Mapping present-futures with young people: Black queer volleyball spaces in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Abstract

This article examines the role of volleyball spaces in the lives of young queer people who live in informal settlements in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Drawing from five years of ethnographic fieldwork and a series of co-mapping activities with young people, I suggest that volleyball spaces, both real and imagined, critically serve as black queer spaces in an otherwise heteropatriarchal, classist, and homophobic urban context. Black queer volleyball spaces function as critical infrastructure that reject the logics of the modern colonial system by serving as spaces of refuge, spaces of refusal and spaces of possibility.