Mapping present-futures with young people: Black queer volleyball spaces in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of volleyball spaces in the lives of young queer people who live in informal settlements in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Drawing from five years of ethnographic fieldwork and a series of co-mapping activities with young people, I suggest that volleyball spaces, both real and imagined, critically serve as black queer spaces in an otherwise heteropatriarchal, classist, and homophobic urban context. Black queer volleyball spaces function as critical infrastructure that reject the logics of the modern colonial system by serving as spaces of refuge, spaces of refusal and spaces of possibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• mapping
• Dominican Republic
• Black spaces
• queer spaces
• recreation

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the residents of La Zurza, specifically the young people who shared their time, their stories and their experiences with me. Deborah: thank you especially for your thoughts on this work. I am deeply grateful to the members of FUNDSAZURZA who continue to welcome me into their community and assist with research. Finally, thank you to the editor and reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 All names in this paper are pseudonyms to protect the identity of participants.

2 In this study, I draw from scholars who reject the binary dichotomies of ‘privileged, normal, heterosexuality, and abject, marginalized homosexuality’ (Brown et al. 2010, 1568) that is prevalent in Eurocentric knowledge systems for those for whom the term queer signifies ‘people whose subject positions are not generally accepted, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and others who do not conform to generally accepted practices’ (Doan 2007, 2). This includes an understanding of sexualities as ‘heterogenous assemblages’ (Brown et al. 2010, 1568) that acknowledge relationality and multiplicity in gender variance and sexualities. However, in order to avoid homogenizing the experiences of this large population of people, this case study queer specifically refers to the experiences of homosexual and bisexual men, and transgendered women who I learned from.

3 Given the current political climate and prevailing anti-Haitian sentiment at the national level, I had difficulty recruiting Haitians who also live in La Zurza.

4 I asked young people to participate in this portion of the project after several summers and winters spending time in the neighborhood in order to build trust. Participants were paid for their time and efforts.

5 Geospatial analysis was conducted in coordination with Michael Shensky at the University of Texas at Austin. QGIS software and custom Python scripts were used to process, analyze, and map the nearly 1.5 million GPS points collected by the participants in the course of the study. The data was first processed using a Python script to aggregate all of the GPS points generated by each individual participant into a single large shapefile dataset. This scripted process for combing the data also made it possible to assign attribute information for participant age, gender, sexuality, educational status, and employment status to each point in the dataset. Using this shapefile of GPS points and a secondary dataset representing the extent of the La Zurza neighborhood, it was then possible to use the QGIS select by location algorithm to count the number of GPS points generated within and outside of the neighborhood based on each of the participant characteristics selected for analysis in this study. These point counts were then used estimate the percentage of time individuals that self-identified with each characteristic spent within and outside of the neighborhood. The points in the large aggregated shapefile of GPS points were also filtered in QGIS based on participant self-identified gender and sexuality so that the distribution of points generated by males, females, heterosexuals, homosexuals could be compared. Once the points were filtered based on these characteristics, the QGIS Heatmap (Kernal Density Estimation) function was run on each of four filtered datasets to generate raster layers representing the density of GPS points generated by participants that self-identified with these classifications.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fulbright Association.