By FABIANE ALBUQUERQUE*
For centuries, knowledge produced by white men was considered “neutral” and “disembodied”, and therefore complete, rational and scientific, while knowledge produced by women was considered passionate.
If the title were “the awakened intellectual”, few men would read this text, because, in the feminine, it would suggest “a woman’s thing”, something specific, from the sphere of the private. In the masculine, however, it is universal, in the image of men and women. This provocation came to me when following the public discussions (the criticisms) of “identitarianism”, especially by white intellectuals.
Does anyone remember the doctor and professor at Unicamp, Paulo Palma, who, regarding the implementation of ethnic-racial quotas at his institution, said: “The university has exchanged brains for buttocks”? Well, well, well! In his petty bourgeois and “white-centric” world, he is the brain and black men and women are the buttocks. That’s right, the intellectual “pure brain”, without the other parts of the body, is in crisis. And, believe it or not! An unprecedented crisis.
The professor adds to his racist reasoning: “University is for an intellectual elite, not for bums.” The entry of black people into the classrooms caused an uproar among these people who consider themselves part of the “intellectual elite” and who have lived, for centuries, legitimized by such an aberration.
White intellectuals, men and women, from the left to the right, are in crisis and this derives from the construction of the self-image, fed by Eurocentric science, that this intellectual is “universal”, “unattached” to any identity (without race, sex, sexuality, values rooted in a social class, etc.). What the “identity movements” did was to place a mirror in front of these men and women showing them: “Look here, you belong to…”.
The traditional image of the intellectual, that is, white, wearing glasses, with a rigid body (because intellectuals don’t move, dance, samba, go to religious ceremonies, have sex, etc.), Cartesian, separating the spirit from the body, was shaken. When bodies with swing, rhythm, sensual, vibrant and “with buttocks” appeared on the Brazilian scene, the feeling of white university professors is that they have lost their place. But, as psychoanalyst Maria Homem asks, “who said that the place was theirs?”
Donna Haraway in the article Localized knowledge: the question of science for feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective, says that Science made by subjects who think they are universal and believe they are an eye that sees everything, without being seen, that, from afar, observes better, has imposed itself as “unmarked”, to the detriment of “marked bodies” (identity-based).
For centuries, knowledge produced by white men was considered “neutral” and “disembodied,” and therefore complete, rational, and scientific, while knowledge produced by women was considered passionate, subjective, pseudoscientific, and formulated from a sexualized body, says Donna Haraway. The neutrality of discourse and male “objectivity” also permeates sexual (hetero) neutrality, while corporeality (since the Greek classics) was attributed to women as a pre-logical and “non-scientific” stage.
A Feminist Methodology questioned this tradition, taking into account the scientific practice of those who research, pointing out as a postulate the subjectivity of the researcher and the assumption that it is not possible to establish a rigid line between subject and object of study, in addition to considering some ethical implications, such as the care not to subordinate women when constructing the theoretical interpretation of knowledge.
Donna Haraway was assertive when she said that there is no “outsider” in research and in doing science, who looks at the world (the object studied) as an all-seeing, distant and neutral “God”. In the same sense, Sandra Harding, in Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of scientific research says that the focus of the objectivity that she calls “strong objectivity” is the recognition that Science is practiced in the real world and is not based on an abstract ideal, responding to questions about the lives of individuals and their social relations. Despite many criticisms of feminist methodology and its epistemologies, white intellectuals even tolerated them within their chairs. The uproar really came with black, African and diaspora epistemologies, brought by these people “with buttocks”.
Marilena Chauí, during an interview with Leandro Demori's channel, said that the great political subject of today is social movements, and added: “There is a problem, a problem that affects me. You only do revolutionary politics, politics of change, when you have some universals as a reference, a huge group of people (...) I am not seeing these references, but the movements becoming “identity-based”. Instead of the movements being unifying, they are becoming fragmented and do not produce this common reference, necessary for social political change”.
The interviewer intervenes: “Before, this universal was the category of work.” There is a misuse of the terms universalism and “universal references.” These references are almost always linked to a race and a social class, which elected them “for everyone” and insist on calling them that. You see, work has never been a universal; it was elected universal by intellectuals of the Western and Westernized left. For the Peruvian intellectual Anibal Quijano, for example, the universal is race. In fact, it is race that structures the division of labor throughout the world. This category is also not a universal for indigenous peoples.
“Identitarianism” is a heavy accusation. We agree with the fragmentation of social struggles, but we do not miss the times when this struggle and its priorities were defined by a dominant subject who told others what the priority was. Professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8, Eric Fassin, considered an “identitarian” in the French academic world, says: “Since the end of the 1980s, we have seen, in the French public space, a strong return of a discourse that invokes national political culture to celebrate a universalism that is blind to differences, whether of gender, sexuality or race. The (French) Republic only recognizes abstract citizens and thus relegates their singular or particular properties to the private sphere. Minority issues would therefore be incompatible with the French tradition. Under the guise of political philosophy, such culturalist rhetoric aims to depoliticize minority issues by treating them as dependent on national contexts. What I have called the “American scarecrow” (Fassin, 1997) is readily brandished: gender, sexuality and race would only have meaning for “them” (the United States) and, in any case, not for “us” (France).
In any case, the demographic census does not collect any data on race and everything happens as if, like gender, race were a completely foreign notion to national history. In short, in France, talking about race, like gender, implies exposing oneself to the accusation of not being republican and, therefore, of not being truly French.
Eric Fassin also points out that the big problem for intellectuals is admitting “belonging” to one of the identity categories they accuse. For the TV channel 5 Monde, the professor talks about the prevailing idea that, once Capital is neutralized, all other demands will be met. We just have to wait. In his book From the Social Question to the Racial Question? He emphasizes that it is not a question of replacing one struggle with another, a single logic with another, but of considering a plurality of logics of domination.
Claiming to be black, feminist, LGBTQIA+, from a favela, from the outskirts, or from a quilombola community is asserting oneself against a homogenizing society. This is identity. What they are understanding is an exclusionary and separatist political claim. In the second case, the conclusions are based on readings of the excesses that are circulating around. But what about the excesses of white identitarians? “Anti-identitarian” intellectuals do not deal with the unfounded and highly ideological statements of white people, and transform them into “identitarianism”. For example, in 2024, Airton Ortiz, president of the Rio Grande do Sul Academy of Letters, said during an event that Rio Grande do Sul was a pioneer in literature due to European immigration. Is there any greater identity harassment than this?
Unicamp sociology professor Renato Ortiz, in the article “Note on the place of speech”, posted on the website the earth is round, says: “With the emergence of feminist movements, gender studies, and the most diverse identity claims, the expression (Lugar de Fala) quickly gained legitimacy (…)”. One can notice the sociologist’s distance when talking about gender and other identities, he is outside of all of them, still looking “from above”, as if he were not “contaminated”.
And he continues: “However, this does not mean that knowledge is based on experience, it means that the intervention of the subject must be considered and made explicit in the act of constituting knowledge itself”. Now, this is precisely what the “identitarians” demand, that is, the explicitness of the subject who speaks. And I will go even further, the discomfort of the “unawakened” intellectuals lies in the fact that these people “with identity” are pointing out their belonging: “You are white, you are rich, you are a man”. And, this is not a question of essentialisms, but of conditioning.
And, to finish, I bring the contribution of the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, in the great work Look at me and tell me, which points out that Western, masculine philosophy has as its form a defining knowledge that concerns the universality of man. It is this defining form, this universal man, that identity movements question, introducing the form of knowledge of the world and of subjects that concerns the identity of specific men and women: “The first form asks “what is man”, the second “who is he””. And, through the second, knowledge and struggle are also produced. It is the “unawakened” intellectuals who have not yet realized this.
Man, in fact: a universal who is everyone precisely because he is no one; who disembodies himself from the living singularity of each one, affirming that he is at the same time masculine and neuter, a hybrid creature generated by thought, a fantastic unity produced by the mind; who is invisible and intangible, although he declares himself to be the only one who can be spoken of by true discourse; who lives by his noetic absolute, although he leaves no trace of any life history; who has cluttered language for millennia with all the philosophical progeny of his abstract conception.
Fabiane Albuquerque, holds a PhD in sociology from Unicamp.
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