Decolonising Queer Politics: Queer Epistemologies, Body–Territory, and Sexual Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This panel brings queer politics in Latin America and the Caribbean into dialogue with gender and politics literatures on citizenship, coloniality, and the making of political subjects. It starts from the premise that sexuality and gender are governed through historically uneven regimes—law, policy, policing, morality, and cultural authority—yet are also remade through insurgent epistemologies and embodied collective life. The panel foregrounds how Global North categories and timelines of ‘progress’ can misrecognise local identities and strategies, obscuring the region’s own conceptual vocabularies and political genealogies—from travesti worlds and Black feminist legacies to decolonial reworkings of desire and community. It also attends to variation across states and institutions, especially in the Caribbean, where similar colonial inheritances have produced sharply different legal trajectories and activist openings. By linking rights struggles to spaces of pleasure and cultural practice, and to radical projects that connect sexual dissidence with broader transformations of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, the panel argues that queer politics is not a niche domain but a crucial lens on democracy, belonging, and whose lives are made liveable.

Title	Details
Queer Communism: Perspectives from Latin America	View Paper Details
LGBTQ+ Rights in the Caribbean	View Paper Details
Beyond the Global North Gender and Sexuality Categories: The Travesti Identity in Brazil	View Paper Details
Reclaiming Body-Territory in the Carnival of Olinda: Feminist Blocos and the Politics of Desire	View Paper Details
Between Amefricanidade and Transfeminism: Legacies and Discontinuities of Black Feminist Thought in Contemporary Brazilian Politics	View Paper Details