Academic Feminism and Exclusion in Brazil: Bringing Back Some of the Missing Voices

Abstract

By investigating the constitution of gender and feminist studies in Brazil as part of the larger ‘feminist discursive field of action’ (Alvarez 2014), we claim that throughout its development and particularly in its struggle with mainstream academia and science governance to contest its scientific marginalisation, this portion of the feminist field ended up producing some other exclusions of its own. Thus, and unintentionally, it contributed to perpetuating part of the marginalisation that is characteristic of hegemonic modes of thinking and knowledge production. More specifically, besides attaching itself to rather reductive notions of what its political subject is (femaleness/womanhood), it also did not create the conditions and the space within which voices articulated from the far margins, such as that of Black women, could flourish. Along these lines, we claim that in the Brazilian context, one of the ways for gender studies and research to continue to be asserted as scientifically and socially useful and relevant is to continuously confront the exclusions that it itself produces. Therefore, a commitment to radical inclusion, which in our article appears through the acknowledgment of Black feminist knowledge production in Brazil, appears as an important and effective means to reassert gender studies’ social usefulness.