Uma despedida? Não

This is not a "goodbye"

Nature published an article on decolonizing academia (McAllister et al., 2025). Indigenous scholars suggested eight steps to decolonize academia in North America. According to them, you must care for and promote change in your own space first, then consider change and improvement for the rest of the world. It is feasible and practical to start small, and the article argues that most Western initiatives to decolonize knowledge have these “White savior” vibes and do not radically correct the injustices in your own department, faculty, and university that prevent Indigenous people and people from the South from achieving academic milestones. The article is right, and through this dissertation I propose a practical way to start small: present research that proposes integrating new ideas (concepts, theoretical approaches, and methodology) and, at the same time, put most of them into practice during the research process. This is me trying to escape from the frequent allegation that feminist and gender studies have no practical application or, more accurately, just complain and solve nothing. During this research, I tried to apply the ideas I developed in a very experimental way and see where they could lead me. It was not always easy, clear, or effective, but I believe the result will be helpful to other researchers who want to start decolonization but don’t know how.

This dissertation argues for a shift in academic gender studies that could come from “outside” (outside North America and maybe outside academia), not just absorbing fragments of Global South knowledge (McAllister et al., 2025), but observing the knowledge we already have and blending (and that is why the idea of syncretism is important here, and I will come back to it) some important aspects to create a third space, complex and more connected with the current reality. In this work, I propose an exchange of knowledge, practices, and resources, aiming to explore possibilities for expanding and transforming how we study gender and, maybe in the future, our understanding of gender. My hypothesis is that, by distancing academic inquiry from colonial logic (as much as possible), feminist and gender studies could advance discussions about certain concepts and approaches that, most of the time, are treated as consolidated, disregarding their limitations (most of them already recognized by feminist scholars) and the growing distancing of these concepts from a complex reality that includes increasing gender violence, attacks on rights already achieved, migration, climate change, male mental health, etc. My proposal is to examine three concepts/approaches widely discussed and used in Northern/Western feminist and gender studies, note their limitations, and propose how ideas and practices from Afro-pindorâmico knowledge could help advance the discussion around them, while also advancing the feminist field as a whole.

I examined (1) the decolonial approach largely employed in Northern/Western feminist and gender studies; (2) the concept of positionality and the hypothesis that a clear positionality is a colonial privilege; and (3) the idea of embodied knowledge, its valorization in feminist theory and the effective implication of the body in it. For each of these aspects, I presented Afro-pindorâmico ideas, journeys, and practices that could add to and complexify current theory. Some of the readers may think it is too much for one PhD dissertation, and now, after this long road, I kind of agree. My idea was to explore more than one consolidated idea in feminist and gender studies to open more doors for future research. About my fear of going for more than one subject and being too superficial, my Brazilian advisor said this: to touch the surface of something is still to get in touch with it". So I treated my journey as a mission to engage with ideas I had relied on for several years without questioning them. By doing that, I concluded that, before, without critique, I was being superficial by simply applying these ideas. Now, by questioning them and exploring potential transformation, I am getting in touch with them for real.  This development of my research focus is not about research itself, but it is also implicated with my feminist curiosity, which means that all this exploration about knowledge-building can have other consequences such as the improvement of Brazilian academia, more valorization of Global South knowledge and scholars in Norther/Western feminist and gender studies and a whole new scenario in terms of methodologies, making researchers’journeys more joyful and creative. This experimental PhD journey is supplemented by an entire research portal that I hope you have the opportunity to explore while you read this dissertation. There, you can read stories, see drawings and a comics/zine, and listen to music and a podcast. As I stated before, I do not consider this creative part secondary; it is an important element in understanding the true meaning of this work.

The main objective of this PhD journey is to show that, by opening to ideas and ways of building knowledge not extensively explored in Northern/Western feminist and gender studies, we could not only transform theory but also strengthen our capacity to form complex coalitions, face some of the innumerable challenges of our time, and mitigate the toxic academic practices that make many lives miserable. These three objectives are practical and need practice to be integrated into the core of my PhD research. This explains why I apply some of my discoveries in this dissertation, in my writing practice, in the products I created, and in how I plan to develop my research in the near future. In this final part of my work, I will summarize these discoveries (the three topics mentioned above) and highlight other discoveries I made by focusing on practice and by “installing new wheels while the car is in motion.”