around a narrative of movement from repression to freedom, or a heroic journey undertaken in search of liberation."⁸ The prevalent perception that migration, besides offering economic opportunities, also often constitutes a socially and culturally advantageous move from more repressive circumstances toward "freedom" and "liberty," renders the return of queer migrants to their countries of origin hardly desirable or, at the very least, counterintuitive.

However, the question of what queer migrants might transmit or bring back —besides financial resources —is becoming increasingly germane with the heightening of "the immediacy and frequency of migrants' contact with their sending communities."⁹ As the migration expert Marcelo Suárez-Orozco notes, "Many immigrants remain substantially engaged economically, politically, and culturally in both their newly adopted lands and their communities of origin, moving 'back and forth' in ways not often seen in previous eras of large-scale immigration." ¹⁰ Among these engagements, the increasingly important role of remittances —money sent back by migrants —figures perhaps most significantly not only for families at home but also for national economies (with the Dominican Republic prominent among these). Alongside these financial contributions there are, however, other forms of nonmaterial and less tangible investments at "home," which Peggy Levitt usefully terms "social remittances": "ideas, behaviors, identities , and social capital that flow from receiving to...