Gomes-Pereira (2019) - Reflecting On Decolonial Queer

REFLECTING ON

DECOLONIAL QUEER
Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira

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Queer theory emerged as a critique of the normalizing effects of identity for-
mation, and as a possible means of grouping dissident bodies. It is a theory that
delineates transgressive interventions and possibilities beyond binary construc-
tion of the sexes, and that rethinks ontologies: a theory that opposes itself to the
hetero epistemologies that dominate scientific production. In multiple journeys,
and in intense movements of theories and people, queer theory encounters deco-
lonial thinking, which is a critical perspective on the “coloniality of power”; in
other words, a conceptual, political, ethical, and productive construct of the social
spheres forged in Europe during the early centuries of colonization (Quijano 1991,
1998, 2000). By seeking out a counterposition to the various logics of coloniality,
and by presenting other cultural, political, and economic experiences and produc-
tions of knowledge, decolonial thinking alerts us to a certain direction in the voy-
ages of theories, and to a geopolitics that transforms certain people into suppliers
of experiences, and others into exporters of theories to be applied and reaffirmed.
This article accompanies these voyages of theories, through the Spanish-and
Portuguese-speaking world, with the aim of delineating the principal outlines of
the encounter between queer theory and decolonial thinking. As we know, deline
ating carries with it a sense of designing, sketching, delimiting, and tracing, but
also a sense of conceiving and of planning (in an architectural context). Thus the
movement here is both a description and a proposition (“proposition,” in this case,
meaning both presenting and proposing) of a decolonial queer form of thinking. In
a preliminary way, the article formulates questions such as: Could this encounter
between decolonial thinking and queer theory produce something that might be
thought of as “decolonial queer theory” (as enunciated in this article’s title)? Or
are these theories incompatible, given that the term queer, rendered in English,
GLQ 25:3
DOI 10.1215/10642684-7551112
© 2019 by Duke University Press
404 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
signals the very sort of geopolitics that decolonial thinking attempts to counter?1
Is there any commonality between these proposals? What is the potential of this
encounter, and what might it produce? And what sorts of movements would a queer
decolonial reading design?
Of Theories and Voyages

When queer theory travels through the Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking world,
it becomes a crooked theory, a theory of the asshole, a faggot theory, a twisted
theory, a pink theory, a transgressive theory that questions, critically, the very
position of theory and its supposedly immaculate character (Guasch 1998; Jiménez
2002; Córdoba 2007; Bento 2014; Pelúcio 2014b). Thereby, at least here in the
global South, this movement serves as an alert against the aspirations of a “uni-
versal” (Eurocentric, white, and hetero) theory that aspires to embrace everything
(Miskolci 2014a).
It is important to emphasize, however, that here in the global South, queer
theory arose and came into being as an open term that allowed us to confront the
hegemony of the global North in producing and disseminating social theories, as
well as to its pressure in creating disciplines. The term queer theory, as originally
used in the United States, may refer to a critical and counternormal gaze that
served as a common denominator for a vast and diverse cross-section of academic
production. But it was not only in the United States that people connected to gender
and sexuality studies sought the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig—among others—to create a coun-
terdiscourse, as authors like Richard Miskolci (2014b: 66) have observed. Here in
the tropics, we have reinvented and reconstructed queer genealogy, extending it
to new areas, thereby amplifying and modifying what queer theory is understood
to be in a North American context. This modification has taken place to such an
extent that, here in the tropics, queer theory has virtually raised the possibility of
distancing itself from, as I affirmed above, pretensions of universality (see Miskolci
and Pelúcio 2017).
This movement implies a conscious abdication of authority, and it insinu-
ates itself as impure and improbable. This occurred to such an extent that, here in
the global South, queer theory arose narrowly linked to the interpellation of mul-
titudes of dissident bodies, that calls itself into question, and that takes seriously
the risk of transforming itself (Sharon 2005). This is because the term that quali-
fies it could be abandoned in favor of others that produce more efficient political
actions (Butler 1998).
REFLECTING ON DECOLONIAL QUEER 405
The proliferation of new languages produces the sentiment of discomfort

and incompleteness, of malleability, and of the necessity of living through transla-
tions. This type of frequent experience exposes queer theory to affectations that
produce changes and transformations. In conforming to the means of affectations
and affects of dissident bodies, queer theory in the global South can only imagine
itself through the process of a permanent decolonization.2 It is therefore a theory
stretched to its own limits, that jokes at its own expense and fluctuates with the

interpellations of bodies, and that—between this shaking up and outright abdica-
tion, tends to fall in love with other theories: specifically, with the other-theories
that emerge from the multiplicity of bodies and subjectivities. In sum, my argu-
ment here is that queer theory is an agonistic theory that sees its only possibility
for existing in the practice of distancing itself from itself in order, paradoxically, to
construct itself as possibility.
However, what is queer is not beyond the differences of power and prestige
in the itineraries of theories. Regardless of its subversive potential, queer theory is
inserted into a geopolitical context. When queer theory travels to the global South,
it carries with it the challenges, dangers, and potentialities that all voyages pre
sent. Here, there is a temptation to simply apply queer theory as though the term
queer and the subversion that it provokes (through the destabilization of theory
itself) did not also act through dislocations. It is as though when queer theory trav-
els, its abdication of initial authority were forgotten, and as though that theory later
reemerged, now in the position of theory ready to be applied.3 According to Larissa
Pelúcio, we have tended to receive queer knowledge by incorporating theories from
the global North without a due critique of imperialism (Pelúcio 2014b; Miskolci
2014b). In Pelúcio’s (2014a: 41) terms, according to the anatomized geography of
the world, the global South’s place would be in “the asshole of the world.” We went,
below the equator, localizing ourselves in peripheral confines and, to a certain
extent, we recognized this geography as legitimate. And, Pelúcio continues, if the
world has an asshole, it also has a head: a thinking head, in its north. This mor-
phological metaphor illustrates the geopolitics that I take on with this article. But
applying queer theory—that is, accepting in our space what was formulated far
away—is a sort of escape from the field of queerness. In this case, it becomes a
trick against queerness.
If this trick moves through its voyages to the global South as an imminent
presence, it need not pass through dangerous itineraries: this is because voyages
also subvert theories, producing something beyond a theory to be applied. This
is also because voyages are complex forms of interweaving. Researchers from
the global South travel to the North and come face-to-face with queer theory. But
queer theory does not only travel through people who come from the global North;
books and articles also travel to the global South, which they crisscross in complex
itineraries. Books and articles also travel, and their paths do not always coincide
with those traveled by people.4
In the global North, it finds multiple frameworks. For example, for almost
a decade, queer of color critique has been questioning the white and middle-class
nature of the analyses that were first recognized as queer theory. There is also a

rediscussion of queer genealogy that aims to recognize the Chicana feminist Glo-
ria Anzaldúa as one of its creators (Ochoa 2011; see Miskolci 2014b: 67). In the
midst of the machine that reproduces canonical theories, and the institutionalized
departments (and disciplines) that are historically linked to white, heterosexual
intellectual elites, these researchers opt to approximate themselves to formulations
of dissident bodies. In queerness, they find a more open position in reaction to a
certain normalized gay/lesbian gaze that has traditionally guided studies of sexu-
ality, even in the global South (Miskolci 2014b; Colling 2015). Queer theory’s voy-
age to the global South is also part of the actions of the researchers and activists
who appropriate this theory, creating noise and dissonance in response to the way
things are done in this part of the world.
People walk, they travel, they pass through, and they move themselves.
And their path, their itinerary, changes them, transforming them into something
different at the provisional end of any given trajectory. This process acts on bodies
that feel the effects of other languages, habits, and ways of being in the world, and
these bodies become something different. This becoming is not totally controlled;
such is the beauty of trajectories. Like bodies, theories also travel, and the trans-
positions that play out in unheard of paths and encounters transform these theories
into processes of dislocation, movement, and multiplicity. These transpositions,
encounters, and voyages lead us on our search, which I alluded to in the begin-
ning of this article, for interweaving theories. If queerness constructs itself in a
conceptual movement that tends to open itself to other theories, how might it come
to encounter decolonial thinking?5
The Encounter
When theories travel, they come face-to-face with a conceptual and political struc-
ture, and with an ethics of the management of social spheres forged in Europe
in the early centuries of colonization, all of which Anibal Quijano (1991, 1998,
2000) refers to as “coloniality.” Quijano attempts to account for a context that
draws out the history of colonialism at the same time as he reveals the continuity
of colonial forms of domination even after colonial administrations officially ended.

He shows how certain processes that originated or were accentuated with coloniza-
tion are renewed, even as we are told that they have supposedly been overcome,
assimilated, or become outmoded. Thus colonialism and coloniality are different
but related concepts: the first points to specific historical periods, whereas the
second reveals the underlying logic of colonial undertakings as the colonial matrix
of power.

This logic manifests itself in the transformation of cultural differences
in values and hierarchies of geopolitics, race, and gender. Distinctions become
epistemological and ontological classifications, and whoever controls classification
controls knowledge. The process of transforming differences into values creates
inferior zones. Colonial difference is a process of control, a strategy to demean cer-
tain populations and certain regions of the world. The concept of coloniality allows
us to understand these classifications and hierarchies, suggesting that colonial dif-
ference is an accomplice to universalism, sexism, and racism.
To decolonize is to extricate ourselves from the logic of coloniality and
its effects, and to detach ourselves from the apparatus that confers prestige and
meaning to Europe. In other words, decolonization is an operation that consists
of detaching ourselves from Eurocentrism and, in the same movement with which
we extricate ourselves from its logic and its apparatus, opening ourselves to other
experiences, stories, and theories. It involves opening ourselves to others that have
been covered over by the logic of coloniality: those others that have become lesser,
abject, and disqualified.6
In opening ourselves to other logics, claiming the importance and magni-
tude of these other-thought, questioning theories, and believing in a multitude of
theories and bodies, decolonial thinking approximates what we call queerness.
Like queer theory, decolonial criticism interrogates the theoretical pretentions that
generalize certain assumptions and subjects, and that elude the formulations of
Others, which are considered specific and particular. Confident in this approxima-
tion, several authors have worked at constructing encounters between queer and
decolonial thinking.7 It is certainly true that the outlines of this approximation are
still cloudy, and that the path has yet to be fully laid. At present, there is a strong
necessity for consolidating the encounter between queer theory and decolonial
theorists that elaborate critiques of coloniality starting from Latin America and the
Caribbean.8 Tracing this path is certainly still a task to be carried out, despite the
many praiseworthy efforts and initiatives that this article seeks to join.
Given this variety of theoretical options and persistent lacunas, it is not
strange that, in the relations between queer theory and decolonial thinking, many
current formulations appear to be suspect. Queerness—embraced by a multi-

tude of “strange” bodies—travels, placing itself before those who suspect certain
voyages of theories, such as decolonial thinking. This suspicion is based on the
alleged proximity of queer theory to theories formulated in the global North. The
very term queer is exceedingly difficult to translate, which means that even as it
travels to diverse places, it preserves itself it English, thereby signaling a geo-
politics of knowledge that decolonial thinking seeks to oppose. Thus problems of

literal translation become superimposed in terms of conflicts about the production
of knowledge along a North-South axis.9 For its part, queer theory also tends to be
suspicious of the use of reified identities, and of theoretical proposals that are not
attuned to questions of the body. It also is suspicious of the geopolitical framing
that forgets its origins as a nonconforming way of thinking about nonconforming
bodies. From its beginnings, queer theory has taken pride in what was once an
insult attributed to segments considered abject or lacking in prestige.
Despite these suspicions, there are also, as I mentioned earlier, approxi-
mations between queer theory and decolonial thinking. In its search to reveal the
underlying logic of colonial undertakings, decolonial thinking seeks to reveal how
constructions of gender and sexuality overlap in or are the products of colonializa-
tion (Lugones 2007, 2011, 2012; Segato 2012, 2013). If the canon is Eurocentric,
hetero, and white, queerness jokes with these places and theories, and with their
presumed universality. It also calls their heteronormativity into question. Decolo-
nial thinking denounces the processes of construction at work in this universality,
and it suspects these theories, demonstrating how the “colonial wound” expands
and takes on the imposition of a sex-gender system as an ontological determination
that installs itself in European colonies (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Suriaga 2011).
Meanwhile, queer theory makes possible a critique of history’s gazes as being
refracted through a heteronormative lens, interpreting the configuration of sex and
gender as part of the colonial project. Queer theory and decolonial thinking open
themselves to and believe in other bodies, histories, and theories.
Presumably, both queer theory (here, I am referring to the queer theory
being produced and reinvented in the global South) and decolonial thinking ought
to refute the tendency of traveling theories in which the global South supplies data
and experiences for the global North to theorize and transform into further export-
able theories (Connell 2010).
Queer theory and decolonial thinking either abdicate from or subvert con-
ceptual machinery that defines itself as universal and necessarily applicable; both
emerge from a place of contempt, ridiculing or denouncing theory and its preten-
tious universal applicability. In reality, both queer theory and decolonial criticism
must be affected by bodies and experiences, which leads to their propensity to
become caught up in the dilemmas of processes of translation. The term queer does
not have a direct translation in either Portuguese or Spanish, so when it arrived
in these parts, queerness already carried within it a necessity for translation, as
though the very difficulty of translating the term queer served as a telos for the
seemingly impossible—in other words, for translation itself. Decolonial thinking

also asserts the potency of other-theories, such as those of dissident and radical-
ized bodies. Some authors, for example, mention the construction of a “pluritopic
hermeneutics” with an intuition for perceiving the conflicts that originate in colli-
sions of cosmovisions while still recognizing and preserving other traditions and
ways of thinking (Mignolo 2000).
Thus queer theory and decolonial thinking configure themselves as open
areas of study, and they are defined exactly to the extent that they affect and are
affected by others. What makes the encounter between these theories probable and
fecund is that they are not modes of thinking closed in on themselves but opening
movements for others, movements of insertion in other-theories and in other forms
of thinking and being.
Queer theory and decolonial thinking are fields in construction, spaces of
confluence between the forces of bodies and of geopolitics. They are expressions
of colonial difference as manifest in bodies. These bodies are not simply time-
bodies but also space-bodies: they are bodies that are inveterate in certain spaces
(Mignolo 2008). Queer bodies are constituted according to colonial difference.
There is no way to separate abject bodies and dissident sexuality from geographic
location, from language, from history, and from culture. Queer theory is also a
politics of localization: both queer theory and decolonial thinking are embodied
theories.
Neither queer theory nor decolonial thinking professes a simple rejection
of theories from the global North: instead, they are ideas and practices, embodied
and localized, that denounce these geopolitical divisions and call them into ques-
tion, moving themselves in such a way as to both break with and recuperate theo-
ries, thereby producing something new (Stoler 1995). But—returning to a question
to which I have already alluded—what movements might a decolonial queer read-
ing design? And what potency would such movements have in identifying colonial
machinery’s capacity to act in reading concepts that travel, with all its silences and
obliterations?
Concepts and Their Voyages
Pierre Bourdieu (2002), writing about the circulation of ideas and the types of
voyages to which I have referred here, highlights a short passage written by Karl
Marx in the Communist Manifesto about texts circulating outside their original
context. Marx observes that German thinkers have a poor understanding of French
thinkers because they receive French texts—which are impregnated with political

conjunctures—as pure texts. Thereafter, Marx notes, German thinkers transform
the political agent that was present from the beginning into a transcendental sub-
ject. This is one aspect of the circulation of ideas, in all its dissonance. But there
are still other problems in the voyages of theories, and perhaps a meaningful issue
might be—as I have tried to formulate here—the fact that authors from “central”
countries export concepts and theories that, later, are applied independently of
local histories. This takes place to such an extent that, in the global South, there is
always the possibility of applying and replicating a theory that not only was unique
to other contexts but also was forged in a process of obliterating the experiences
of local histories. To think about this type of voyage and about the transit of ideas
and theories, a good example might be the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
Agamben’s influence and presence may be due to the scope of his under-
taking, given that he has dedicated himself to understanding the political life of
the West and to formulating a critique of Western metaphysics. In terms of the
former, he avails himself of four central and interwoven concepts: sovereign power,
bare life (homo sacer), the state of exception, and the concentration camp (Agam-
ben 1998, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006). According to Agamben, these concepts per-
meate Western politics and reach their maximum saturation in modernity.
To elucidate how states of exception were brought into being in republics
and constitutional states, Agamben analyzes the history of governments, passing
from the Roman Senate to the French Revolution, through both world wars, and up
to the events of September 11, 2001. However, Agamben’s sophisticated, erudite,
and historically extensive analysis of the origin and development of political and
legal thought in the West stands in stark contrast to his profound silence about
the history of colonization. Throughout his work, Agamben makes only fleeting
references to colonization, without stopping to examine concrete histories.10 In his
attempt to understand the political life of the West, Agamben never explores the
modes through which the geopolitical entity known as “the West” emerges through
the domination of others. In reality, Agamben elaborates his theoretical outline
(with concepts such as homo sacer, fields, sovereignty, and state of exception) with-
out references to colonialism or to critical interventions of struggles against colo-
nial oppression and against the imperial logic of control based on racial exclusion.
His body of work does not stop to examine specific histories or concrete social
circumstances of the present state of exception, of the relations of abandonment in
colonial structures, or the relations between colony and empire (Shenhav 2012).
This silence becomes even greater when we recall that Agamben developed his
theoretical contributions in a postcolonial context. Moreover, there is a relevant
body of literature of postcolonial authors, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak,

and Homi Bhabha, as well as the previously cited theory of coloniality of the global
North: one of the few theories to go against the grain of the geopolitics that divides
the world between North and South (Segato 2013).
How, therefore, can we explain how an erudite thinker with vast historical
knowledge might obliterate a significant part of the history that produced the con-
cepts fundamental to his theoretical output? The possible response to this inquiry
would lead us to localize Agamben’s work as being immersed in a Eurocentrism
that universalizes provincial theories (Chakrabarty 2000) and that limits its poten-
tial and capacity for perception to the horizon of the Western political tradition
(Kalyvas 2005). In this same sense, the silences and silencing(s) of Agamben’s
output can be contextualized in the context of coloniality: his theories are impreg-
nated by the apparatus and the logic that construct and reproduce Eurocentrism.
When Agamben forgets certain historical experiences, it is due to the actions
of an apparatus that defines Europe as both the primary model and as the de
facto center.
Despite this provincial character, we can recuperate concepts such as homo
sacer and the state of exception in order to aid our comprehension of the reality of
colonization, and of the politics of exclusion and abandonment that are so charac-
teristic of the colonial situation. Agamben examines how the state of exception has
become a permanent paradigm in Western democracies. As previously mentioned,
he explores the European genealogy of exception that articulates the relationship
between law and exception—a relationship that is essential to the state’s violent
practices—but he does not confront the relationships between colonialism and
imperialism that are so fundamental to understanding exception. This is espe-
cially true given that imperialism was the arena in which the state of exception was
implemented most systematically and violently. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, a time when European colonies occupied 85 percent of the world’s terri-
tory, political spaces appeared in which imperial powers implemented alternative
models of rules, making this context especially propitious for studies of sovereignty
(Fieldhouse 1967). Colonialism is one of the best examples for any theoretical
study of norms and exceptions, of the rule of law, and of emergencies, especially
because emergency was used as an elastic category throughout Europe’s colonies,

varying in events such as insurgencies. For example, in Olivier Le Cour Grand-
maison’s (2005) analysis of the French colonial experience in Algeria, he dem-
onstrates how judicial and military techniques of exception that developed in the
colony were later used to suppress class revolts in European metropolises. Grand-
maison concludes that any attempt to understand the “political matrix of power”
through the logic of exception must necessarily consider the state of exception from

a colonial perspective.
Bearing in mind Grandmaison’s formulation, would it not also be interest-
ing to investigate whether the colony might serve as a paradigm for modernization
in place of (and more appropriately than) the “concentration camp” (Eaglestone
2002)? And might the colonial concept of law be more adequate for understand-
ing the jurisprudence of emergency (Hussain 2003)? It would be interesting to
recall, as demonstrated by Hannah Arendt (1989), that concentration camps first
appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Boer Wars, a dis-
pute between colonizing countries over diamond and gold mines in what we now
know as South Africa. These camps remained active in South Africa and India
as a form of dealing with undesirables. The expression “protective custody,” later
used by the Third Reich, emerged at this time. As I have noted, concentration
camps, the jurisprudence of emergency, and homo sacer are all closely related to
processes of colonization.
What, then, would a queer decolonial reading be? What movements might
it design? Its efforts would seek to break with the apparatus and logic of colonial-
ity, to signal them in its movements, and to move away from them, while perceiv-
ing Agamben’s body of work—and its silence regarding colonial history—in the
context of coloniality. This effort would also direct itself toward altering concepts,
transforming them in such a way that they might produce something new, and
apply more broadly and in different ways. In this case, Agamben’s theory about
the state of exception and biopolitics in the West would be situated within the his-
tory of colonial relations, a theoretical-conceptual movement that would allow us
to identify the coloniality of power as a formative dimension in the West’s political
paradigm. This movement would be one of detachment, of breaking with Eurocen-
trism and its limits, and of inverting and modifying concepts, transforming them in
such a way and with such intensity as to make them produce something new, mak-
ing them speak more and in another way. And to say something more, it is worth
interpellating beyond the politics of localization and the place of enunciation, and
toward the corporality of these theories.
For example, Ronit Lentin (2006) explores specific forms of state-sanctioned

violence based on her work with survivors’ testimonies. The histories of women
survivors lead her to ask whether the category of homo sacer has gendered impli-
cations, and whether there might be a female equivalent in “bare life.” In other
words, might a femina sacra exist? The author concludes that a woman, when at
the mercy of sovereign power, exercises the function of vehicles for ethnic cleans-
ing, thereby becoming femina sacra: someone who can be killed, but not sacri-

ficed. Lentin follows the same directions as other analyses of feminicide, in which
women’s bodies become metaphors for nations and territories, and are placed at
the center of disputes (Segato 2006, 2014).
Here in the global South, various researchers have shown how colonial dif-
ference and the logic of coloniality act through a construction of what is human at
the expense of women, Black people, and queer bodies (Mignolo 2006). Agam-
ben’s work, however, does not question or consider social actors’ gender as part of
life; Agamben does not consider the homo sacer within the dimension of gender
or sexuality. There is also a disincarnation manifest in his analytic procedures:
Agamben operates by erasing his corporeal connection as researcher, maintaining
himself as separate from an incorporation susceptible to forcing or limiting him.
From this disincarnate, delocalized position, Agamben places himself in opposi-
tion to women, to queer bodies, to radicalized bodies, all rooted in a nontranspos-
able corporality.11 What appears by default, then, is Agamben’s masculine, West-
ern, and white condition. He is a subject without depth, distanced from incarnate,
incorporated subjects. He is distant because of his obliteration of his histories,
because of his lack of attention to the colonial differences that produce sexualized
and radicalized bodies.
This distance is constructed through analytic procedures that place them-
selves in opposition to the proposals of a decolonial queer way of thinking: that is
to say, in opposition to the conjunction of corporeal and localized theories. Deco-
lonial queer theory would therefore be a movement in search of eliminating this
distance, a movement that wagers on other experiences, bodies, and ways of know-
ing. Agamben’s movements in critiquing Western metaphysics reveal the difficulty
of making such an analysis from within the West itself.12 This difficulty speaks to
the preeminent necessity of opening other theoretical movements: a propensity of
decolonial queer theory through its investment in voyages, crossings, and paths
that pass through the experiences of the bodies that travel them, trans-localize
them, and derive from them, as well as in sophisticated forms of agencies.
Other Movements
The intention of the previous section was clearly not to create an exegesis of Agam-
ben’s work. I merely aimed to emphasize the possibilities of queer decolonial
readings, sketching out their embodied and localized theoretical movements. In
point of fact, these movements—which, as I have said, I am both proposing and
describing—are already prefigured in many different ways by multiple agents. For

example, we can recall authors who have based their work, first and foremost, on
postcolonial literature and subaltern studies (Hawley 2001); others who have been
more influenced by migrants and their relations to the coloniality of the United
States Empire, such as those engaged with Chicanx studies (Yarbro-Bejarano
1999; Perez 2003; Danielson 2009; Soto 2010); and authors who have interrogated
social formations as intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, such as
queer people of color studies (Muñoz 1999, 2006; Ferguson 2004; Johnson and
Henderson 2005). However, I would also like to highlight three contributions that I
consider fundamental in thinking of a decolonial queer theory, especially because
each of these examples has, in its own way, touched on the difficulty of critiquing
Western metaphysics from within the West.
The first contribution is that of María Lugones (1987, 2005, 2007, 2012),
who elaborates direct approximations between feminism and decolonial criticism.
Lugones carries out a reading of the relationship between colonizer and colonized
in terms of gender, race, and sexuality, proposing a rereading of capitalist moder-
nity within modern coloniality. She shows how the colonial imposition of gender
crosses through questions about ecology, economics, and government, as well as
relating to the spiritual world and to knowledge in general. Lugones recalls that
the Eurocentric colonial gender system produces nonhumans, such as Black and
indigenous women, who are represented neither by the universal category of woman
nor by the categories Indian and Black. Lugones involves herself in Aymara social
movements and cosmopolitics. In addition to presenting alternative ways of being in
the world, Aymara concepts permit a critique of the hardening of modern configura-
tions of gender, a critique of the coloniality of gender. Aymara cosmopolitics affects
Lugones’s (2011) thinking, an affectation that appears in her critique of the gener-
alizations of feminist theories and in her search to construct a decolonial feminism.
The second contribution is from Walter Mignolo (2007), who, for his part,
presents Guaman Poma’s decisive contribution to decolonial thinking. Poma was a
Quechua and Aymara Indian who, writing in Spanish, produced a long critique of
the harmful implications of Spanish colonization on Peru’s indigenous communi-
ties. Writing in the sixteenth century, Poma proposes a form of government and
management of the colony based on the perspective of the Inca Empire, framing
imperial and Western history both through local systems of thought and knowl-
edge and through colonial history. In Poma, Mignolo identifies the origin of the
“paradigm of coexistence” that proposes an epistemological-spatial-temporal (geo-
political) rupture in articulating a Spanish-Indian-African triad. Through this par-
adigm, Poma defended a horizontal form of organizing social institutions that ran
counter to the imperial model of power. Mignolo argues that Poma’s thinking was

as important for Andean people as Marxism was for critical emancipatory think-
ing after the Industrial Revolution. Experiences and theories like Poma’s allowed
Mignolo to formulate the concept of border thinking. In this sense, both Mignolo
(2007) and Lugones open themselves to other cosmopolitics and other forms of
knowledge, such as the saying that the decolonial option is a way of thinking that
arises from the experience of exteriority, in the borders created by Europe’s expan-
sion within the world’s diversity.
The cosmopolitics and forms of knowledge that interpellate queer theory
directly may be why one of the most important contributions in considering a deco-
lonial queer theory is through indigenous queer studies. Within this already rela-
tively extensive body of literature, the collection by Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley,
Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) stands out. In it, the edi-
tors bring together critical approaches centered on indigenous populations in order
to understand the lives and communities of gays, lesbians, transgender, queer, and
Two-Spirit people (GLBTQ2). The book’s objective is to provide inspiration for crit-
ical interventions in the re-imposition of native, queer, and indigenous studies. It is
composed as a dialogue among a group of activist academics who revise the history
of gay and lesbian studies in indigenous communities, and who simultaneously
forge a path for indigenous theories and methodologies. Many of the essays deal
with the possibilities of defining the LGBTQ2 acronym and delineating relations
that sometimes cause queer theory to become fetishized. The book’s organizers
look into how old descriptions became substituted by decades of organization and
writing by indigenous LGBTQ2 people. They also formulate insistent questions
about how queer and indigenous theory informs their work, how the promotion of
queer theory as “criticism without a subject” joins the efforts of indigenous studies
in centralizing indigenous forms of knowledge and in carrying out a critical inves-
tigation of colonialism (Driskill et al. 2011: 2).13 Driskill (2010: 86), a Cherokee
theoretician and activist, argues:
David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and Muñoz have asked, “What does queer
studies have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty,
and terrorism? What does queer studies tell us about immigration, citizen-
ship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights?” While these moves
in queer studies are creating productive theories, they haven’t addressed
the complicated colonial realities of Native people in the United States and
Canada. In an attempt to answer the questions posited above within specif-
ically Native contexts, Two-Spirit critiques point to queer studies’s respon-
sibility to examine ongoing colonialism, genocide, survival, and resistance

of Native nations and peoples.
These analyses emphasize the relationship between colonialism and sexuality,

as well as the link between colonial development and heterosexuality. Anchored
in erudite indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, the authors propose
a remodeling of native studies, queer studies, and transgender studies, and of
indigenous feminisms. The logic behind coloniality must be exposed, showing how
constructions of gender and sexuality intersect and are products of colonialisms,
framing the modern configuration of sex/gender as part of the colonial project.
Decolonizing implies queering (see, e.g., Smith 2010). The effect of indigenous
queer critiques is so significant that currently, in the United States, it is not viable
to study decolonial studies without approaching forms of colonization that are cur-
rently in progress in indigenous/native modes of surviving.
Approaching from the same direction as these theoretical movements (and
affected by these theoretical movements), I have also come across powerful other-
theories here in the global South. In Afro-Indigenous religious traditions, I have
seen that the modern configuration of masculine-feminine does not coincide with
the fluidity of sexual orientation and a model of sexuality marked by a transitivity
of genders beyond that which colonialist culture represents, without tying gender
to sexuality. I have perceived that decolonial queer theory passes through other
histories and through sophisticated other-theories of sexuality and the body.
Other-Theories
Speaking of voyages, someone traveling by bus to Santa Maria, in southern Brazil,

might, if they are lucky, encounter Cilene—a beautiful travesti14 —at the bus sta-
tion where she works as a custodian. From 2011 to 2015, I carried out research
with Martha Souza on the itineraries of travestis in the public health system (SUS)
of Santa Maria. It did not take us long to find a gap in assistance that demonstrated
the inadequacies of health services in attending to travestis. It was in this context
that we met Cilene. In addition to interviews, conversations, and shared correspon-
dence, Cilene insisted on writing her own story. Cilene’s story tells us something
about these dissident bodies, as well as about the possibilities of transit.
Born into a very poor family, Cilene was forced to leave school at a young
age. Her departure was hastened by the everyday violence to which her classmates
subjected her, as an “effeminate boy,” as well as by the sexual abuse that she
suffered at the hands of a school psychologist. Cilene’s physical transformation
was also very difficult: her family did not accept her, and she suffered frequent

condemnations and punishments, especially from her father. In the midst of these
conflicted relationships, which she did not know how to resolve, she had no option
other than to leave home to “live with other travestis.” However, she later tried to
return to her family’s home to care for her mother, who was “in poor health.”
Cilene attempted to return to her family for years, but the same conflicts
and her family’s continued repudiation of her nonconforming body never allowed
her. Her siblings believed that Cilene was a “freak,” and her father completely
rejected her, calling her “disgusting” and saying that any contact would be impos-
sible. Her body, which she insisted was “beautiful and desired on the street,” was
“freakish” to her family.
According to Cilene, her “street life” was not very different from that of the
other travestis in Santa Maria with whom she lived: she was surrounded constantly
by beatings, fights, drugs, alcohol, injuries, scars, robberies, and investigations
by the police, as well as insistent pressures from the “bosses of the block.” Yet
her street life was also a space for seeking support networks, especially among
Santa Maria’s other travestis. Cilene used hormones, which she injected on the
same street corner where she “made the rent”; she eventually got silicone implants
in her breasts with a locally known bombadeira.15 She still bears scars from this
procedure, which she calls her “whip marks,” as though these scars were also part
of constructing her body. Because of health problems, she stopped “working the
streets” in 2010.
Decades passed until Cilene—patiently, and by taking advantage of “time’s
work” (Das 2007)—was once again able to live with her mother, siblings, and
nieces and nephews. It was only after her father began to suffer from a debilitat-
ing illness that Cilene was able to return to her family home, this time protecting
the man who had imposed a regime of violence on her, and caring for someone
who had avoided all contact with her. Despite the fact that everyone in the house
persisted in calling her by the masculine name with which she had been baptized,
and the persistent conflicts that existed in the house, she found living with her
family to be possible after her father’s illness.
When Cilene describes her life, she highlights her love life and her fam-
ily. Her narratives of her experiences focus on her romantic adventures as a girl.
Based on her dissident body and her tenacity in claiming her ability to trans-
form it according to her desires, Cilene weaves together her worries about her
romances with concerns about her mother’s health, as well as with her capacity
for forgiveness, her cooking and cleaning, and the necessity of having patience.
Aside from her discourse insisting on her rights, Cilene also presents an obstinate
everydayness.

Cilene’s insistence on maintaining romances and familial relations, on liv-
ing in the everyday, and on recognizing the importance of waiting highlights the
agency of certain social actors who do not fit into typical notions of “agency.” Usu-
ally, notions such as patience and passion are more closely linked to passivity than
to resistance. Cilene’s “descent into the everyday,” however, shakes up preestab-
lished models of resistance; or rather, it presents other possible forms of conceiving
of these models. Different forms of dealing with exclusions and with the processes
of becoming an abject figure exist, and many of these forms distance themselves
from heroic models of resistance. Cilene also constructs a daily practice of trans-
formation: her agency is not found in heroism and in the extra-ordinary but in her
descent into the everyday, in her daily preparations of meals, her cleaning, and
her organization of chores, as well as in her persistent care for and cultivation of
her familial relations.
If the expression queer is a proud form of manifesting difference, inasmuch
as it can cause inversions in the chain of repetition that confers power to preexist-
ing authoritarian practices, there is something new in Cilene’s forms of action.
Through another grammar, Cilene expresses the discomforting and nonassimilable
differences of bodies and souls that dare to make themselves present. Cilene goes
out to the streets and participates in LGBT parades and in political actions that
highlight her pride in being a travesti. She reenacts the queer act of facing injury
and of turning injury into something positive. This, however, is only one part of her
agency. Cilene also overlooks her family’s insults of “freak” and creates spaces of
coexistence, allowing the passage of time and the process of waiting to make these
offenses obviously inappropriate. This transformation takes place within a game
of affectations and affects that reinvent forms of resistance. Here, another type of
agency exists (Mahmood 2001).
Cilene’s narrative signals a powerful theory of dealing with this tangle
of loves and desires, and of waiting and patience: “I’m a daughter of Oxum, the
orixá16 of fresh water, of health, of beauty, and of fertility. My body belongs to
Xapanã, the orixá of brooms, who sweeps negative and bad things far away, and
who brings us good things with his seven brooms. All I have do to is ask Him.”
By calling on Oxum to construct and give meaning to her female characteristics

and her desire to “be part of the family,” and on Xapanã to aid in her insistent
quest to solve other peoples’ problems, Cilene proposes other-theories to explain
her descent into the everyday. Her body belongs to Xapanã, the orixá of smallpox
and of all other skin diseases, who is responsible for causing illnesses, but also for
curing them. This alignment, which I cannot by any means claim to approach here
with the care that it deserves, signals an other-body that is different, produced by

other mediations, and that is both shaped by and conforms to other subjectivities.
These are bodies that are transformed by hormones and silicone, but that are also
“worked through with the drum beats” of Afro-Brazilian religion.
In the last two years, since returning to her mother’s house, Cilene has
worked as an employee of the Santa Maria bus station, cleaning both the men’s and
the women’s bathrooms. This possibility is justified by the myth in which “Xapanã
is the orixá of the broom, who sweeps negative and bad things far away.” In the
Santa Maria bus station, Cilene shuffles the terms man and woman, and anchors
her femininity in Oxum, and her agency in Xapanã. She inhabits a space of ambi-
guity in her everyday existence. This apparently ambiguous body cares for the
apparatus (the bathroom) that acts by omitting ambiguity.
Public bathrooms are institutions that the bourgeoisie brought into being,
and that became generalized in Europe during the nineteenth century (Preciado
2002). Though initially conceived of as spaces for managing human waste, they
became, during the twentieth century, watchtowers for gender. They serve bod-
ies recognized as fitting exclusively into a dualistic logic: “man and woman” and
“masculine and feminine” become the defining adjectives for the physical space
of the bathroom, and they configure these spaces, defining specific architectural
forms for each gender. As Preciado demonstrates, bathrooms evaluate the degree
to which bodies adhere to the standardized norms of masculinity and femininity.
When asked whether she herself uses the men’s or women’s room, Cilene
does not hesitate to answer: “The women’s, of course!” However, she still tran-
sits between both spaces. The company she works for had to conduct a “juridical
study” to avoid any “problems”: in this sense, sweeping and washing latrines can
also open the doors of the law.
As Cilene focuses on family, on caring, and on her loves, her narratives
are always accompanied by religious and philosophical incursions about the rela-
tion between myth and agency. Cilene accesses an Afro-Brazilian codex to situate
herself in the world;17 she also creates conditions in which she is able to wait for
decades in order to live in her “family’s house,” as though this codex and these
conditions were necessary in order to face the sobriquet “freak.”
Cilene exists in the apparatuses that produce “normal,” “hetero,” and

“nonambiguous” bodies. Between the bathrooms in the bus station in the middle of
the state of Rio Grande do Sul, she is referred to as Cilene—her “social name”—
which is a conquest that she has yet to attain in her own home. Transiting between
the fields of masculine and feminine, she signals that the architecture of bath-
rooms cannot encompass everyone. In this case, the apparatus for constructing
genders is cared for by someone whose very existence highlights the failings of this

apparatus and signals toward what can never be fully reached.
Cilene’s story addresses us in different ways, perhaps the most scathing of
which is the form in which it makes our vocabulary obsolete: terms like culture,
nature, tradition, and modernity seem to lose their habitual meanings. A modi-
fied body (modified both through sophisticated technologies and by back-alley
bombadeiras) belonging to a girl from the interior of Brazil; the management of
sophisticated forms of knowledge; and the construction of a grammar of gender and
sexuality that removes itself from compulsory heterosexuality: these are bodies
that reinvent biology.
The obsolescence of vocabulary challenges us to think about theories. As
we have seen, Cilene speaks about agency and deals with abjection in different
ways than those we are accustomed to reading about in either queer theory or
decolonial thinking. In addition, Cilene’s experiences show us that the construc-
tion of a dissident body is not the same everywhere, and that this construction is
also situated through other mediators and other bodies. Finally, Cilene presents
another form of describing the world, a movement through which she shows that,
beyond problems of representation, there are worlds that can vary and that cannot
be reduced to the global North’s canons of rationality.18
Faced with this interpellation, perhaps our central inquiry is not to show
how Cilene’s story corroborates a decolonial criticism, or to signal it as part of
queer theory, but to explore how these other-theories affect (in the strongest sense
of the word, through new forms of agency and reinventions of the body) decolonial
queer theory.19 Therefore, decolonial queer theory is not an application of exter-
nal categories formulated in the absence of stories like Cilene’s but movements of
approximation and of opening toward theories and experiences that allow these
forms of knowledge to affect and transform others. Any pretension of a decolonial
queer theory implies an opening toward these other-theories, an opening that must
take place in such a form and with such intensity as to be able to produce some-
thing new by the end of the voyage.
The End of the Voyage
Decolonial queer theory is therefore an encounter, a project, and a search. In

developing this article, I have signaled a few simultaneous movements of the con-
fluence and shock inherent in this encounter, and I have delineated key conceptual
landscapes. I have described theoretical scenarios while always traveling on voy-
ages of theories and their intersections. In this process, a heterogeneous group-

ing of theories and authors has emerged in an area in which the very concepts of
queerness and of decoloniality are still in dispute. Furthermore, these theories
recall a variety of authors and traditions that do not always coincide.
Decolonial queer theory is a theoretical possibility that passes through
our bodies, as well as through a politics of localization. Thinking as a sudaca,
as a bicha, 20 thinking with a “theory of the asshole” and from the “asshole of the
world”—to borrow Pelúcio’s (2014a) provocation—changes the texture of thought
and the form of thinking; it alters questions, investigations, and problems. To the
extent to which decolonial queer theory can produce something new, it does so by
dislocating theories, delineating other logics, epistemologies, and ontologies, and
causing them to emerge.
If this is truly the case, decolonial thinking must make queerness more
attentive to the existence of a matrix of power that operates by naturalized racial
and gender hierarchies; that allows for the reproduction of territorial and episte-
mological domination; and that obliterates experiences, forms of knowledge, and
forms of life. It is more vigilant than a structure that constructs and naturalizes a
hierarchy of thought, and it treads cautiously in the intimate relationships between
the epistemological and the colonial. Queer theory, for its part, shows how his-
tory has and continues to be written through hetero lenses; it shows that so much
exists beyond the division of masculine and feminine, beyond man and woman; it
presents other (re)inventions and possibilities of nonheteronormative sexualities;
it shows that colonial logic is masculine, hetero, and white. But all of this occurs
in simultaneous, related readings to the extent that queerness and decoloniality
form a single theoretical movement, expanding our capacity for comprehension and
perception.
Our challenge, then, is to read queer texts in a decolonial way, and—in the
same way and with the same intensity—to queer texts that elucidate decolonial
thinking. If the reading of bodies in the global South is always radicalized and
gendered, there is no way to act against the machine of coloniality by forgetting the
multitude of queer bodies. In this part of the world, the condition of being queer is,
equally, one of being decolonial. By stagnating ourselves in theory without being
affected by other-theories, queerness removes itself from its promised subversive

character.
In different moments throughout this text, I have shown that, from a deco-
lonial queer perspective, theory is not meant merely to be applied. Instead, our
search is to fustigate the pedagogy that advocates for simple adhesion to the canon
and affirms that the better we know and apply it, the more capable and (to use a
term that is currently very fashionable) productive we will be. Decolonial queer

theory disbelieves in this adhesion and signals its assumptions and its own geo-
political framing; it proposes a rereading of the global North’s theories in order to
revise them, bend them, scrutinize their silences and obliterations, and to make
them speak differently (as I have sought to show in my reading of Agamben). But
searching also implies writing other-theories, allowing apparently strange and
unfinished discourses, such as Cilene’s, to affect the texture of thought. I think
that the possibility of decolonial queer theory is linked to these investigations and
to these worlds.
However, the key question here is not whether decolonial queer theory might
pose questions to a shared, previously established theoretical framework (i.e.,
queerness and decoloniality) or elaborate the existence of a variety of responses
and forms of describing the world that ought to be collected, thereby augmenting
their repertory and potential. Rather, the central question is how opening toward
other-theories, such as Cilene’s, presents the possibility of encounters with other
questions and other worlds (and other bodies), to the extent that, as I have empha-
sized here, the political is not merely epistemological but also ontological. In any
case, neither queer theory nor decolonial thinking can serve as a mold for encap-
sulating these other-theories, these other histories.
Decolonial queer theory would therefore be composed of these movements,
of itineraries in construction that are always open to other-theories. This opening
highlights the centrality of the processes of translation, with the task of revising
those epistemological categories that seek to universalize themselves through pro-
cesses of unidirectional translation, thereby destabilizing preconceived notions.
We can therefore come to understand translation as a process of transforming ori-
gin and destiny, and transforming concepts that travel.
This is how a queer decolonial theory emerges: it moves closer to these
other-theories through its propositions of reading histories (other-histories)
and other elaborations of agency, other reconstructions of bodies and sexualities,
and other investigations of the naturalized hierarchies of knowledge. It indicates
the silencings and obliterations of the theories of the global North, making them
speak in another way. As I have said, this is a possibility, a search in this encoun-
ter of theories that travel. It is a provisional encounter, instable and disturbing,

that makes these voyages of theories and concepts possible, in all their disso-
nances, problems, and potentials. It is provisional because, in the words of José
Saramago (1997), “the end of one voyage is only the beginning of another,” since
“the voyage never ends.”

Notes
Translated by Raphael Soifer. This article is a substantially reworked and revised

version of one that appeared in Portuguese in the Brazilian journal Contemporânea.
1. On the question of translation, see Lugarinho 2001, Rivas 2011, Sancho 2014, and
Pelúcio 2014b.
2. Here, I am thinking of such authors as Bento 2014, Miskolci 2014b, Pelúcio 2014a,
and Colling 2015.
3. For an article analyzing how queer theory is produced, how it circulates, and how it is
read in an Anglophone context, see Miskolci and Pelúcio 2017.
4. See the concept of diasporic ethnography in Ochoa 2014.
5. This passage was inspired by María Lugones’s concept of world-traveling, as found in
Lugones 1987.
6. I have been very inspired by several decolonial authors. As it is impossible to cite
them all, I name the following: Mignolo 2000, 2008; Walsh 2004, 2009; Castro-
Gomez 2007, and Segato 2013, 2014.
7. Examples include Hawley 2001, Perez 2003, and Canfield 2009. Approximations
between feminism and decolonial criticism can be found in Lugones 2005, 2007,
2011, 2012. For an analysis of the difference between postcolonial and decolonial
thinking, see Grosfoguel 2006.
8. On elaborate critiques of coloniality starting from Latin America and the Caribbean,
see Mignolo 1998.
9. On the question of translation, see Lugarinho 2001, Rivas 2011, Pelúcio 2014a, and
Sancho 2014. To accompany an analysis of translation and the travels of theories, see
Möser 2013.
10. Agamben (2002, 2006) makes oblique mentions of colonization and of colonial prison
camps, specifically the Spanish colonization of Cuba and the British colonization of
South Africa (Shenhav 2012). Beyond this, in his essay “Metropolis,” he examines the
tropes of colonial and postcolonial analysis (Svirsky and Bignall 2012). But that is all.
11. I am indebted here to the theoretical movements of Donna Haraway (2007).
12. This may be why Roberto Esposito (2010: 117), the Italian philosopher, affirms: “I
believe that a critical and self-critical image of the West can come to us only from
outside the West, from a conceptual language that does not coincide with the West’s
own and whose specificity lies precisely in its difference from the West.”
13. To accompany how indigenous queer theorists have affected work relating to indig-
enous sexuality in Brazil, see Fernandes and Arisi 2017.
14. Travesti is a form of self-designation and will not be translated in this article. Accord-
ing to Pelúcio (2009), in Brazil, travestis are people who seek to construct their bodies
through materials and symbols understood as social markers of femininity.
15. An amateur cosmetic surgeon: literally, a “pumper.”
16. Orixás are divinities associated with Afro-Brazilian religions.

17. Segato (1998) defines the Afro-Brazilian religious codex as the grouping of repeated
and embodied themes and motives in the interaction between divinities in this pan-
theon. These themes and motives can also be found in patterns of social interaction, in
ritual practices, and in informal conversation.
18. Consequently, political demands are not merely epistemological but also effected
through an “ontological politics” (Mol 1998).
19. Within trans* studies—such as in Jay Prosser’s work—there is a strong critique of
queer theory using trans* peoples’ stories as examples of the instability of gender. I
do not have space to discuss the theme here, but detailed critiques can be found in
Prosser 1998. Mauro Cabral (2003) considers it indispensable to introduce the articu-
lation of trans* theories and politics that both interpellate crystallized narratives and
also introduce a demand for sexual citizenship in the first person.
20. Bicha, like queer, is used both pejoratively and as a term of self-affirmation for people
of nonconforming gender and sexual identities. Its closest equivalent in American
English would be somewhere between queen and faggot.
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REFLECTING ON

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Of Theories and Voyages

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The proliferation of new languages produces the sentiment of discomfort

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of colonial forms of domination even after colonial administrations officially ended.

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current formulations appear to be suspect. Queerness—embraced by a multi-

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Concepts and Their Voyages

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because emergency was used as an elastic category throughout Europe’s colonies,

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For example, Ronit Lentin (2006) explores specific forms of state-­sanctioned

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These analyses emphasize the relationship between colonialism and sexuality,

Speaking of voyages, someone traveling by bus to Santa Maria, in southern Brazil,

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By calling on Oxum to construct and give meaning to her female characteristics

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Cilene exists in the apparatuses that produce “normal,” “hetero,” and

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The End of the Voyage

Decolonial queer theory is therefore an encounter, a project, and a search. In

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affected by other-­theories, queerness removes itself from its promised subversive

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ter of theories that travel. It is a provisional encounter, instable and disturbing,

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Translated by Raphael Soifer. This article is a substantially reworked and revised

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(Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia), 1 – 8. reconstruyendoelpensamiento

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Guasch, Óscar. 1998. La sociedad rosa. Barcelona: Anagrama.

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For example, Ronit Lentin (2006) explores specific forms of state-sanctioned

affected by other-theories, queerness removes itself from its promised subversive