Histórias / Stories

In Brazilian Portuguese, encruzilhada means crossroads. But the encruzilhada is much more than that. At the encruzilhada , ordinary life meets the divine. Anyone in Brazil (even the most devout Christian) will, at some point in their life, leave an offering at the encruzilhada . They are trying to reach an ambiguous entity that does not care whether the human believes in the patriarchal god or belongs to the African Brazilian religion. Exu cares only about the offer made a

A Terceira Margem do Rio (Rosa, 2001) was written by João Guimarães Rosa, one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers. His work is full of regional and popular references, and his language is heavily grounded in Brazilian orality and neologisms, making his writing virtually impossible to translate (at least with some fidelity to the original meaning). Despite that, he was widely published outside Brazil. You can read this particular tale in French and English. [1] In the short

Once, Exu was challenged to choose between two gourds for a trip to the market. One gourd contained goodness, while the other held evil. One represented medicine, and the other, poison. One was associated with the body, and the other with the spirit. One was what is visible, while the other was the unseen. One was spoken word, and the other represented what would never be said. Exu immediately asked for a third gourd. He opened all three and mixed the contents of the first tw

I really love the idea, from Lucas Cassidy Crawford (2008), that we are “too much to be perceived” (p. 140). The author co-opts the tangible invisibility of trans, queer, and non-binary people and transforms our journey through life into something mysterious, magical, and complex enough to unsettle a cis-White-normative understanding of any queer identity. For me, the way he puts it is like being a witch, a fairy, Exu , a Pombagira [1] , or any enchanted creature that comes

Last weekend I was in Toronto for the Nuit Blanche. This event spans an entire night (7 pm to 7 am), during which you can visit a multitude of art events, installations, performances, and shows, all linked by the year's central theme (this year, “reading the city through art”). My dear and brilliant friend Renata Moreira was one of the curators. As she is a queer art curator, I was certain that her work would have some impact on my dissertation, but I was not expecting it to

What is research? Where is research needed or even allowed? How can we build (inclusive and communal) knowledge relationally and remain relevant? Where to be considered relevant is, in fact, relevant nowadays? Since the beginning of my research, I have been trying to find a way to talk with people and to learn from them without necessarily taking from them. “How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates between power—which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying

I have been a creative person since I was a child. However, at the beginning of this project, I intended to go entirely theoretical. You know? Being serious for the first time (irony here…) and playing the “real” scholar. Years ago, a colleague told me, “What you do is philosophy, not science.” Another colleague said, about the political implications of my research field, “Pamphleteering is not science.” Today, I can formulate an answer for that in my mind: “What I do is art.

I believe that knowledge is an endless journey. We learn from the moment we are born until the day we close our eyes for the last time. This is why it is essential to cultivate humility throughout our lives—so we do not miss any opportunity to recognize what we do not yet know and learn from it. We learn from our own experiences and from others’ when we are open to listening. Regarding gender, I gain valuable insights from my own lived experiences. Still, I learn even more b

Yesterday, I went to a concert. A dear friend invited me to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, which is, in fact, a school. The concert featured three pieces of contemporary music performed by a small orchestra of all students. The first piece, composed by a grad student of the institution, was being played for the first time that day. I was expecting some kind of “classical”, maybe with more rhythm, but never something that could sound entirely new (and strange…). T