Misogyny prevails in academic circles in Brazil – 03/11/2023 – Science

How many female historians, geographers, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists do we meet at school or university? Which women scientists, artists and intellectuals do we quickly remember?

If we cross the markers of race, class, sexual orientation and territoriality, the question becomes more challenging: how many black, subaltern, lesbian and peripheral authors did we have access to in our training?

Answers that are often hesitant and reticent to apparently banal questions like these do not indicate mere lapses of forgetfulness or lack of information. They can be a recurrent symptom of the mechanisms under which certain subjects are recognized as authors or whose intellectual production has or has not become visible, authorized and disseminated in society.

And here is a warning to navigators who deny identity demands: under certain historical-political frameworks, not all individuals are worth or count as subjects because, in a game of unequal distribution, some are more “recognizable” than others.

The problem, as the philosopher Judith Butler warned us, cannot be resolved solely with magical passes of visibility and inclusion, although both are indispensable actions, but demands a collective transformation task force of the very terms and conditions that govern recognition policies. .

A few decades ago, it ceased to be news that the persistent invisibility of the intellectual production of authors “other” than that of white men, from the dominant classes, cisgenders and heterosexuals is a result of the dynamics of formation of canons in the literary, artistic, historiographical and scientific.

In all its variations, processes of canonization are not random, but effects of memory and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion policies. Therefore, they remain potentially open to disputes, revisions and challenges.

Although there is no lack of important initiatives to criticize the canons, a quick consultation of general reference works in the human sciences still demonstrates the predominance of white male authors. Who hasn’t come across collections that are widespread and full of good didactic intentions identified by generic titles such as “the thinkers”, “great names in sociology” or “the historians”?

Effective compensations for the asymmetries of recognition have emerged in recent editorial projects such as the Feminismos Plurals and Pensamento Feminista Hoje collections, in addition to a vast and expressive set of works dedicated to non-canonical authors in the fields of literature, philosophy, anthropology and of history.

Laudable and necessary, counter-canonization actions would have to multiply in number and inverse proportion to the insidious crystallization of erasures accumulated over time.

We know that, in historical contexts prior to the 21st century, it is possible to identify “other” authors in different areas of the intellectual field. It is noteworthy that this is the result of copious memory work and the arduous excavation in the margins and less visible crevices of the monumental pantheons of canonical authors.

When we look through the temporal mirror, there is no lack of emblematic episodes of segregation, crossed by gender bias. They are stories of characters who dared to cross the lines of what Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Three Guineas”, described with the metaphor of “chalk tracing” that “a male with a strong voice and clenched fists childishly decided to do on the floor of the world”.

Like symbolic rituals, such demarcations fix certain limits within which human beings remain rigidly and arbitrarily confined. For some, more than for others, such lines of segregation, even if they sometimes seem permeable, have always been exclusive.

Literate women, when dedicated to writing modalities such as poetry, socially acceptable in the 19th century for those who wore skirts, could become hostages of misogynistic framing patterns.

It was like this with Narcisa Amália, a poet born in Rio de Janeiro, who dared to salute the libertarian ideals of the French Revolution in the book of poems “Nebulosas”, published in 1872.

The author’s favorable reception was also accompanied by disapproval of her ideological engagement. In the review for Correio do Brasil, Carlos Ferreira assessed that “[…] before politics, singing about revolutions, deifying the mobs”, Narcisa Amália was “simply out of place”.

Therefore, it was recommended that the “talent of the illustrious lady” remain “in the fragrant sphere of sentiment and simplicity”, as she did not have “the necessary virility” to cultivate poetry of a political and social nature.

About two decades earlier, a similar message would come packed with the veto of the admission of a woman among the members of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute. In the association in which the memory and writing of national history was forged, there was no room for female representatives, even with recognized literary merits, such as those of the poet born in Ouro Preto Beatriz Francisca de Assis Brandão.

In the refusal, the committee of distinguished members, formed by names like Joaquim Manuel de Macedo and Antônio Gonçalves Dias, alleged that the institute was not a place for the “respectable patrician”, advising that she be received as an “ornament” of a literary society.

The openly misogynistic and androcentric orientation was the norm and current practice at the IHGB for more than 120 years of its existence. Only in 1965 did the institute admit its first corresponding partner, the Portuguese historian Virginia Rau and, in 1968, among the effective partners, the geographer Isa Adonias.

At the Academia Brasileira de Letras, an offspring of the First Republic, little was done to alleviate the weight of the sexist and patriarchal tradition, with female candidacies vetoed in the first 80 years of its existence. The writer Júlia Lopes de Almeida, a central figure in the idealization of ABL, was deliberately excluded from its list of founders.

The justification was that the institution followed the model of its French counterpart, whose regulations restricted candidacy to male literati. Under such prerogative was included the name of Filinto de Almeida, today better remembered as the husband of the author of “A Falência”.

Until 1951, the Academy’s statute provided that only “Brazilians” with recognized literary merit could run for one of its chairs. It was with this justification that the candidacy of Amélia Beviláqua would be rejected in 1930.

The sexist barrier could also be kept simulated under varied and unconvincing pretexts. This was the case in 1911, when Carolina Michaëlis, a philologist of German origin living in Portugal, was refused a vacancy as a correspondent member of the ABL, on the grounds that the “quota” of Portuguese members at that time was fully filled.

Among refusals, vetoes and interdictions, there was no lack of inspiring counterexamples beyond the chalked space that safeguarded the dominant academic circles.

“I know that this novel is worth little, because written by a woman, and a Brazilian woman, with a shy education and without the treatment and conversation of illustrated men”. The words of Maria Firmina dos Reis, in 1859, in the prologue to the first edition of “Úrsula”, a pioneering novel in Portuguese on the subject of slavery, reflect this challenge well.

If the self-declared modesty of the writer from Maranhão can cause us a certain strangeness, this was far from being a personal or exclusive trait. The downgrading of literary and authorial value, known by the Latin expression capturetio benevolentiae, was a rhetorical resource widely mobilized in prefaces to works of all genres.

Not by chance, the appeal to the benevolence of the readers was perhaps essential for those who dared to kill the “angel of the Home”, which haunted women writers.

This is how the Bahian Ignez Sabino defined it in her “Contos e Lapidações”, from 1891: “I don’t write to kill time: I don’t write to translate light and futile thoughts, no. I write out of moral, physical, psychological and intellectual necessity. I write as a most obscure amateur, so be kind to me.”

Behind what might only sound like excessive modesty, was a white woman, from the literate elite, who, in the turbulent early years of the First Republic, published short stories, poetry, novels, articles and essays for newspapers. She was also the author of a volume of biographical entries, “Mulheres Ilustres do Brasil”, with which she aspired to “take Brazilian women of letters out of the barbarism of oblivion”.

Paradoxically, Ignez Sabino was unable to escape the persistent erasure of memory against which he was so committed: his name is perhaps just one more listed on the list of literate women (a little more than a hundred) who signed texts of various modalities in Brazil in the 19th century.

With entry being constantly banned from academic institutions under the pretext of sexist rules, one possible path was to act as writers, editors and intellectual mediators in newspapers, magazines and periodicals created for specific audiences. In the 19th century alone, more than a hundred titles of women’s and feminist magazines and newspapers circulated in the country.

There, voices such as Josefina Álvares de Azevedo, journalist, teacher, poet, playwright, editor and women’s suffrage activist, emerged. The founder of the newspaper A Família publicly contested the decree, which she called “iniquitous and absurd”, by Benjamin Constant, Minister of Instruction, which, in 1891, prohibited women’s access to higher education.

The stories of Narcisa, Beatriz, Maria Firmina, Ignez, Júlia, Amélia, Carolina, Josefina haunt us with the question: which “other” authors do we have news of or access to in our training? In these vetoed and impeded voices, don’t we find the sense to erase the traces with chalk still scratched on the world’s floor and build imagined futures in which similar questions may become obsolete and unnecessary?