The errant worlds of disidencias: sex-gender dissident sense-making practices and counter-normative politics in Quito

Mantilla Garino, Lucas (2025) The errant worlds of disidencias: sex-gender dissident sense-making practices and counter-normative politics in Quito. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis is a theoretical and ethnographic investigation of the contemporary politics of disidencias sexo-genéricas (sex-gender dissidences) in Quito, Ecuador. Disidencias sexo-genéricas are a transfeminist political formation composed of LGBTI+, queer, and sex-gender dissident individuals and collectives. Over the last two decades, disidencias have emerged across Latin America/Abya Yala in dialogue with feminist, trans, and queer movements, challenging mainstream heterocisnormative and homonormative politics. While disidencias have been studied in major Latin American cities, their contextual specificities and political generativity in geopolitically marginal locations like Quito remain understudied. This research delves into the onto-epistemic registers of disidencias in Quito, examining the ontological and epistemic dimensions of their sense-making practices and political subjectivations. By focusing on political subjectivations, the thesis traces the intellectual and political genealogies of disidencias, highlighting their everyday forms of resistance against colonial violence and onto-epistemic assimilation. It also examines how sex-gender dissidents assert their epistemic agency to affirm their lifeworlds. Theoretically, this thesis bridges some of the gaps between decolonial and queer theories, placing them in dialogue with the situated knowledges of sex-gender dissidents themselves. In pursuit of understanding and working with these dissident knowledges, the thesis employs a patchwork-ethnographic methodological approach. Fieldwork research (June-December 2022) encompassed participant observation at key sex-gender dissident sites in Quito, deep hangouts and reflexive conversations with 27 prominent dissident actors, and archival documentation and analysis of their creative works. Drawing on these methods, the thesis examines four distinct onto-epistemic registers that emerge from the political subjectivation of disidencias. First, it explores sex-gender dissidents’ practices of disidentification and examines how these appear in response to social wrongs rooted in coloniality. Second, it analyzes their transversal political and epistemological alliances, the counter-normative identifications they develop to make sense of themselves and their worlds beyond modern-colonial frameworks, and their instrumental uses of liberal rights and justice frameworks in their struggle. Third, it considers the aesthetic subcultures of disidencias, their ambivalent complicities with queer-normativity and Whiteness, and their re-politicization through ancestral memory and remembrance. Fourth, it elucidates the political cacophony of disidencias, showing how it allows dissidents to evade normative assimilation, assert their equality as a form of difference, and sustain dynamic forms of onto-epistemic resistance in the face of ongoing repression. Ultimately, this thesis argues that disidencias craft alternative worlds of sense that both challenge and redefine the very notion of what it means to be political. These heterogeneous, contradictory, and cacophonous lifeworlds expose the hegemonic onto-epistemic frameworks of coloniality/modernity as violent orders that can, and must be, contested.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2025 Lucas Mantilla Garino
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Sets:	Departments > Gender Studies
Supervisor:	Madhok, Sumi and Sabsay, Leticia
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4895

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