Erin Durban on the Sexual Politics of Empire

[00:00:00] Cathy Hannabach: Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about bridging art, activism, and academia to build more just futures. I’m Cathy Hannabach, and in this episode we explore the past and present relationship between the United States and Haiti as it shapes the lives of queer and trans Haitians.

[00:00:23] My guest on today’s episode is Erin Durbin, who is a queer, disabled, chronically ill, feminist, interdisciplinary scholar, who’s also an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

[00:00:35] Erin’s first book, The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti, was just published by the University of Illinois Press. In that book, they trace the interaction among religious, political, and human rights movements in Haiti and how they shape the daily lives of same-sex desiring and gender-creative Haitians.

[00:00:55] In our conversation, we talk about the history of US occupation and imperialism in Haiti, as well as how it shapes the work that international LGBTQ organizations begin doing there in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

[00:01:10] Erin also shares how their approach to ethnographic research has shifted over their career, particularly in terms of challenging colonial unknowing, even when it appears in one’s own family narratives and community.

[00:01:23] We close out the episode with Erin’s vision for a queer disabled university, one that centers the needs and livability of not only those working within the academy but also those whom it affects, including the folks that we write about.

[00:01:39] Thank you so much for being with us today, Erin.

[00:01:42] Erin Durban: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:44] Cathy Hannabach: Your new book traces the rise of and transformations in what you call postcolonial homophobia in Haiti. I’m curious, what do you mean by this concept and how do you see it operating across the various contexts and case studies that you analyze in the book?

[00:02:00] Erin Durban: I was really interested in thinking about what are the effects, the legacies of not just American imperialism in Haiti and how that shapes sexual politics, but also European colonialism. This took a long time to tease out how those different colonial formations shaped people’s daily lives.

[00:02:30] I think what is more known to people is that there are forms of homophobia that are, colonial legacies. After doing years of research, I found that there are sort of two predominant forms of homophobia in Haiti.

[00:02:47] One is Catholic homophobia that I describe as a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, where people don’t really discuss same-sex sexuality, and there are forms of censure for doing so. Catholicism really comes from Spanish and then French colonialism. That’s how the Catholic church got established.

[00:03:11] But then the US has been involved in Haiti for now over a hundred years. The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and that occupation generated interest in US missionaries going to Haiti. And so, slowly over time there’s been a shift from Haiti being predominantly Catholic to having increasing influences of evangelical Christianity and Protestantism.

[00:03:45] Protestant homophobia operates differently than Catholic homophobia. A lot of the difference is that Protestant or evangelical homophobia people, um, talk about same-sex sexuality. They talk very negatively about it. They ask people if they’re gay. The churches have interventions to save people’s souls.

[00:04:10] It’s not necessarily perceived as violent to do this. It’s meant to take care of people, to take care of families, to take care of churches, and even the nation. But it’s really, detrimental to people’s lives and relationships with each other. And it is in fact very violent.

[00:04:29] So you have these two older forms of homophobia that trace back to foreign intervention in Haiti.

[00:04:38] Other scholars in queer studies have looked at how these different forms of homophobia are colonial legacies or are part of anticolonial nationalisms. But in this case, also I am looking at what is the effect of pro-LGBTQI organizations coming into Haiti and what does it mean for queer work within Haiti?

[00:05:08] This is a piece of postcolonial homophobia that is like the, the most difficult to explain because it would seem that these organizations really have the best interests of Haitian people at heart.

[00:05:25] In the book, I really am intentional of saying same-sex desiring and gender-creative Haitians since queer isn’t a word that really circulates in Haiti.

[00:05:36] But what happens is a lot of these organizations essentially make the same kinds of interventions as missionaries. When US organizations in particular come in and have certain attachments to visibility politics and announcing oneself, it adds fuel to the fire of Protestant homophobia.

[00:06:02] And what happens is the types of homophobia I talked about before and these new queer politics, these social movements that seem to be opposed, actually work together and work off of each other and make same-sex desiring and gender-creative Haitians’ lives harder.

[00:06:23] I’m thinking about homophobia in terms of the effect of people’s material lives: their livelihoods, their relationships with their families. When these two social movements are working off of each other, it creates a political environment that is very dangerous and ultimately detrimental to Haitians.

[00:06:45] And so those are the different pieces that are at play and Haiti is only one place that has these layers. There’s a lot of other work in the Caribbean or in Africa where there’s these sort of colonial legacies in homophobia and US organizations come in supposedly as a solution, but I really want to complicate how we think about that from this research on the ground about looking at those dynamics.

[00:07:15] So, um, that is a long explanation.

[00:07:19] Cathy Hannabach: I think it’s an explanation that that does justice to the complex layers of this. You’re talking about multiple histories. You’re talking about multiple, overlapping social movements that we often don’t think of as having a lot in common or we think of as opposing each other. What the book does is it shows how in some ways they’re aligned and in some ways they diverge, of course. But you’re tracing some of those overlaps.

[00:07:43] Erin Durban: Yes, definitely. When the earthquake happened, that’s when a lot of these new LGBTQ organizations started going to Haiti in the context of rescue and relief efforts.

[00:07:57] They saw Haitian homophobia, that was the way they described what they saw. And these organizations attributed it to French colonialism and Catholicism. And it was then that I actually knew I had something different to say than what they knew based on their very limited time in Haiti.

[00:08:22] They were disappearing the effects of US intervention in Haiti, the missionaries didn’t just show up like they did after the earthquake. By then it had been many, many decades and they were following in that same path.

[00:08:38] Cathy Hannabach: When you’re tracing these kinds of overlaps in the book, you ask this really fascinating question of what does it mean to ask the state for protections under conditions of foreign occupation?

[00:08:50] I’m curious how you see that manifesting over the course of your research but also over the course of the social movements that you trace in the book.

[00:09:01] Erin Durban: I mean, this is a very difficult kind of a question, and I would say I come to it from working in radical queer movements in the United States—ones that are abolitionist, thinking about the context of Black Lives Matter, thinking about state violence.

[00:09:19] But then in the context of Haiti, when I started this research in 2008, there weren’t queer organizations, there weren’t LGBTQ organizations. There was one organization that was specifically an MSM organization, so men who have sex with men, that was really focused on HIV prevention and health. And there was another organization that predominantly was MSM, but didn’t publicly define itself that way.

[00:09:53] I was working with artists, which was a sort of unique entry point because it wasn’t through NGOs, it wasn’t through organizations. What I saw was people really working to support each other, people who had been marginalized in lots of different ways.

[00:10:14] So, um, there were gay men who were working with other kinds of outcasts in Haiti, whether that was deportees or people described as bad boys who were artists, who were Rastafarian, and trying to build connections of mutual aid and support, building on older Haitian traditions of people supporting each other, during and after the Haitian Revolution.

[00:10:42] Unlike a lot of the places where these international organizations that are based in the United States had worked, Haiti didn’t have laws against same-sex sexuality.

[00:10:55] The earthquake really made US organizations feel like they had work to do in Haiti. Everything got NGOized and the political commitments people had shifted.

[00:11:10] So in these context I was working in where people were building broad collaborations and it wasn’t necessarily specific to same-sex desiring and gender-creative people but really centered queer Haitians in a vision for liberation.

[00:11:31] Instead, these organizations started saying like, “Apply here for funding, the way that you’re going to get ahead is by thinking about the laws where you are.” And it really shifted the political possibilities.

[00:11:49] During that time, Haiti was under occupation. There are debates about how that occupation gets characterized, but the United Nations had soldiers on the ground. And the US tried to minimize how visible it was in that occupation. So I mean, what people saw on the ground was a lot of soldiers from Jordan and Brazil, and it was definitely the United Nations and technically it was a peacekeeping operation, but there’s like all these complicated factors.

[00:12:26] And so, the ways things shifted were from these great organizations that are thinking about liberation very broadly, they’re thinking about what does it mean to live under foreign occupation and why is it important to center that as a queer political strategy to then sort of this weird moment of capture where suddenly people start to feel like maybe their best allies are the people who work in the US Embassy because they have progressive politics and really support gay people and will host events in support of them.

[00:13:08] That sort of transition, the before and after the earthquake transition point, is really important to me and brought up this question, what does it mean to ask the state for protections under conditions of foreign occupation.

[00:13:21] Cathy Hannabach: In your acknowledgements in the book, you tell this really lovely story how you were inspired to write this particular text and do this kind of research by a conversation that you had with José Esteban Muñoz, who advised you to write the book that your 15-year-old self needed but didn’t yet exist in the world.

[00:13:41] You also talk about how your family history shaped this project in some really fascinating ways.

[00:13:48] What was your journey into researching and writing about Haiti?

[00:13:53] Erin Durban: So when I was in college, I was doing a lot of organizing work in Colorado with the American Indian Movement, with the Red Earth Women’s Alliance and that’s when the Haitian president was kidnapped by the United States.

[00:14:10] It was 2004. It was the bicentennial of Haiti. Haiti found itself without a president and people in those activist networks started talking about the history of, the US in Haiti, having film screenings, having discussions.

[00:14:30] And so here we are, thinking together about the Caribbean in a transnational context.

[00:14:37] In the course of all these conversations, I started to unearth all these connections to Haiti.

[00:14:43] I found out that my dad and my uncle had actually lived in Haiti and had an export business. The family business on my dad’s side, they’re florists and they used to have greenhouses and so it was exporting Haitian baskets to two florists in the United States.

[00:15:02] It was weird to me that my dad and uncle had lived there and I had never heard about it. This baby basket that had been in my house growing up, that was the one that I came home from the hospital in, was a Haitian basket.

[00:15:20] It became more important to me to understand why I had these relationships and didn’t know about them.

[00:15:31] There are some really great scholars in Theory and Event who introduced this term colonial unknowing. As a US citizen and thinking about US empire, there are all kinds of things that I still have yet to learn, and this one felt very intimate.

[00:15:49] And so, I was still in college when I started to research Haitian history. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Haitian immigration to the US and representations in literature.

[00:16:06] When I was a master’s student, that’s when I was starting to focus on queer Haitian immigrants in the United States and their cultural production. So, I wrote a paper. It was about Assotto Saint and I went to a Haitian Studies Association conference in Haiti and presented the work.

[00:16:29] By that time I had very rudimentary Haitian Creole. I had attended an institute in Boston. I spent some additional time in Haiti and through the networks in the class, I met gay and lesbian Haitians who were not scholars and just talked to them about my research and my family history and the historical connections between the US and Haiti.

[00:16:58] There was an artist who said to me , “You ought to think about doing your work here and if you have this opportunity to highlight people’s voices and you have this platform that we won’t ever have as artists to an international audience, you should take that and get to know us and our work.”

[00:17:18] I took the invitation. It felt important to do, and that led to eight years of ethnographic research in Haiti and developing all of these relationships and watching these changes that I’ve talked about.

[00:17:34] Even now, nearly 20 years later, there’s still so much to learn about US imperialism in Haiti, specifically for me. but I want other people who maybe have some intimate tie like I do, or maybe who don’t but who are US citizens, to know about this history and how it shapes people’s lives in a contemporary moment.

[00:18:03] And it’s also how I make sense of growing up in the southwestern United States and thinking about settler colonialism there to US imperialism in places that are outside the territorial boundaries of the United States.

[00:18:19] Cathy Hannabach: One of the things that I find really compelling about this book is the way that you represent those artists and activists and cultural workers that you worked with over those eight years of ethnography. I think it offers something different than a traditional ethnography.

[00:18:35] I’d be curious to know how you approach that method and what you think that degree of collaboration can offer to other scholars who are also invested in challenging traditional ethnographic divides between researchers and those that they research?

[00:18:52] Erin Durban: This is a, great question and hard in some ways. I would say I took up their invitation and really that meant developing long-term relationships with each other. I mean, everybody in the book, except for a few people, I still have relationships with. A lot of us had kids around the same time.

[00:19:18] And, I think that forming those relationships was really key to how the book turned out. I feel a sense of responsibility to the people who are represented in lots of different ways.

[00:19:37] There are some people where we could have conversations about how they’re represented, what they thought about the book. But a lot of it was just actually about having open lines of communication, about really talking about what I was thinking about.

[00:19:53] I’ve been working on this book for over a decade. I think that’s pretty usual for people. But in the time that I was actually writing, my chronic illnesses became more apparent and so did my disabilities and it made me really think about how ethnographic fieldwork is done and rethink how that could be done differently.

[00:20:18] I actually think that the way this was set up, even though the fieldwork had feminist and antiracist and anti-imperialist commitments, there was a lot of replication of traditional ethnographic research and it took becoming disabled for me to see that in a different way.

[00:20:43] Now my work thinks a lot about that question. What I mean by traditional ethnographic research is that, anthropology sort of set the model for this, researchers use their own mobilities, their whiteness, their masculinity, their US or European citizenship to navigate their informants’ immobility.

[00:21:08] Even the structure, the invitation to come there by the artist who I mentioned, acknowledges those power differentials. And so really I’m interested in thinking about how could that be different?

[00:21:25] I’ve been working with, Haitian and American scholars, and they’ve also been doing a lot of work without me, to amplify the voices of queer Haitian artists and activists. And so there have been a lot of gender and sexuality and Haiti events where people have had the opportunities to meet each other who don’t know each other, even within Haiti and to articulate from Haiti and the diaspora the needs and concerns of Haitian queer people. And I think that that’s really important.

[00:22:04] And part of what I can do with other scholars in the academy is put resources into that and provide structures so that, there’s some redistribution happening there.

[00:22:19] Cathy Hannabach: I think that’s actually a really great dovetail into my final question, which really gets at the heart of why you do this work and how you allow it to change over the course of your life.

[00:22:30] So in the spirit of imagining otherwise, what’s the world that you’re working toward when you do this kind of work? What kind of world do you want?

[00:22:39] Erin Durban: That organizing I was talking about before, the work that artists were doing to connect with each other, to provide resources for each other across different kinds of differences, to really lift up the needs and experiences of people who are marginalized, that work really is important to me.

[00:23:06] I do a lot of work with a group on campus where I’m at, at the University of Minnesota, called the Critical Disability Studies Collective. We are enacting that in a different way but it feels like I have a good model from somewhere else about how to make a different kind of academy, to imagine otherwise in a place that I often feel very alienated from, where there are efforts by queer disabled people, by women of color, to support each other and lift up each other’s work and have each other’s backs and provide resources and support.

[00:23:47] You know, it just looks like a really different kind of academy when you center people and their needs and really are intentional and thoughtful about making our work livable.

[00:24:02] I feel like it’s important to start where you are. I think doing work here where I live is very important also continuing to be involved in Haiti, to highlight those relationships, to learn about other places like Haiti that are shaped by US imperialism.

[00:24:24] Making those connections I think is really important. That has to be the place from where we can do that work to imagine otherwise.

[00:24:36] Cathy Hannabach: Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing the process of researching and writing this book and for sharing all of these creative ways that you imagine otherwise.

[00:24:47] Erin Durban: Thank you very much. It’s very nice to be here.

[00:24:50] Cathy Hannabach: Thanks for joining me for this episode of Imagine Otherwise, and a big thank you to Erin for sharing their research and vision. You can learn more about their new book, The Sexual Politics of Empire, as well as their other projects on our website ideasonfire.net, where you’ll also find a teaching guide for this episode as well as related books and resources.

[00:25:16] This episode was produced and edited by me, Cathy Hannabach, and social media and show notes support was provided by Christopher Persaud and Sara Tatyana Bernstein.

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