Review: Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:

Gay men in racial minority and immigrant communities encounter multiple levels of oppression and stigmatization, e.g., the intersectional construction as the racial other and the sexual deviance. Minority and immigrant gay men also face homophobia from their community members. They are blamed for bringing shame upon their communities, which demand men to uphold the dominant ideology of hegemonic masculinity in a racist and sexist society. In this globalized world under which national boundaries are often blurred, how do immigrant gay men negotiate their sexual identity in the process of transnational migration? Exploring an uncharted territory, Decena in Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men examines experiences of Dominican immigrant gay and bisexual men in New York. Central to the text are the following questions: How do Dominican immigrant gay men in New York reconfigure their sexual identity and gender presentation through transnational migration? How do they refashion themselves as modern subjects? How does their migration reshape their relationships to their homeland and their identification with Dominicanidad (Dominican identity and community)? What are the implications of their ambivalence toward the US colonial legacy as well as their simultaneous construction of the United States as the modern and Dominican Republic as the backward? What does all this mean in terms of their stigmatization as the racial/sexual other and their idealization of white gay men and identification with whiteness?