Decoloniality, dialogism, and gender tensions

a conflicted discursive web

Abstract

Decolonial studies have focused on amplifying voices historically silenced by systems and structures of power marked by gender, race, and heteropatriarchy, as well as “by the dispossession of bodies and lands, and by Western rationality as the only structure and possibility of existence” (Walsh, 2023, p. 6). This paper proposes an analysis grounded in the articulation between decolonial and dialogic studies, aiming to identify the tensions between hegemonic and resistant discourses on gender, based on the actions and reactions evoked by utterances produced in response to the transphobic episode involving Congresswoman Érika Hilton (PSOL-SP) in September 2023. The study is theoretically and methodologically supported by the works of Bakhtin and the Circle, Bakhtin (2015; 2016; 2022), Volóchinov (2019; 2021), Medviédev (2018), as well as by scholars who discuss gender and decoloniality, such as Facchine (2003), Lacerda e Santos (2020), Quijano (2015), Silva (2021), Neves (2022), Walsh (2023). Congressman Isidório’s discourse reflects a binary and biologizing conception of gender, rooted in the idea of biological sex and opposed to social and identity-based constructions. In contrast, the responses affirm trans identities and challenge discursive practices that legitimize prejudice and exclusion. These tensions reveal a clash between a normative, Eurocentric perspective and others that seek to expand the understanding of gender beyond the constraints imposed by colonial modernity.