FEMINISMS AND SEXUAL AND GENDER DISSIDENCE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH – Comparatistas

Description

Postcolonial theories and conceptualizations of the Global South as a metaphorical area of systemic injustice often address issues related to gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity only in passing. On the one hand, the hetero-patriarchal view is often the implicit pattern of approaches that are radical at other levels. On the other hand, it is not uncommon to see that international cooperation institutions attempt to impose the legal achievements of western feminist and queer movements on the Global South, while erasing the fact that many (pre-colonial) communities in Latin America and Africa were not organized in a hetero-cis-patriarchal manner. In the colonial encounter with the Other, this variety of forms of social organization raises a number of challenges to cultural translation and demonstrates the strong connections between colonialism and patriarchy.

At the academic level, gender and queer studies also tend to universalize their main subjects, starting from western perspectives or linear conceptions of temporality. In this context, feminisms produced in the Global South have become essential, both academically and socially, because they insist upon the emergence and centrality of the female subject, racialized bodies, sexual and gender dissident identities, as well as the intersection with other marginal categories. Literature, cinema, performing arts, among other artistic expressions, produced in the South, have become a space for negotiating these demands.

Objectives

The overall objective of this project, based on interdisciplinary perspectives, is to analyze literary productions, as well as other artistic expressions from Africa (with a special focus on the Lusophone context) and Latin America that address gender issues. Indigenous, black and mestizo feminisms (e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa, Julieta Paredes, Lélia Gonzalez, Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí, Nkiru Nzegwu) will be privileged approaches for analysis, along with the epistemologies of the South (following Boaventura de Sousa Santos) and the decolonial perspective (in the line of Aníbal Quijano and María Lugones). The contexts where these artistic productions emerge will also be subject to analysis. Special attention will be payed to the mechanisms that may trigger the different levels of literary and artistic production, as well as their absence, as far as gender is concerned.

This project aims to put into dialogue artistic creations with theoretical productions around the topics of sex/gender, thus contributing to the relativization of universalized western logics, as well as to the decolonization of the category ‘woman’ and of sexual and gender diversity, within literary and cultural studies, and beyond. To this end, the collaborations to be established at the national and international level with academics from the Global South and/or with academics who focus on this space, are fundamental.

Activities

Conference: “Representações da diversidade sexual e de género na arte, literatura e media ibéricos e ibero-americanos” [Representations of sexual and gender diversity in Iberian and Iberoamerican art, literature and media], at the Public Library Palácio Galveias, Lisbon, 19 March 2019. Organization: Isabel Araújo Branco, CHAM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Doris Wieser (CEC, FLUL), Laura López Casado (CEC, FLUL), Teresa Veiga Furtado (CHAIA, Universidade de Évora), Aida Rechena (CeiED, ULHT e CHAIA, Universidade de Évora).
International conference: “DecliNações: Questionando identidades nacionais, género e sexualidade” [DecliNations: Questioning national identities, gender and sexuality], at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 29 to 30 October 2018. Organization: Doris Wieser, Jessica Falconi, Luciana Moreira, Raquel Lima, Simone Cavalcante.
Symposium: “Representaciones del género y de las identidades sexuales disidentes en el mundo iberoamericano: literatura, cultura y cambio social” [Representations of gender and dissident sexual identities in the Ibero-American world: literature, culture and social change], at the 56th International Congress of Americanists (ICA), Salamanca, 15 to 20 July 2018. Coordination: Doris Wieser and Luciana Moreira Silva.
Article: “Women in the colonial periodical press: discourses and representations”, ex æquo, 39, 2019
Editors: Jessica Falconi (CEsA, ISEG) e Doris Wieser (CEC, FLUL)

Team

Doris Wieser (CEC, ULisboa)
Ana Balona (UNL, Lisboa)
Ana Romão (CEC, ULisboa)
Elena Cordero (CEC, ULisboa)
Jessica Falconi (CEsA, ISEG, ULisboa)
Laura Casado (CEC, ULisboa)
Luciana Moreira (CES, UCoimbra)
Magdalena López (CEC, ULisboa)
Raquel Lima (CES, UCoimbra)
Rosa Churcher Clarke (CEC, ULisboa)
Simone Cavalcante (CEC, ULisboa)

Duration of the project

January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2021