[ONLINE] University of Aveiro, Portugal

October 21, 22 and 23 2020

Intersectionality and Orientalism: Towards A Chinese Decolonial Queer Perspective

Romão Matheus Neto
Regiane Ribeiro

Since the 1990s, important queer reflections about gender and sexuality have been reworked in search of epistemologies and knowledge produced by/for/on identities that were deemed unintelligible and abject by a virtue of performative acts that entails a compulsory order between sex-gender-desire. Through these categories of analysis, any binary scope between sex/gender and nature/culture is rearranged, in a way that they are perceived as results of irregular relations based on power structures and its cultural, social, political, and economic citational acts. Nevertheless, if the intersectionality between race and culture is not considered, such studies can propose alternatives built on euroamerican and individualist models. For this reason, this paper seeks to delineate brief notes on the definition of theoretical dynamics of culture, gender, and race through a Chinese decolonial critique. Therefore, we discuss the concept of Orientalism (SAID, 1979), coloniality (QUIJANO, 2009; BALLESTRIN, 2007), as well as the definitions of intersectionality (CRENSHAW, 1994; PEREIRA, 2019). At last, we present Xiang’s (2018) transdualist perspective as a non-Western tool to comprehend sex/gender, as well as its relationships with discursivity and materiality.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; orientalism; decoloniality; transdualism; gender.