By CARLOS ZACARIAS OF SENA JUNIOR & MAIRA KUBÍK MANO*
Defending the university, nowadays, is defending the real subjects that are within it.
About the text “Who is afraid of social movements”, which we publish on the website the earth is round , in response to Rodrigo Perez Oliveira, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, we received a reply from our colleague who intended to comment on some of the questions we raised and which were also raised by Fábio Frizzo, Marco Pestana and Paulo Pachá, in an article published in Folha de S. Paulo on October 2.
In his rejoinder, entitled “On relations between left-wing social movements and universities”, published in Forum magazine (04/10/2024) Rodrigo Oliveira states that “Many colleagues agreed [with his text 'University professors hated on the right and on the left', published in Sheet, on 15/09] and the publication drew attention to the need to create a National Observatory with the aim of monitoring reports of all types of workplace violence against university professors”.
The argument used by Rodrigo Oliveira follows the same line as what he has been stating in his articles in Forum magazine and in his intense activity on social media, a topic we address in our text. However, the UFBA professor adds that we lacked empathy in the face of the four cases he brought up and that we chose not to discuss, and also that “the assumption that in cases of recidivism the cancellation courts would be legitimate, with activists placing themselves in the position of accusers, judges and executioners”.
It is almost unnecessary to say that we do not advocate “cancellation courts” nor do we consider it legitimate for social movement activists to place themselves in the position of “accusers, judges and executioners”, but it is laughable to assume that in the face of possible tensions that are increasingly common between harassers (or alleged harassers) and their victims, it is not uncommon for students to seek out their organizations and act in favor of the punishment of those they consider guilty. To ignore this is to be unaware of how conflict works in a class society, based on the exploitation and oppression of the subaltern segments, which for the colleague from UFBA are a threat to the exercise of teaching.
Finally, Rodrigo Oliveira laments that the university has been co-opted by specific groups, which is in line with his fellow UFBA colleague Wilson Gomes, who in September 2023 said, among other things: “One of the most unhealthy places to work today are universities. The slightest thwarted interest, the slightest demand for pedagogical hierarchy, the mere indication of bibliography can correspond to an accusation of a very serious identity crime. A heinous crime, the sentence automatically served”.
If it is as they say, and there is no way we are in different universities, because we are all from UFBA, perhaps it would be the case that we support the proposal to create an Observatory to monitor the issue and protect ourselves from the so-called identitarians, these supposed violent cancelers, who do not respect hierarchies and want to impose their bibliographies and their logic on all those who do not pray in their manuals. However, we do not understand it that way, both because we have different experiences from those of our colleagues at the same university, and because we have access to data that belies a view that we consider distorted and overestimated of the phenomenon that they abusively call “identitarianism”.
Our objective in this text is not to continue the debate with Rodrigo Oliveira, nor even to point out the problems in Wilson Gomes' argument, something that, in fact, has already been done by Joyce Alves, Patrícia Valim and Rosângela Hilário (“The invention of the 'Identity Court'”, Folha de S. Paul, 01/11/2023), but to address issues that have mobilized a part of academia and movements that express dissatisfaction with positions they call “identitarianism”.
Our intention, therefore, is not to personalize the debate, but to respond to the accusations that have been gaining ground in the public debate, which say that teachers are attacked by the “identity-based” left as if the left’s biggest problem were identities, and not its lethargy, its towing and the class conciliation defended by the hegemonic parties and by the Lula government that chooses to negotiate with Arthur Lira and the Centrão, instead of betting on struggles, on the mobilization of workers and on social movements.
The university as a space for the reproduction of violence
The university is obviously not isolated from the rest of society. Due to its educational mission and its role as a space for the exercise of critical knowledge, the transversal conflicts present in the social relations within it appear and, perhaps, are even more highlighted. Not simply because there is more violence, but because this should (or should) be an environment conducive to confronting it. Classrooms, in particular, are supposed to be a place for questioning, for inquiry. After all, isn't doing science, which is part of the central vocation of the university, about asking questions? Isn't that what we teach?
Among the social conflicts that are expressed in an acute manner at the university, we can highlight those that make explicit the intertwined inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity and social class. In recent years, thanks to a new moment of strengthening of the feminist, black, indigenous, LGBTQIA+ and people with disabilities (PWD) movements, combined with access to the university for these so-called subaltern groups through public policies of expanding places and quotas, reports of sexism, racism, LGBTphobia and ableism have become increasingly frequent, coming from both students and professors and administrative staff. As a result, we have seen the implementation of policies – still timid in most higher education institutions – to confront violence and harassment, both moral and sexual.
We highlight this new moment because, a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to dismiss a professor for sexual harassment, as happened recently at the Federal University of Bahia, where we teach. Such processes, which multiply as the number of complaints increases, however, have a long way to go, as demonstrated by the long time elapsed between the complaint, the reaction, and the resolution. The most common situation, however, is that there is no institutional action at the university to respond to such situations. And by university, I mean us, the professors, who hold management positions.
Generally, the lack of solutions leads to discontent, discouragement and, in extreme cases, illness, evasion and abandonment of the university. In an extension project carried out between 2017 and 2018 at UFBA, when asked about referrals to situations of gender-based violence, whether moral or sexual, students, professors, technical-administrative staff and outsourced workers demonstrated their disbelief in the university's ability to deal with complaints.
At the same time, the witnesses made very strong complaints about what they heard, especially from teachers, heterosexual men, but also from students. Humor appeared to be a frequent weapon used by the aggressors, but there were also those who reported extreme physical violence, such as rape.
We highlight this context because it is in an environment where violence is what prevails for the so-called subalternized groups that some mobilizations have taken place that could be considered more radicalized in terms of social action. And we ask: if violence were not a daily occurrence, would such actions, or rather, reactions, occur in this way? Certainly not.
Epistemic erasure and representation
The recent access to universities by so-called subalternized groups through quota policies has also brought with it an intense reflection on their epistemic erasure. In classrooms, there is an increasing demand for bibliographical references that are more representative of a plurality of thought and are not restricted to European canons. Where would there be authors other than those from four or five countries in Europe and the United States?
However, noting the existence of such a claim does not mean that it appears in the form of imposition or breaking of hierarchies, as some point out. In most cases, the simple observation of the lack of diversity in the literature used by teachers who are sensitive and attentive to changes results in diversification. In these situations, even without ignoring the canons, the expansion of references by incorporating diversity and, eventually, other epistemologies, contributes to strengthening the university as a space for criticism and the confrontation of ideas.
When reflecting on the structure of knowledge in Westernized universities, Ramón Grosfoguel points to a direct relationship between the knowledge considered legitimate by academia and historical events that meant the erasure, through violence, of other forms of knowledge: “Epistemic privilege and epistemic inferiority are two sides of the same coin. The coin is called epistemic racism/sexism, in which one side considers itself superior and the other inferior (…). The foundational structures of knowledge in Westernized universities are epistemically racist and sexist at the same time” (Grosfoguel, 2016).
Ramón Grosfoguel asks himself what historical processes produced the structures of knowledge based on epistemic racism/sexism and the answer, according to the author, focuses on four epistemicides: the conquest of Al-Andalus; the invasion of the American continent; the African populations forcibly taken from Africa and enslaved on the American continent; and the mass murder of Indo-European women accused of witchcraft and burned alive by the Christian Church.
The Brazilian university, whose founding act was the creation of the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia in 1808 by D. João VI, has been directly linked to these historical events since its creation and, therefore, based on racism, sexism and colonialism. Created by the Portuguese monarchy, it changed little in the following century, when the main event that left its mark was the French mission to the University of São Paulo in the 1930s.
The most significant change came in the 1960s, with the middle class gaining access to this space previously predominantly occupied by the ruling classes. The direct result of this expansion of the university was that the student movement became a relevant political actor on the national scene, symbolizing the confrontation with the military dictatorship. Even so, the university remained a space that was not very representative of Brazilian society as a whole, especially with regard to race/ethnicity.
It was only with the quota policy, initially implemented in 2002 at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and the State University of Bahia (Uneb), that the university was transformed. Along with an ostentatious policy of financing private universities, via Prouni – with all the problems that this entails – we saw, throughout Brazil, proud testimonies of daughters and sons of the working class who managed to obtain a higher education.
If admission is an achievement, staying in the program has proven to be challenging. Public student assistance policies, with increasingly smaller budgets, are not able to serve all people in situations of social vulnerability. As a result, we have a student body that is also a worker and who divides their time between academic training and professional practice, which is often precarious. In the case of women and people who perform female social roles, there is also an overload of caregiving tasks. There is no shortage of testimonies from students who express the strangeness of experiencing such distant worlds: university and the rest of their lives.
When reflecting on her position as a black academic in predominantly white spaces, Patrícia Hill Collins resorts to the formulation of outsider within (outsider from within), conceived from the experience of black domestic workers in white family homes, to address this being inside and outside the academy at the same time (Collins, 2016 [1986]). Mastering the language of the white way of life and living among black people acquires, in this reading, a potential for epistemic privilege.
Being a black woman brought Patrícia Hill Collins academic concerns that a white man would not have and, consequently, gave rise to different research questions, brought different epistemological constructions and shaped interpersonal relationships at the university in different ways, including relationships with the student body.
Following Patrícia Hill Collins’ suggestions, a diverse classroom should be a relief, a refreshment, an invitation to other thoughts and actions. What are we not asking about certain subjects? Which authors are we not reading? Some of our colleagues, however, respond in a reactive manner to these opportunities, little accustomed to transformations and propositional discomforts. Furthermore, it is a fact that although the student body has transformed substantially and adopted a leading position to demand epistemological changes, the faculty is mostly white.
Public service quotas are having difficulty being implemented in universities, under the justification of few places available in each specialty. And when one thinks that progress has been made in the issue of reparations through quotas, it is not uncommon for candidates from the general competition to challenge the results in court and succeed, which represents an immense risk for this important public policy wrested from governments by social movements.
Thus, in addition to not seeing themselves represented in bibliographies, quota students also feel a lack of representation in teaching. The politics of presence matter. And how many of us, white teachers, have read, for example, Bell Hooks or another black author to reflect on this? How many of us, white people, have blackened our bibliographies and how much have we fought for greater equity in access to university places for white, black and indigenous people? How many indigenous authors do we take as reference?
Identity and “identitarianism”
It is essential to add another layer to the analysis made so far: the period of advance of the extreme right in Brazilian society and, in particular, in institutional politics, coincides with that of the most intense transformation of universities. We therefore ask ourselves whether it is possible to establish relations between these two phenomena.
The changes in universities are being led by a new generation that is more fluid in terms of gender identity, and are also marked by a new era in the feminist, black and indigenous movements. In 2015, young women took to the streets of major Brazilian cities to protest a bill by the then president of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, which restricted access to the morning-after pill for rape victims. In the same year, black women organized a march in Brasília to demand a good life.
In 2018, the #EleNão movement was a massive movement and, by all indications, was fundamental in preventing Jair Bolsonaro from winning the first round of the elections. In 2019, the first year of Jair Bolsonaro's government, it was the turn of indigenous women to courageously protest in the federal capital. Our students were there, present in these democratic demonstrations, and this should be a source of pride for those of us at the university.
These movements, however, did not go unnoticed. Research in the field of gender studies shows that, combined with recent advances, such as adoption by LGBT couples, the recognition of the right to change one's name and gender without sex reassignment surgery, and the timid expansion of the right to legal abortion, including anencephalic fetuses, this rise of social movements has generated a conservative reaction in part of Brazilian society. And also within the progressive field, including among our colleagues who see these movements as “identity-based.”
This reaction is not exactly new. During the 1970s, new social movements were strengthened by a feminist wave in the global North, combined with black, student, sexual freedom and environmentalist struggles. Feminist demands caused tensions in class-based organizations – unions and political parties –, which were met with suspicion and accusations of divisionism.
From the 1990s onwards, with the consolidation of gender studies as a field of knowledge, debates on identity as an analytical category were strengthened. In gender problems (1990), Judith Butler went beyond Simone de Beauvoir's (1949) question about what it means to become a woman to ask who, after all, would be the subject of feminist struggles. In 1996, Stuart Hall raises the question: who needs identity (Hall, 1996)? In social movements, the production of collective identities is reinforced and the naming of political subjects multiplies, such as, for example, the identity queer. The acronym GLS (Gays, Lesbians and Sympathizers) is changed to GLBT and the movements are accused of creating an “alphabet soup” (Facchini, 2002).
We are currently experiencing an intensification of attacks on these social movements, characteristic of a moment of social and political fascistization. From the perspective of the extreme right, everything is combined into a one-dimensional reality: the university is full of leftists, feminists, LGBTQIA+, anti-racists and is a place to be fought. The new documentary by the denialist producer Brasil Paralelo, which supposedly deals with the university (we say “supposedly” because it is a university that does not exist that is presented in the series), is the clearest example of this.
It should come as no surprise that, in the face of these attacks, our colleagues, instead of defending a student who was publicly lynched on social media, have joined the heavy artillery. What did Tertuliana Lustosa, a UFBA master's student who went viral on the internet after an event in Maranhão, do that also provoked them, to the point that they were not supportive and, worse, blamed her for supposedly damaging the university's image? How did a legitimate and necessary discussion about identities, academic practices and alternative pedagogies turn into immediate repulsion, even using far-right tactics by spreading memes and exposing the person on social media?
It is not appropriate here to delve into the legitimacy of his academic research and the pedagogy he proposes. Leandro Colling, also a professor at UFBA, has already explained, in recent article, how this new moment in universities brought knowledge that “transformed queer (white, cisgender, American and southeastern) into cuir or kuir (thought by the ass of the world, by our local abjections and insults) and mixed with black feminism, transfeminism and decolonialism. That initial queer no longer exists” (Colling, 2024).
The conservative reaction from colleagues seems to point to a latent discomfort with recent changes at the university. A lack of understanding about the current student body and its potential. In an institution where those who are just starting out still have a hard time feeling like they belong and which is permeated by daily violence, radicalized and provocative performances should not cause surprise. Tertuliana Lustosa's performance summarizes a tension that is already present at the university. After all, what fits in and what is “out of place”?
Defend the university and social movements
Defending the university today means defending the real subjects within it, with all the diversity that is observable and peculiar to it. It also means recognizing that the product of these transformations that have diversified the university has repercussions on the expectation of diversifying knowledge, some of which is produced based on the identities of different subjects. Identities thought of in this sense, as a real and unavoidable phenomenon, as Asad Haider points out, “correspond to the way in which the State divides us into individuals, and to the way in which we form our individuality in response to a wide range of social relations” (2019).
In this sense, it seems impossible not to point out that a university formed by a majority of workers, women, black people, LGBTs and people with disabilities, needs to be attentive to what is demanded of it by subjects who recognize themselves from the intersection of many places.
Building a university capable of dealing with the challenges posed by the 21st century therefore means rejecting the unimportant status that the current stage of capitalism attributes to it. It means building resistance, operating from the margins, rejecting “identitarianisms” but assuming the identities of where real people exist, in search of other sociabilities and other possible worlds.
In effect, we stand from the perspective of the feminism of the 99%; from the perspective of black feminism, black men, LGBT people and people with disabilities, all workers who have forever changed the face of the university. It is, therefore, at the intersection of these subjects, which is our very condition of being in the world, as professors and activists in social movements, that we intend to defend the university, its social movements and everything we have built in recent decades. We will do so against the offensive of the far right and of all those who fear losing their privileges and imagine themselves capable of moving the wheel of history in the opposite direction.
*Carlos Zacarias of Sena Junior is a professor in the History Department of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
*Maíra Kubík Mano is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies and Feminism at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
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