"Ana-Maurine Lara offers us a meaningful invitation to consider the multifaceted potentials of streetwalking, and to witness how Dominican LGBTQ activists make <i>resistencia</i> that reorders our understanding of the queer politics of the everyday. Beautifully written and cogently argued, <i>Streetwalking </i>is an important contribution to queer of color critique." - C. Riley Snorton (author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity) "<i>Streetwalking</i> is the first book to document and analyze LGBTQ activism, theorizing, and life-making in the Dominican Republic. As such, it is inherently groundbreaking and innovative. But more than being the first, it is also a finely argued, nuanced understanding of the context-national, regional, and historical-in which this community asserts its contestatory vision of rights, citizenship, morality, humanity and collectivism." - Ginetta Candelario (author of Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops) "New Books Network: New Books in Anthropology" interview with Ana-Maurine Lara (New Books Network: New Books in Anthropology) Pride Month June 2021 round-up (Bookshop.org)
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.
Section I: Street Smarts
Chapter 1: Christian Coloniality
Chapter 2: Sexual Terror
Section II: Streetwalking
Chapter 3: ConfrontaciÓn
Chapter 4: Flipping the Script
Chapter 5: Cuentos
Conclusion: On Silence Transformed
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index