The Fiction of Fernanda Dias and Senna Fernandes: Revisiting Colonial Macau through the lens of Ethnicity, Gender and Patriarchy Ana Maria Correia, University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR, China Vera Borges, University of Saint Joseph, Macau SAR, China The European Conference on Cultural Studies 2014 Official Conference Proceedings Abstract Macau, the last colonial settlement of the Portuguese empire, inspired several Lusophone writers, though few have captured the intricacies of the Portuguese and Chinese cultural presence. Senna Fernandes and Fernanda Dias are such outstanding voices and the selected authors for the current analysis. Being a Macanese, a term locally reserved for Eurasian people of Chinese, Portuguese and other descent born in Macau, Senna Fernandes chronicles his own community, picturing the processes of the construction of identity and otherness along multiple lines of class, ethnicity, and gender. He captures the fused historical experiences of the Macanese community at the borderline between the Portuguese colonizers and the majority Chinese population. His novel Amor e Dedinhos de Pé, depicting the strains and conviviality between those of Lusophone descent and the Chinese population, reflects a very conservative social milieu where protagonists remain trapped inside customs whose roots stretch back through the centuries. The contemporary Portuguese poet and novelist Fernanda Dias presents a self- conscious gaze into a romantic encounter in Macau, perceived as generating a new identity. Featuring a relationship between a Portuguese woman and a Chinese man, she delves into the power strains intrinsic to love, uncovering the subtle games of political implications and allusions to colonial history. A gendered identity is built upon the overlapping of erotic love and aesthetical options. The two authors reveal the various thin lines of invisible but resilient markers and multiple crisscrossing strategies of either closure and refusal or binding with and accepting various others. Keywords: Fernanda Dias; Senna Fernandes; literatura colonial; Macau iafor The International Academic Forum www.iafor.org