Colonialities and Genders: dissidences, resistances and struggles against extermination

Organizers:
Fabrício Ricardo Lopes (Universidade Federal do Acre) - fabricio.lopes@ufac.br
Helder Thiago Maia (Universidade de Lisboa) – heldermaia@edu.ulisboa.pt
João Manuel de Oliveira (Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa) - joao.oliveira@iscte-iul.pt
Yarlenis Ileinis Mestre Malfrán (Universidade Federal do ABC) - malfran.yarlenis@ufabc.edu.br

Abstract:
The shift in focus brought by the concept of coloniality (Quijano, 2000), highlighting the lingering effects of colonial transits and their impacts on both colonized and colonizer worlds, even after independence, has enabled the development of knowledge and practices related to the sex-gender system (Lugones, 2008). Several working hypotheses emerged, bringing critical fabulations (Hartman, 2008) about how gender and sexuality practices were experienced from positions that existed previously and resisted against a sexual and political gender order imposed in those places (Spivak, 2021).
Colonialism, alongside power and knowledge, also asserted itself through methods such as burnings at the stake, exile, forced internments, and imprisonments, which disarticulated and colonized traditional systems as well as local gender and sexuality norms and practices. Furthermore, it operated by organizing material spaces, producing compartments, as Fanon (1968) pointed out, and establishing criteria on which bodies have the right to occupy certain territories.
As Lugones (2008) reminds us, the idea of a civilizing mission was nothing more than a euphemism for colonial biopolitics that sought control over bodies to keep the colonial capitalist machine running. In this game of euphemisms and distribution of violence, organized through the imposition of christianity and positivist scientific racism, differences between the colonial order and the gender and sexuality practices of colonized countries were used as points of power exercise and subjugation, often resorting to the “pedagogies of cruelty” (Segato, 2018). As Karina Bidaseca (2011) points out, racism and coloniality constitute the gender relations of the present, forming colonial grammars that still persist.
The eurocentric and anglocentric perspectives were organized around a scientistic logic, which, under the guise of supposed universality, neutrality, and scientific truth, produced knowledge that legitimized subalternities, hierarchies, and violence, as well as genocides and epistemicides. As a result, the colonial order of gender and sexuality was transformed into a field of subjectivation, though not without tensions, challenges, and resistance from those who fought for independence and assumed power. The independent countries, almost all positivist and liberal, embraced the colonial order as a civilizational ideal and continue to fulfill the “dreams of extermination” (Giorgi, 2004) of the colonized, particularly trans and cis women, Indigenous and Black people, and gender and sexual dissidents. The coloniality of gender and sexuality, wrapped in the political grammar of racism, represents the colonial dream that neverended. Thus, as Fanon (1968) pointed out, to understand these multiple forms of violence, it is
necessary to undertake a comprehensive review of the entire colonial situation.
The peripheries of the modern/colonial world system, however, are not completely captured by the norm. Rather, they constitute spaces of mockery, parody, and disobedience to gender norms (Oliveira, 2017). In this sense, the dissident Latin American gender knowledge is relevant, as it allows us to rethink another ontology—as transit, as becoming, as potency. This knowledge turns the norm inside out, as proposed by viviane vergueiro (2018), when she highlights the need to study cisgender as a decolonial possibility, which means understanding how cisgender bodies have their normality produced and their humanity guaranteed; while this same cisgender norm excludes trans, travesti, and gender-dissident people from the realm of intelligibility of what counts as human.
In dialogue with decolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial perspectives, the dossier Colonialities and Genders: dissidences, resistances, and struggles against extermination expects articles, essays, poems, and visual essays that articulate, from Latin America and Africa, discussions around:
- The concept of gender and sexuality as part of colonial epistemology;

- Dissident practices against the colonial order of gender and sexuality;
- The coloniality of gender and the independence struggles of colonized countries;
- Resistances, continuities, and internalizations of the colonial gender order;
- Gender and coloniality in scientific discourse, literature, cinema, and other arts;
- Counter-hegemonic practices of gender and sexuality decolonization;

- Subaltern and subjugated knowledges; - And other possible themes.

Timeline:
Submission deadline: December 30, 2025
Publication estimate: July 2026

References:
BIDASECA, Karina. “Mujeres blancas buscando salvar a mujeres color café: desigualdad, colonialismo jurídico y feminismo postcolonial”. Andamios, v. 8, n. 17, p. 61-89, 2011.
FANON, Franz. Os condenados da terra. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1968.
GIORGI, Gabriel. Sueños de exterminio: homosexualidad y representación en la literatura argentina contemporánea. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004.
LUGONES, María. “Colonialidad y Género”. Tabula Rasa, n. 9, p. 73-101, 2008.
HARTMAN, Saidiya. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, n. 26 p. 1-14, 2008.OLIVEIRA, João Manuel de. Desobediências de gênero. Salvador: Devires, 2017.
QUIJANO, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”. In: LANDER, Edgardo. La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000.
SEGATO, Rita. Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Spivak, GAYATRI C. (2021). Pode a subalterna tomar a palavra? Lisboa: Orfeu Negro, 2018.
VERGUEIRO, viviane. Sou travesti: estudando a cisgeneridade como uma possibilidade
decolonial. Brasília: Padê Editorial, 2018.