Latine
As a Brazilian American nonbinary person, I have struggled to find the words to describe my experiences in Portuguese. Portuguese is a gendered language where to describe yourself, you have to gender yourself. To say you’re Brazilian, you have to choose between being brasileiro or brasileira.
It is unclear exactly when people first began to modify the gendered aspects of Portuguese, but it has begun to gain some popularity in recent years, primarily in queer communities, without any significant wider recognition. The most common modifications are replacing the gendered -o or -a with -@, -x, and -e. I chose to explore all of these endings in a unique art book form I invented. You can slide the gold square across the sentence and move the arms to modify the endings of the words, making them feminine, masculine, or gender neutral.
