On Rhythm and Same-Sex Couples Dancing on Heteronormative Songs in the Dutch Caribbean

How is citizenship practised and culturally articulated in Curaçao and Bonaire by sexual subjects facing multiple forms of systemic inequalities based on hierarchies of race, class, gender, religion and sexuality? Sexual minorities – meaning subjects that are having same-sex and transgender relationships and practices in the Dutch Caribbean – are consistently framed as if in need of development and modernisation. Concurrently, local populist politicians and religious leaders maintain that homosexuality is something un-Curaçaoan, un-Bonairean, non-Christian or non-Black, meaning a Western export. As it is the case with the rest of the Caribbean region, it seems, like David Murray poses, that “any expression of sexuality outside patriarchal heterosexuality is uniformly unwelcome” (Murray, 2009, p. 2). Sexual minorities in the Dutch Caribbean are generally imagined in terms of ‘sexile’ (see La Fountain-Stokes 2008) – the idea of queerness being incompatible with Afro-Caribbean culture where one has to move away from certain Caribbean repressions to European or American ‘freedom’ based on their sexual orientation (Agard-jones, 2009; Guzmán, 1997; Reddock, 2004). In this paper, I discuss forms of inclusions and claims of citizenship that problematize the seeming incommensurability of being gay and Dutch-Caribbean and thus address the invisibility of same-sex loving subjectivities within Dutch Caribbean historiography. Drawing on a preliminary seven-month fieldwork research in Curaçao and Bonaire, I explore the complexities of a particular same-sex subculture, with its linkages between the state, the body, race and sexuality and how these sexual minorities through acts and practices constitute citizenship.