"Spaces of Radical Openness": Counter-Spaces for Afro-Brazilian Women in Higher Education in Brazil

• In Event: Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Abstract

The third panelist draws on interviews with Afro-Brazilian female students, professors and community members to examine how their creation of and participation in critical, counter-hegemonic spaces inform how they engage in self-actualization and contribute to the ways they resist exclusionary, racialized and gendered oppressions within higher education institutions and society in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Throughout the world, historically marginalized groups are resisting institutional forces of repression and exclusion from “inside” the walls of higher education (Arday & Mizra, 2018). Afro-Brazilian women who have historically been excluded from Brazil’s public universities, have transformed the demographics of public institutions of higher education (IHE) since the passage of the Federal Quota Law in 2012, requiring universities to reserve seats for Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples and graduates of public schools (Lloyd, 2015; Oliven, 2014; Telles & Paixão, 2013). Yet, vestiges of white exclusivity persist in these universities, leading Afro-Brazilian women to create spaces which center counter-hegemonic knowledges to push back against these barriers.

Scholars have drawn attention to the racialized and gendered culture and practices within higher education institutions. Patel (2012) examined the ways dominant academic norms reproduce racism and sexism and adversely impact the experiences of women from marginalized groups. Women of color feel invisible and are more likely to experience isolation, imposter syndrome, and pressure to assimilate to colonial mindsets (Patel, 2015; Squire & McCann, 2018). Highlighting the need to attend to the historical and contemporary ways race and gender converge to inform educational policy, practices and spaces, Puwar (2004) underscores how spaces are imbued with history and meaning that contain raced and gendered norms informing which bodies are entitled to certain spaces. Ahmed (2012) explains, “We might even experience ourselves as space invaders, as way of experiencing spaces as if they are not reserved for us (and indeed, they are not)” (p. 13).

Corbin, Smith, and Garcia (2018) explain the “racial battle fatigue” women of color experience from the psychological tensions and silencing they face in predominately and historically white IHEs, leading women of color to seek out counter-spaces while navigating their oppressive intuitions and the broader society at large. Jacquie Alexander (2005) calls attention to oppositional knowledges, transnational feminist constituencies, and “subordinated knowledges within the academy that have traded radicalism for institutionalism” as “spaces that carry the potential for corruptibility” (p. 20). Joyce King (2019) explains the value of centering an Afrocentric paradigm or a “cultural centeredness as a necessary corrective” to regain our platforms and advance toward consciousness.
Situated within a political landscape of increasing racialized and gendered violence, such as the 2018 assassination of queer Afro-feminist Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco, two preliminary findings from this ongoing case study reveal: One, Afro-Brazilian women experience various forms of isolation, exclusion, and raced and gendered oppressions in higher education institutions in Brazil. Two, supportive spaces which center counter-hegemonic knowledges can be sites of possibility for resisting racialized and gendered practices of domination as women engage in processes of (un)remembering, resistance, transformation, and imagining possibilities.

Author

• Tarsha I Herelle, Johns Hopkins University