Programme

22 October 2025, 17:00, Room 2, CES |Alta

Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body by Roxane Gay (2017, Harper Collin)

In this powerful and moving memoir, Roxane Gay shares her story with brutal honesty and rare sensitivity. Hunger is an intimate account of body, trauma, survival, and identity. The author explores how experiences of childhood sexual violence profoundly influenced her relationship with food, her body, and the world around her.

More than a narrative about weight or appearance, Hunger is a manifesto about what it means to live in a body that defies social norms — a large, black, female body — in a society that insists on controlling it. With her courageous and incisive prose, Gay invites us to reflect on acceptance, vulnerability, and the complex journey of regaining self-love.

5 November 2025, 17:00, Room 2, CES | Alta

Amora by Natalia Borges Polesso (2016, Editora Dublinense)

Winner of the Jabuti Literature Award, Amora is a collection of short stories that celebrates, with lyricism, humour, and sensitivity, the multiple forms of love between women. With sharp and delicate writing, Natália Borges Polesso portrays real and complex characters in everyday situations — encounters, silences, discoveries, desires, and breakups.

These are stories of restrained and explosive affections, of identities that are affirmed or hidden, of youth and maturity, marked by engaging and deeply human language. By giving voice to lesbian experiences with naturalness and empathy, Amora breaks stereotypes and invites the reader to see the diversity of love in all its nuances.

A necessary, poetic and courageous work — as sweet and intense as the fruit* that gives it its name.

^{*[TN: “Amora” in Portuguese can stand for “blackberry” or, in this case, a play on words standing for the word “Love” in the feminine gender]}

3 December 2025, 17:00 [GMT], Online Event

a) Feminist Studies and Gender Studies: interdisciplinarity and recognition by Adriana Bebiano (2023)
In this essential article for understanding the field of Feminist and Gender Studies, Adriana Bebiano reflects on the trajectory, challenges and achievements of these domains in the contemporary academic and cultural space. The author analyses the fundamental role of interdisciplinarity as a method and as a political strategy, emphasising the importance of crossing knowledges to understand the complexities of relations of power, identity, and inequality.

Bebiano also addresses the process of legitimising Gender Studies in universities and in the production of knowledge, facing resistances and reaffirming its relevance in current critical thinking. The article proposes a careful reading of the social transformations, ethical commitment and political impact of these studies in the contemporary world.

An indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand the place and power of feminisms in academia and society.

b) Intimate Lovers, Legal Strangers—The Politics of Dissident Relationality in Portugal by Ana Cristina Santos and Ana Lúcia Santos (2023)

The article investigates how cultural, legal, and political frameworks in Southern Europe are still based on the ideal of reproductive, monogamous, and cis-heterosexual couples, while LGBTQ+ intimacies continue to face prejudice and exclusion, despite legislative advances. Based on the Portuguese context, it discusses how state recognition can contribute to (de)constructing the cultural abjection attributed to these experiences, exploring the personal, sociocultural, and legal aspects that shape affective trajectories.

The text analyses the visibility of non-normative sexualities, the importance of the legal status of marriage as a way of overcoming invisibility and stigma, and points to non-monogamy as one of the main focuses of cultural rejection, associated with ideas of moral panic. Finally, it presents the notion of relational performativity and proposes relational dissidence as key to understanding the intimate experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the process of ageing.

7 January 2026, 17:00 [GMT], Online event

Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism by Grada Kilomba (2008) [Translation by Nuno Quintas (2019), Orfeu Negro]

In this book, Grada Kilomba explores how racism persists in everyday life through seemingly trivial but deeply violent episodes. Combining autobiography, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and black feminism, the author exposes the colonial structures still present in Western societies. The work proposes a decolonised writing, giving voice to those who have historically been silenced.