Asian or queer? (in)visibility and situated intersectionality among Chinese LGBTQIAPN+ immigrants in São Paulo

Abstract

Although queer studies frequently associate emancipation with visibility, Asian presence remains scarcely examined in Brazilian scholarship on sexuality and gender. Chinese LGBTQIAPN+ immigrants in São Paulo occupy positions crossed by ethnicity, migration and sexuality. This article does not focus on the sum of these identities, but on how different markers become salient, are suspended or are reorganized according to interactional contexts. The central question is: how are race/ethnicity and sexuality activated according to field, class and social capital? Drawing on ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted over seven years, it argues that these markers do not operate as cumulative attributes, but as situationally mobilized differences. In Chinese workplaces and spaces of sociability, the activation of the ethnic marker imposes the closing of the sexual marker; in affective encounters with Brazilians, ethnicity predominates and the subject is desired as a type rather than as a person; in everyday public space, sexuality recedes while ethnicity comes to operate in an anticipatory mode. Only in spaces of sociability organized by Chinese LGBTQIAPN+ people are both markers recognized at once, a co-legibility conditioned by language, cultural repertoire and class. The article concludes that ethnicity operates less through its cultural content than by signalling network connectivity, and that visibility and recognition are not equivalent operations.