Carlos Ulises Decena: Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire Among Dominican Immigrant Men.

Adam, Barry D.

Carlos Ulises Decena

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

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, xiii + 309 pp.

This well-crafted book uses the experiences of gay and bisexual Dominican men living in New York as a particularly productive vantage point for reflecting on some of the big themes in transnationalism: migration, culture shock and self-transformation, performing gender, and sex and inequality. The author describes his methodology as "autoethnography, participant observation, and twenty-five retrospective life-history interviews with Dominican immigrant men in New York City" (2). It is an approach that combines some of the best of the humanities and social sciences by having an empirical referent in the narrated lives of a diverse set of Dominican men (avoiding a tendency in the humanities to grand claims based on a single literary text) and by applying interpretive tools to these narratives (avoiding a tendency in the social sciences to view interview texts as simple reflections of the real). In many instances, the reader is treated to the original Spanish transcript of research participants' remarks with a parallel translation and notes on specifically Dominican terminology.

A central thread running through the book is how these men perform and embody masculinity. Having one strike against them in the masculinity game as men who desire men, these men are insightful about how masculinity must be played and perceived. "Serious masculinity," in the author's words, is the presentation of self that commands deference and social recognition in patriarchal systems. Achieving and sustaining serious masculinity requires vigilance against locura (craziness), an imminent risk that reveals a body that is not always in control of itself and "always already imagined as feminized and excessive" (15). A range of strategies emerge from these life histories showing how masculinity is navigated and achieved typically in the workplace or in families. Becoming his family's provider, becoming "modern" or upwardly mobile all help establish credibility and respect. Although these are well-established themes among many Latin migrants to the north, this study shows how they remain operative for men who infrequently marry women or have children of their own.

Serious masculinity also constructs itself in opposition to a perhaps more specifically Dominican figure of the tiguere, a kind of street actor, "cast as creatures who look out for themselves and nobody else, who are gifted talkers and manipulators of adverse situations, and who tread in uncertain moral waters" (131), reminiscent of studies of "cool pose" among African Americans.

These narratives also show how much inhabiting gay identities and spaces in New York is associated with upward mobility, being modern, cosmopolitan, and perhaps "white." Some of these men see gayness as a form of cultural capital that distances them from Dominican culture and identity that they, to some degree, want to leave behind. One of the measures of that distance is adoption of the gay standard of "democracy in bed" (182), that is, sexual versatility that differentiates itself from the activo-pasivo distinction in sex between men widespread in "traditional" Latin American society. As the author points out, contrary to a literature that insists that the male pasivo is always abject and discredited, it is the inflexible activo who is now cast as insufficiently modern. Decena is careful to delineate the complications and permutations in the ways in which gayness is lived through. Most of his respondents had other Dominicans and men of colour as sex partners. They indulge in mariconeria with friends, that is, a friendly banter of insult and intimacy that nevertheless risks going too far and must be played with care.

Another central theme is, of course, the way that migration escapes from and yet reproduces many of the inequalities of race, class, and gender from the Dominican Republic to New York. A particularly strong part of the book concerns the relations of the mobile and immobile, a treatment that joins the now more sophisticated research literature on "sex tourism" that is rethinking notions of sex, inequality, exploitation, and human connection. "Taking white (gay) men out of the picture--as antagonists, exploiters, and objects of critique--does not undo a scaffolding of inequality and power that is erotically productive and that points to present negotiations of the legacies of colonial expansion," Decena argues (237). Reflecting both on his own social location as an expatriate Dominican academic back in Santo Domingo, and on a group of African American tourists attending a New Wave Black Man circuit party on the island, the author uses the final chapter to open up questions of the inescapability of race and class inequality in intimate relations along with stories of personal engagement and transformation. For example, one interviewee in the study appears to be effectively gay in New York and bisexual in the Dominican Republic. Is this a kind of "freedom" from gay identity, in line with the deconstructionist orthodoxy that insists that "gay" is a limitation to fluid sexuality, or is it an instance of biculturalism showing that desire is deeply influenced by location and social expectations?

Overall this is a book that has much to contribute to the research literature on sexuality, gender, migration, and Latin American studies.

Barry D. Adam, University of Windsor