Abstract
This chapter is an invitation to reflect on the current state of queer aesthetic production and activism in the Hispanic Caribbean region. I am interested in a selection of primary accounts that offer a particular looking back to political queer genealogies, particularly forms of contestation and agency from the 1970s. By focusing on a regional understanding of a critical queer gaze emanating from the Hispanic Caribbean, I am interested in pointing out the ways in which forms of survival, memory, creation, and struggle stand in opposition or resistance to dominant neoliberal narratives of queer life.
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Notes
- 1.
“El mismo jefe abrió la reunión diciendo, oigan bien, que ese era un día especial, pues a tono con los nuevos tiempos y para beneficio de la firma y sus colaboradores y colaboradoras, había invitado a unos jóvenes líderes de quién sabe qué, que venían a hablar de la homofobia en el trabajo” (Negrón 2010, p. 98).
- 2.
“Deberían hacer un anuncio, dándonos las gracias” (Negrón 2010, p. 101).
- 3.
Different emblematic accounts of (Hispanic) Caribbean identity and cultural studies insist on the primacy of sexed bodies as the focus of what makes the Caribbean different. Think of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Roberto Fernández Retamar, among others. The same claim is reflected upon by Faith Smith in the introduction to Sex and the Citizen. Interrogating the Caribbean. In the opening piece, “Sexing the Caribbean,” Smith recognises the intertwinedness of the taboo of miscegenation and the taboo of homosexuality as a convergence specifically intensified in the Caribbean: “Racial combinations become a way to assign or refute inferiority and to prop up racial and masculine honor. Sex—or at least heterosexual, reproductive sex—proves something about the success or failure of political rule, and written into the nationalist text are these refutations and affirmations” (Smith 2011, p. 4).
- 4.
Forms of violence that, as Kofi Campbell describes in the introduction to The Queer Caribbean Speaks, exist within a contradictory pendulum in which queerness is severely punished or silently tolerated. “One can see, then, that the lives of queer Caribbeans are filled with contradictions and contradictory cultural receptions. How can a country that says homosexuality is a crime also be home to the Miss Gay Guyana Glory Pageant, an annual event well attended by people of all classes” (Campbell 2014, p. 4).
- 5.
Here I am thinking of the introduction to José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire. Interventions from Queer Latin America (2000). Quiroga lays out a different politics of “coming out” in Latin America. More than a public declaration of one’s desire or sexuality, ambiguity and non-disclosure exist in Latin America as another way of queer resistance: compared to the “transparency” of the coming out politics of the North, opacity offers an alternative to existence and creation.
- 6.
According to a report on migrationpolicy.org, the United States is the first destination of Caribbean migration, followed by Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/caribbean-immigrants-united-states.
- 7.
1968 is the catalyst for much of a global transformation in many different aspects of experience. In particular, it was the year that saw a shift around support for the Cuban Revolution. Before the Cuban Government’s support of the invasion of Prague by the Soviet Union, there was a generalized support of the global left for the Revolution. According to historian Rafael Hernández, “Until 1968, the left almost everywhere supported the Cuban Revolution. In Europe, the Revolution was originally perceived as a populist revolution ‘without ideology’ that had independently come to power in an unaligned manner through the efforts of guerrillas, offering an alternative to Stalinism and a world divided into two superpowers. In the Third World, above all in Africa, the Cuban Revolution was seen as the spearhead of the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism, and Cuba as a political an even military ally, of considerable weight despite its small size” (Hernández 2009).
- 8.
At this point, it is necessary to make a distinction regarding the actuality of Queer (Hispanic) Caribbean studies today. On the one hand, understanding queer practices as modes of agency that hold on to their genealogies as they respond to the demands of current neoliberal forms of oppression has contributed to a line of current work that focuses more on the contributions of black academic and activist production in the region and its diasporas. As Gill puts forth as the guiding principle for his book and the community of academic production in which he participates, there is a looking back to the contribution of black feminist thought, particularly that of the Trinidadian-American, Audre Lorde. For Gill and others, like Rinaldo Walcott and Omise’eke Tinsley, the engagement with black feminist scholarship production today arises as a concern to think of the ways in which Lorde’s texts, and others, had already begun, avant la lettre, to think of queerness, problematising the silencing of feminist thought and the wide space occupied by white gay masculinity in the field. Gill anticipates that it is a particular reading of Lorde’s notion of the erotic, taken from her stellar speech at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1978, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” that which can open up the space for the cohabitation of contradictory modes of experience like pleasure/pain or love/hatred. In his refashioning of the concept, the “erotic” “describes various formal and informal power hierarchies (the political), sexual as well as nonsexual intimacy (the sensual), and sacred metaphysics (the spiritual) simultaneously” (Gill 2018, p. 10). Bringing together political desire, sensual desire, and spiritual desire may in fact contribute to a reconciliation of modes of experience thought which are, to me, unassimilable, and, thus, may contribute to a revision of Queer Caribbean genealogies by emphasising the ways in which they perceive and include tensions within difference.
- 9.
Even though Negrón-Muntaner clarifies that Román Lopez’s position has changed and currently her academic work deals more with what can be referred to queer epistemologies, distancing herself from her early leftist militancy, and focusing more on the role the law has on determining binary constructions of “good” and “evil,” “victim” and “victimizer,” etc. (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 353).
- 10.
“Creían vivir intensamente. Creían. Los imagino rebeldes, entusiastas, dinámicos, plenos de vitalidad, optimismo e ideas novedosas. Debió ser un momento de ilusiones […] Eran los años duros, cuando no había nada de nada, arroz con merluza, ilusiones y va que chifla (Portela 2010, p. 32).
- 11.
“No había nacido en un ingenio azucarero como su padre, ni lo habían torturado y deportado como habían hecho con los amigos de sus padres en los años setenta. ¿Qué coños le pasaba?” (Hernández 2018, p. 37).
- 12.
“El nuevo químico entraba en Argenis al atropellado ritmo de la conversación de Bengoa; un torrente de fechas emblemáticas de la lucha antiimperialista, recetas para batidas profilácticas, trozos de canciones de Silvio, Amaury Pérez y Los Guaraguaos, economía china y estadísticas de béisbol. Tenía la boca seca y las pupilas tan dilatadas que todo a su alrededor lucía como una foto en alto contraste” (Hernández 2018, p. 13).
- 13.
“Por un lado, el ideal socialista convertido en mercancía; por otro, la marca capitalista de contrabando que sostenía a duras penas el funcionamiento biológico de la Revolución” (Hernández 2018, p. 33).
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
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Martínez Hernández, L. (2020). The Queer Hispanic Caribbean: Contemporary Revisions of Its Genealogies. In: López, M., Vera-Rojas, M.T. (eds) New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_8
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