Project

Documenting Dominican Women’s Sexual Resistance: Building a Digital Repository for Their Stories

Program

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

Department

English

Abstract

Dominican women’s sexual lives are full of contradictions as they use their bodies in ways that they have been expressly told not to do so. There are a myriad of individuals, institutions, and cultures influencing and communicating certain things to Dominican women about their bodies. This project examines how Dominican women respond to these forces in the greater context of transnationalism (the movement and exchange of people and ideas across the United States and the Dominican Republic) and intergenerational relationships between first-generation Dominican mothers and their second-generation Dominican daughters. Through the collection of oral histories from Dominican women of various ages and generations, this project curates a digital space which documents and circulates their stories about how they manage and resist these forces to gain sexual pleasure. The development of both a website and an accompanying social media account will present their stories orally, audially, and visually. In order to challenge the hegemonic narratives limiting Dominican women’s sexual lives, new stories have to circulate and be discussed. This project provides online spaces that can be conduits to and outlets for Dominican women to hold crucial conversations surrounding sex and pleasure.