Quir Research Hub

Coord: Helder Thiago Maia

Queer Studies | Literature | Interarts | Performance

Description

Quir Research Hub consists of a transdisciplinary community of scholars working within the wider domain of gender and sexuality studies, with a particular focus on literary and cultural studies, performance, and representation. Our commitment lies in producing meaningful cultural analysis and institutional action, advancing theoretical, critical and educational solutions, while fostering connections between different institutions.

By mobilizing the term quir (evoking the more radical, phonetic transposition of cuir in Latin America), in its unsteady interactions with the better known term “queer” (often used as a synonym to the acronym LGBTQIA+, especially in Europe and the U.S.), we mean to signal our commitment to insubordinate epistemologies and traditions of knowledge-production from within the global south, as they enliven and trouble worldviews and social practices entrenched in the western tradition, and thus, in the violent histories of colonialism – including Portugal’s own (Sutherland, 2009; Lugarinho, 2013; de Perra, 2012; Pelúcio, 2014). We thus stand in coalition with other peripheral (and semi-peripheral) zones of knowledge-production, in a commitment to foster a more heterogeneous, intersectional, and transdisciplinary perception of the power structures and cultural patterns these various contexts bear witness to.

Formulae such as that of sexual dissidence (Dollimore, 1991) and gender disobedience (Serano, 2007) speak to the epistemological complexity of transnational insurrectional critical practices in the area of gender and sexuality studies. We depart from a recognition of this plurality of perspectives, and of the crucial heterogeneity of the field itself, as well as a responsibility to situate our own intervention in the context of late-stage capitalism, colonialism, globalization, white supremacy, patriarchy, ecological and economic extractivism, and cisheteronormativity.

While queer studies emerged primarily from English and Comparative Literature departments in the United States, across the 1980s and early 1990s, we are aware of the field’s structural invisibilization in Portugal, where it has scarce financial and institutional support – despite a range of important contributions to the field (Almeida, 2004; Amaral, 2001; Santos, 2006; Cascais, 2004). With our work, we hope to help transform that state of affairs, and re-center gender and sexuality as crucial categories of analysis across a range of disciplinary contexts - including literary, artistic, and cultural studies. Likewise, we hope to give visibility to Portuguese academic research in the field of queer studies.

Principles and theoretical-methodological approach:

QUIR Research Hub will operate as a platform for bringing together a varied network of scholars, activists, and artists, to collectively reflect on the complex relations between gender, sexuality, race and power, and their constitutive interdependence as social phenomena. We are particularly interested in the queer experience, both philosophically speaking (as a conceptual figure) and on a more material level (as a mode of embodiment), while holding space for other forms of sexual dissidence and gender disobedience. Thus, our emphasis lies on 1) representation (in film, literature, media, etc.), 2) performance (performativity and identity-formation) and social practices (activism, creative praxis, political praxis, etc).

The following principles inform our methodological and theoretical standpoint:

This intersectional inquiry is necessarily built in conversation with other critical traditions founded on the resistance to dominant systems of oppression, including (but not limited to) feminism, lesbian and gay studies; post-colonial and decolonial studies; critical race studies; disability studies and crip theory, and mad studies; animal studies and ecocriticism; migration studies, and the various ways in which kinship and solidarity are performed and constructed in minority discourses:
To elaborate on an extant archive of Portuguese (and Portuguese-language) LGBTQIA+ studies, contributing both to its promotion and to its ongoing elaboration, and thus challenging - and placing into perspective - the anglocentric economies of representation that dominate queer theory and queer politics. The aim would be to establish connections between different Portuguese-language theoretical and cultural archives, from a transnational and comparative perspective;
We recognize that the work of queer critical labor is not possible without an ongoing conversation with the feminist theory (and women’s studies) which in large part granted queer theory with its historical conditions of possibility. Thus, we continuously call attention to the necessary interface between queer theory and various traditions within feminist critique, including transfeminism, Black feminism, postcolonial and decolonial feminism, and gender studies;
We depart from a comparative, intercultural framework that interweaves different theoretical, cultural, and linguistic locations to produce an in situ reflection, indebted to the politics of location (Rich, 1984) of our own intervention, and to the specific histories of feminist, transfeminist, and queer critical praxis in Portugal. We believe that by intertwining a connective mesh across multiple institutional sites, we can produce both a theoretically grounded description of the Portuguese context, and a situated critique of the exclusions often enacted by dominant discourses within gender and sexuality studies – often preponderantly focussed on the Global North;
Autofiction, autotheory and autobiography have figured heavily in the history of queer studies and queer theory. Their importance for feminist critique has likewise been recognized, including their deployment in experimental modes of critical inquiry (Fournier, 2022). Recognizing a need for the constitution of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), we believe a focus on these different formats and approaches can help frame the differences between a) so-called “specialized knowledge” and personal experience, b) academic production and the more informal forms of collective knowledge (including oral history and non-academic archives, eg. Cvetkovich, 2003), and c) “high culture” (including the literary canon), various countercultures, and pop culture - along with quotidian experiences and interpretations;
We define texts in their broadest acception, referring to a wide range of cultural materials, emphasizing an inter-arts disciplinary approach that places different artistic disciplines (as well as non-artistic domains of cultural production) in critical dialogue. Departing from an understanding of literature as “an expanded field” (Garramuño, 2012) and from the concept of “post-autonomous literature” (Ludmer, 2010), we intend to place literature itself in perspective, in its interactions with other cultural practices. Taking a cue from queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), we recognize texts as spaces of interaction, which empower the critical examination of common frameworks of lived experience, and which enable the transformation of structures of domination and discipline.

Activities

Publications

D´Amico, Marzia. (2024). el Gasometro: a gender perspective on the Ostiense District in Rome, People, Spaces and Places in Gendered Environments (vol 34), ed. by Vasilikie Demos & Marcia Texler Segal (Emerald Press), pp. 35-53. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620240000034003
Maia, Helder Thiago (2024). Donzelas guerreiras: mulheridade, transgeneridade e guerra. Salvador: Devires.
Matias, Joana (2024). "Cravos cor-de-rosa: notas para o lugar das dissidências sexuais e de género na história da Revolução". Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 133. Doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/11pr2
Semedo, Luísa (2024). Luta AfroQueer: as sementes de Amílcar Cabral. Revista Crioula, 34. Doi: https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1981-7169.crioula.2024.232301

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Quir Research Hub

Coord: Helder Thiago Maia