There’s no such thing as a final truth

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 by engaging with my students, attending insightful classes, and forming meaningful connections with diverse people across several environments and cultures. What I learned in life contrasted with the rules that colonial institutions, family, religion, and even progressive educational and social environments tried to teach me about gender.

The current epistemology, which is directly inherited from the coloniality of knowledge, limits our understanding of gender by viewing various aspects of gender markers as inherently interconnected. For example, biotype, performance, sexuality, and affection must align for someone to be deemed acceptable in our “coherent” society, even if that person identifies as queer. A poignant example comes from a close friend of mine who was called “viadinho”[1] at a very early age because he was small, sensitive, and very sweet. By the time he was old enough to understand what “viadinho” meant, he was already accustomed to that label, trapped in an identity with little chance of escape. Upon joining the queer community, he realized that many young men shared similar experiences, and he finally found a sense of belonging. In this case, the social and cultural demands limited his horizon of perception, placing him in a bubble that (kind of) made him acceptable. Acceptability (even at a limited level) is linked to coherence: your gender performance must align with your sexuality and affectivity, and you must choose your clothing, friends, and places you go according to the identity that makes the rest of the world more comfortable. If you are a viadinho, you must socialize, dress, and love as a viadinho. It works the same whether you are a woman, a man, or another queer identity.

To break free from this dominant notion of “coherence,” we must make a leap that our current epistemology is not prepared to support. It is essential to expand our understanding of gender and to recognize the diverse arrangements that exist in real life. These arrangements are often stifled by a system that demands certain behaviours, political alliances, and epistemological links both within and beyond normative expectations. A disruptive leap is necessary to embrace the many identities, combinations, and possible coalitions still constrained by our colonial heritage. This type of disruptive leap in recognizing the complexity of reality has become more frequent in our time due to increased access and exchange of knowledge and interpersonal experiences, and it can be expanded by opening our field to unevaluated sources, rethinking validation systems and unbracing complex relationships between oppositions.

To demonstrate this type of leap and its potentialities, I would like to begin with a citation from Nat Trotman’s article, “The Burning Between: Androgyny/Photography/Desire” (1999), which I referenced in my 2015 master's thesis. I will also demonstrate graphically what this explanation means:

“In geometry, two points exist on the order of the linear,

and the introduction of a third allows for the planar. This third point, however, must not be realized in terms of the first two but must exist in a perpendicular relationship to the line they create as an outlier to the set that the first two points comprise.

Androgyny must be visualized in these terms: Male and female are two points that create a linear dialectic; if androgyny is seen as a blend of gender characteristics falling on the line they form, then it is no liberation from the terms set by gender. To create a planar notion of gender, in which any number of gender roles can be fashioned, androgyny must stand apart from gender as we know it, subverting the patriarchal institutions of gender definition by lying wholly outside of them. Androgyny, therefore, must be located in a place outside of traditional, patriarchal discourse and its objective, rational, linear worldview. It must align itself with the subjective, the irrational, the realm of pleasure” (Trotman, 1999, pp. 384-385).

By breaking with the idea that androgyny is the blend of feminine and masculine, Trotman redefines androgyny as a subversion of gender norms and a challenge to the very concept of gender itself. By proposing androgyny as an alternative to the traditional binary gender system, the author manages to step outside lazy simplifications but still finds themself limited by the three points that define what gender studies already accept. While androgyny can be a revolutionary concept, it may not be enough to fully encompass the vast range of bodily expressions, affections, political arrangements and knowledge-building possibilities that we see in our rapidly changing world.

After I finished my master's degree, my life was transformed. I realized that the academic work and research meant more to me than just earning a title. It changed the way I understand myself, the way I perceive others, and the way my affections allow me to connect with others. It changed my personal and collective self. And one day, in a semiotic class, my research and life were transformed again by my contact with others.

I was discussing my research with a kind professor, and when I presented a diagram of planar gender, he asked what was happening outside the three lines.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/a77505_b3b66cb31eb14791b0b43afab8213f4f/480p/mp4/file.mp4

The decisive moment

This question sparked my feminist curiosity (Hemmings, 2012) and led me to investigate what lies beyond the three recognized subjects of gender studies (masculine, feminine, and deviant). It took me a while to identify the territory outside the lines as non-colonial. Still, I quickly recognized the limitations of the sources I had been referring to up to then. I started to identify how some sources I used often reinforce binarism and the oppositional relationships between masculine and feminine aspects of self. I realized that my research was influenced by strong modern values, naturalized within feminist thought.

A demonstration that even feminism is often trapped within the three colonial lines is the interpretation given by some feminist authors to the practice of drag, crossdressing, transvestism and even male homosexuality as something relative to women or femininity. Judith Butler tells us that at its extreme, this type of analysis is colonization in reverse, a way for feminist women to place themselves at the center of male homosexual activity (and thus, paradoxically, reinscribe the heterosexual matrix at the heart of the radical feminist position) (Butler, 1993, p. 121). To fully comprehend the diverse expressions of bodies and affections beyond the three colonial lines, we must first let go of our current understanding of gender, which is rooted in colonial epistemology, as I will return to several times throughout this dissertation. The reality of bodies is too complex and fluid to be consistently anchored or compared to a consolidated identity, a specific context or a crystalized set of cultural rules. This is the knowledge I seek in traditional Brazilian culture because I believe that it could influence gender studies and the way we produce knowledge about gender.

The way we perform our research should be open to the possibilities of the unknown and let go of overused opposition as “essence vs. social construction”, as I pointed out in my literature review. This is another instance where gender studies are confined within the lines of coloniality. Even while aware of the oppositional relationship and the problems it generates, our field has failed to establish alternative structures to theorize the body, its affections, complexities, and its political presence in the world. Denying binary relationships, establishing new mandatory behaviours, relationship structures and gender rules does not seem the correct answer.

 The possibility of escaping the binary essence of social existence is a fruitful subject that could be explored through various epistemologies. The reality of bodies (onto) and their gender (epistemo) are related, but they are not identical (Hemmings, 2012); they can also hold space for other elements that could complexify binarity and expand gender studies. If there is any potential for political transformation considering “onto” and “epistemo,” it lies in moving from what we currently are to what we have the potential to become in personal and societal terms. This work is academic, but it is also an attempt to explore different epistemologies, writing formats and ways of living and research to understand myself, my beloved ones, my reality, and improve the lives of many people who cannot find belonging and love. I really would love it if little boys could grow up without the limitations of a label, free enough to discover themselves and build their own, unique ways of living, loving, and sharing their truths.

[1]  Warning: This expression is a homophobic slur that is relevant for the sociocultural analysis. Viadinho is the Brazilain Portuguese equivalente for “little fag” but this is not a literal translation.