“Yo me lo consumo!”: Water, Consumption, and Relation in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

• In Event: Black Sexual Ecologies of the Americas

Description for Program

On November 18, 2023, the Dominican Republic experienced a torrential downpour, culminating in a record-breaking amount of rain. The storm resulted in significant deaths, injuries, and infrastructural damage. November 18 was also the original date of Draguealo: Santo Domingo is Burning, an annual drag ball hosted in the capital of the Dominican Republic celebrating transnational ballroom culture. “Yo me lo consumo!/I will consume you!” a spectator yelled to a performer seductively strutting down an unleveled runway during Draguealo’s raincheck in December. Consumption relishes in the delight of exchange of Black, queer, and trans popular culture, through the possibility of tasting relation through one’s mouth. This paper engages water as a medium of destruction and relation, taking seriously Toni Morrison’s declaration that “all water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was” (Morrison 1995, 99). Invoking Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, I return to the site of November 18 as memory and place (McKittrick 2006) to argue that water creates new routes that guide us to Black : queer : Indigenous traditions of gathering and care in Ayiti, rather than Christian colonial and heteronormative means of overconsumption.

Author

• Bonnie Samantha Maldonado, University of Pennsylvania