ABSTRACT
In Brazil as elsewhere, historically marginalized groups have crafted linguistic practices, gestural repertoires, and vocabularies pertaining to the singularity of their lived experiences and social identities. Pajubá (or bajubá) is the word used to refer to a way of speaking associated with the LGBTIQ population in the country. While the status of pajubá as a language, a dialect, or a creole linguistic formation is still debated, its emergence can be traced to countercultural circuits of the Black Atlantic.
The chapter draws on this history, situating pajubá in a broader history of resistance, transgression, and epistemic creativity in the Global South. It reviews the existing sociolinguistic and anthropological literature on pajubá in order to theorize its constitution as a modality of Southern queer elocution that departs from the grand narratives of LGBTIQ historicity centered in the Global North. As I will argue, pajubá is so promising within an intellectual and political project invested in thinking concepts “from the Global South” because its biography eludes the linear narrative of dissemination of Western categories of gender and sexuality. Rather, pajubá is rooted in and routed through the southern itineraries of the Black Atlantic and its postcolonial iterations.
