All my queer elders: Panóias. Gestures toward an autoethnography

Abstract: This essay of creative non-fiction stages a queer autoethnographic return to Panóias, a pre-Roman sanctuary in northern Portugal, as a site for rethinking ancestry, belonging, and the porous boundaries of “we” and “they” from a queer perspective. Moving between pilgrimage narrative, theoretical reflection, and intimate encounters with landscape, the piece interrogates the epistemological cuts that structure national identity, historiography, and the politics of grievability. Through meditations on fibers, material traces, and the discontinuities of cultural memory, the essay probes how empathy toward ancient, barely legible communities —here, the Lapiteas— collides with questions of race, pre-history, and colonial temporalities. In weaving together queer kinship, literary mediations, and embodied presence at the sanctuary’s carved stones, the essay proposes an ethics of ancestral relation grounded not in biological continuity but in affective, imaginative, and ecological entanglement. Ultimately, it gestures toward a speculative, queer genealogy —one where ancient gods, contemporary vulnerabilities, and the author’s own life intersect across time, matter, and myth.