This special session examines and questions the constructs of gender in literatures written in Portuguese. The panel emphasizes intersectional approaches that shed light on how contemporary literature engages with gendered historical constructs and how experiences of race and sexuality intersect with experiences of gender. The session will offer an understanding of how literatures written in Portuguese have historically marginalized the voices of women, queer, and trans peoples, and how contemporary writers aim to correct for these earlier experiences of invisibility. Through presentations that vary in terms of geography, time periods, literary styles, and theoretical approaches, this panel will engage with questions of representation, access, agency, and belonging at the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. The distinct case studies offered by the panelists will enrich understanding of how writers conceive of an represent gender in the Portuguese language, whether in a transatlantic context or a specifically Brazilian one. By examining how literary texts strive to represent the lived and affective experiences of peoples often absent from the official historical record, this session engages with the topics and questions raised by the 2025 Presidential Theme of “Visibility.”

The panelists in this session will build on a growing bibliography on intersectional approaches to gender in Lusophone literatures. In the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars like Peggy Sharpe, Marta Peixoto, and Cristina Ferreira-Pinto focused their attention on gender and feminism within Brazilian literature. Their work drew attention to overlooked writers like Nísia Floresta, Maria Firmina dos Reis, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, and Hilda Hilst, among others. Ferreira-Pinto’s work also emphasized desire and the body as she thought of gender and sexuality together. This approach becomes more evident in the important 2002 volume edited by Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas, Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-speaking World. This study began to establish connections and comparisons across Portuguese-speaking communities, a methodology continued in the volume Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections, edited by Hilary Owen and Anna Klobucka. In a 2019 special dossier for the Journal of Lusophone Studies, Klobucka and co-editor César Braga-Pinto amplified studies that highlighted queer and trans voices and agency. Recent studies by Daniel F. Silva, Maria José Somerlate Barbosa, and Ana Paula Ferreira, among others, have continued to explore the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality within Lusophone cultures and literatures with an interest in how contemporary manifestations relate to earlier experiences of Portuguese imperialism and colonialism from the fifteenth century through the twentieth.

This session’s panelists expand beyond this existing literature by integrating concepts of “escrevivência” and “amefricanidade” emerging from Black feminisms in Brazil, as well as of global feminist, queer, and trans theoretical perspectives. The session will consist of four presentations of 12 to 14-minutes each, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion at the end of the session. The session presider will keep introductions short and carefully document the time to ensure this period of conversation. The panel presentations will follow a chronological order, beginning with how recent works engage with historical figures and events from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and continuing with presentations on the contemporary moment. Lanie Millar will begin by examining the historical depictions of Rainha Ginga in colonial accounts before tracing how the figure of Ginga continues to circulate in contemporary cultural texts with the potential to untangle her power as a Black woman from colonial dynamics. The second presenter, Patrícia Baialuna de Andrade, will similarly consider how a contemporary novelist, Eliana Alves Cruz, reimagines the colonial past through narratives that emphasize the affective and lived experiences of enslaved Black women in Brazil. Next, Benjamin Legg draws our attention to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with an analysis of how writers like Marceline Freire, Joca Reneirs Terron, and Chico Felitti depict the queer experiences of São Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro in alternately decadent and utopic lenses. The session will end with Carolina Bonansea’s close reading of sickness, childhood, and lesbian desire in a short story by contemporary Brazilian writer Natalia Borges Polesso. The panelists include scholars from Brazil, Argentina, and the United States at diverse ranks, including a graduate student, an early career assistant professor, a teaching-line professor, and a mid-career scholar. The disciplinary backgrounds of the panelists vary from comparative literature to Latin American studies to Brazilian literature. Together, these presenters will think through the visibilities of gendered labor, women of color, and queer voices in literature written in Portuguese.