Diaries, dicks, and desire: how the leaky traveler troubles dominant discourse in the eroticized Caribbean

Abstract

This article employs ‘unconventional linguistic self-designation’ in an attempt to move beyond the abstract signifying logics commonly used to theorize First-World/Third-World sex tourism in a language of knowledge, power, and resistance. I look specifically at the sexual liaisons between Western tourists, including myself, and men from the Dominican Republic. In my efforts to move away from representational logics, I mobilize an apparatus utilizing feminist and queer affect theory, notions of embodiment, and a phenomenological language of ‘orientation’. I analyze the journal accounts of my own erotic encounters with Dominican men to stimulate a certain type of layered thinking capable of accessing affective dispositions and challenging the notion of an oriented, stable, composed subject. Neither tourist nor local Dominican men fit this unitary description. Instead, I rely on metaphors of disorientation, rupture, and leakage to arrive at indeterminate, fleeting, fugitive experiences, defying common touristic tropes. I conclude that although Western white men (and women) are bound by authoritative modes of knowing – individually exempt, perhaps, but structurally bound – possibility exists to ‘write back’ or successfully transgress boundaries in the (non)representation of self and the other in a process of mutual recognition.