This project examines saudade—the Portuguese affect of longing, melancholy, and the presence of absence—as an embodied and performative practice through which gender, sexuality, memory, and national identity are produced and contested. Through analyses of Verde Gaio, Amália Rodrigues, Fado Bicha, and Paulo Henrique, it traces how saudade has been mobilized both to naturalize dominant narratives of Portuguese identity and to reimagine them through queer, diasporic, and postcolonial forms of embodiment and belonging.

This project examines how queer artists in Brazil and Portugal use digitally mediated spaces to transform traditional folk performance genres, focusing on Gabeu’s queernejo and Fado Bicha’s reimagining of fado. It argues that these artists employ “performative fabulation” to disrupt heterocentric and colonial narratives while using digital circulation as a contemporary “virtual ocean” through which aesthetic reconstruction moves across borders. In doing so, they create transnational queer communities and imagine alternative futures beyond geographic and genre constraints.

For the past four years, I have been reconstructing and traveling the migratory routes of the Portuguese fisherwomen known as varinas, examining how their labor, movement, dress, songs, and street cries became material for twentieth-century Portuguese performance. I am particularly interested in the transformation of the varina from working woman into theatrical figure, including representations by performers such as Corina Freire, and in what these stagings reveal about gender, labor, class, and Portuguese national identity. Extending beyond Portugal, the project traces how the varina is reimagined through song and dance across the Portuguese diaspora, particularly in the Americas and Cabo Verde.