PAJUBO, LOGO EXISTO: Pajubá as an epistemological key in the emergence of transvestite epistemologies
Pajubá. Decoloniality. Cartesian Philosophy. Travestility. Epistemology.
When I made the state of art around the productions about the Pajubá, many problems concerning the construction of these works surrounded me: the identity focus given to the gay population, the researchers' conception of language, and the common ground of discussions mostly wrapped around the same point: the historical emergence of the dialect and its relationship with the languages of African origin. However, all these problems soon dissipated when, in an encounter with the travesti epistemologies, I made an interesting observation: beyond these works, the Pajubá also appears as a linguistic and political strategy in the productions of the T population. That is: it is not necessarily presented as a central research object, but, above all, as a possibility of distension of the scientific norm for the construction of new epistemologies based on the world experiences of this population, having, in this way, the Pajubá as a kind of theoretical compass in the orientation of these productions. In this sense, this work aims to analyze this mobilization of the Pajubá as an epistemological key in the construction of scientific knowledge of academic transgender and travesti women. I start from the defense that this drive not only displaces the logic of Western knowledge production based on Cartesian science, but, above all, guides to a new direction/ethic of being and being in the world, guided by the affects, by the vital experiences and by the attraction of collectivity. To this end, I turn specifically to the analysis of the works of Amara Moira (2021), Dodi Leal (2018), and Sara Wagner (2020) as they manipulate the Pajubá as a linguistic, thematic, and conceptual-analytical resource, respectively. I do this through the theoretical lenses of Decoloniality and Queer Theory in contrast to the philosophy of René Descartes.