Race, sexuality and performativity

notes for an interpellation of Queer Theory

Abstract

This article aims to articulate a theory of sexual and gender dissidence that considers not only gender and sexual orientation, but also race, since in Brazil and other colonized contexts, race is the basis of the experience of abjection. This work is eminently theoretical. I used, as theoretical-methodological and conceptual assumptions, Queer Theory, especially Performativity Theory, and the study carried out by Berenice Bento, which demonstrated that, in colonized contexts, and especially in the brazilian context, enslaved Black people were treated based on abjection. This article also showed, from a historicized analysis, that the racist bases present in the colonial period remained after the end of slavery and the end of the colonial period. From this, I showed that transviados studies need to consider the anteriority of the racial marker, because there exists, as a legacy of slavery, a "race habitus". I further proposed that black LGBTQIA+ people are affected by a double performativity, racial and gender-based, whereas white people are affected only by gender performativity. That being said, it is clear that race is a marker prior to other social markers, and that it is essential for transviados studies to be constituted by this prior presence.