Producing feminist knowledge, a look from behind the scenes, a new section of cadernos pagu*

The first issue of the journal cadernos pagu was published In January 1993. The presentation signed by Adriana Piscitelli introduced the cadernos to readers. “This publication is intimately linked to the interests and activities of a group: an interdisciplinary academic collective dedicated to deepening knowledge about categories of gender through joint work” ( Piscitelli, 1993: 05).

Originally, our “cadernos” [notebooks] ( Piscitelli, 1993: 06) were considered a collective effort to publish and make visible analyses and reflections that were being worked on by feminist scholars in various disciplinary fields. In that context, attention was particularly focused on the junctions and disjunctions between categories of gender and woman (or women ), as in the article by Suely Kofes (1993) which offered a dialog with the instigating provocations of Joan Scott (1988) and Marilyn Strathern (1988) .

Twenty-nine years later, the Editorial Committee of the cadernos pagu is presenting a new section called Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista [Behind the scenes of the production of feminist knowledge]. The section is designed to be a new space for reflection and publication of raw research articles that can contribute to the development and problematization of various questions dear to feminist thinking and knowledge. Moreover, in deference to the objectives that inspired the formulation of the journal, the ambition of the new section is to reveal the scientific academic processes through which articles, reviews and dossiers are constructed. In this sense, we understand that the always unfinished and dialogical production of feminist knowledge is constituent of this process, which is seen to be constantly transforming through the relations and debates engaged in by its authors.

In interlocution with the journal’s history, this section presents how cadernos pagu promotes the methods, data and evaluative procedures of “science”. The objective of the proposal is to create an authorial form of “open science” in the realm of feminist knowledge. Coming from scientific policies supported by practices and experiments conducted, particularly by biological and health sciences, “open science” has been gradually capillarized in the fields of the humanities, letters, and arts, and has even been object of critical analyses in these fields of knowledge. The relationship of feminisms with scientific epistemes has been articulated by means of sharp scrutiny of an important field of production of knowledge.

The section Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista looks at contemporary demands of scientific production, focusing on the academic work of those who founded our journal and the Pagu Nucleus for Gender Studies.

The second issue of cadernos pagu , published in 1994, launched the section Documentos , to publish research archives and materials collected in the authors’ fields of study. The first document published in the section was collected and commented on by historian Leila Mezan Algranti. In “Casar-se ou meter-se freira: opções para a mulher colonial?” [Marry or become a nun?: options for the colonial woman], Algranti (1994) transcribed an undated document but which is calculated to have been produced in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, which she copied from a file in the Biblioteca Nacional. The author’s research announced a hypothesis: a document presented without any treatment of the data, a precedent opened to analyze the reasons for the prohibition of convents in the overseas Portuguese colony.

Publication of the section Documentos concluded at issue 27 in 2006, and included a file that dialoged with the dossier “Ciência, substantivo feminino, plural” [Science, plural female noun], organized by the geologist and historian Maria Margareth Lopes. Material that Argentine anthropologist Irina Podgorny published in the section told the history of Emma Bravard, who had her trajectory “buried” by biographies about the career of her husband Auguste Bravard, who studied fossils in South America. Podgorny presented data collected from the Arquivo Bravard of the Museu de História Natural Henri Lecoq, in the French city of Clermond-Ferrant. Podgorny affirmed that the documents demonstrated a shuffling of matrimonial documents with scientific diaries and archives of the French naturalist, allowing a glimpse at Emma’s knowledge of geology.

In 2018, in issue 54, Iara Beleli returned to the practice of publishing documents in cadernos pagu in a dossier published by the anthropologists Heloisa Pontes and Maria Filomena Gregori, which was an homage to the trajectory and legacy of feminist anthropologist Mariza Corrêa, a founder of the Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero Pagu and this journal. The text, presented by Iara Beleli, told the history of an unpublished document written by Corrêa, who adamantly refused to have it published during her life, with the orders: “No! When I die, you can do what you want with this text” (Beleli, 2018:01). It does not seem to be a coincidence that the last contributions of the Documentos section were in dossiers about feminisms and scientific production, and in an homage to Mariza Corrêa, who was an astute analyst and scholar of the processes of producing knowledge and power.

The publication of documents in cadernos pagu in the 1990s appears to have echoes in what archivists of scientific journals from throughout the world now call metadata. The demand for the publication of metadata from research allows the democratization of scientific production, but appears to hide the detailed work of data collection in the human sciences, and more particularly, in gender studies. In this way we want to affirm that the specificities and contexts in which some studies are conducted, which are often delicate and extremely fragile, involve relations of complicity, affect, trust and expectations of social transformation, for example, which are not made explicit in publication under the title of metadata. If a fundamental understanding of our field of knowledge is that knowledge is always situated (Haraway, 2009), how can we consider the publication of metadata without considering the production of this corpus, which is contingent and situated for each of the data collected?

For this reason, the materials to be presented in the section will not be isolated from the perspectives, knowledge, and bodies of those who produce them. They will include a brief description of how they were produced and gathered by the researchers, and the motivations that led to the understanding that presentation of the data will support the development, consolidation and transformation of feminist knowledge and gender and sexuality studies. These descriptions do not involve treatment, systematization, or analysis of these data. However, they imply a contextualization and an attempt to explain some of the minutia indicated above and that constitute the human sciences and gender studies. Thus, the section Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista is a response by cadernos pagu to new demands for open science, recalling the former practices of critical and analytical sharing by feminist research collectives, from which the journal arose.

The section also inaugurates a new form of sharing. Entitled “critical comments” the subsection reveals to authors and readers part of the process of evaluating articles published in the journal. As is known, cadernos pagu uses “double-blind” reviews. That is, reviewers and authors remain anonymous during the entire evaluation process. The recommendations and suggestions made by reviewers to the manuscripts are sent by the editorial staff to authors who do not know who made the comments. The objective of this process is to allow outside readings that help provide greater detail about some ideas, greater complexity to others and to perfect reflections made. The reviewers thus contribute to modifying the original manuscripts submitted to the journal, but can also reject a proposed article, with well-founded justifications.

Therefore, as a common practice for validating scientific knowledge, we understand that peer reviews permeate the production of knowledge that is invariably made through collective dialog and theoretical-analytical debates. For this reason, we believe that to present some of the reviews, and exchanges between authors and reviewers until the consolidation of the final text, in the format of an article published in cadernos , is a strategy that fulfills demands for transparency in scientific production. Most importantly, it reinforces the dialogical and situated character of production of this knowledge. If, as Schiebinger (2001) affirmed, feminism changed science, we believe that it did so by making explicit that science is made by considering situated positions, perspectives and approaches that are shared by different subjects and interests.

With the section Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista, cadernos pagu seeks to meet the demands for open science without abandoning its criticism of the generalizations that this model imposes on different fields of knowledge. We understand that the new practices of open science should be based on collective constructions within the different fields of knowledge, with the direct involvement of researchers. This expands the challenges faced by the new section, which can serve as a space for experimentation that reflects on the model of production of knowledge in the human sciences, more particularly in gender studies and feminist theories.

The new section of our cadernos is being inaugurated in issue 65, of 2022, with the publication of critical comments by Laura Murray, who served as an evaluator of the article “Andando entre cabarés: conhecendo os saberes da putaria”, written by Adriely Clarindo; Jésio Zamboni and Rafaela Werneck Martins. In her comments, Murray contrasts pleasure and labor with the academic requirement of reviewing an article, which is intertwined with the pleasure implicit to reading original articles that, like the article by Clarindo, Zamboni and Martins, advance and subvert academic paradigms. Knowledgeable in the field of studies of sexual labor, Murray’s critical comments, which inaugurate the Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista, dialog with another article in this issue that she did not evaluate, the text “Fabulação autoetnográfica – experiência e posição numa pesquisa sobre prostituição de luxo” [Self-ethnographic fabulation – experience and position in a study about luxury prostitution” by Natânia Lopes.

We thus initiate the new section of our cadernos in a stimulating manner. With an eye on advances made possible by a backstage look at the production of feminist knowledge, we review the traces that have been delicately and assertively left by those who opened the curtains in the past. The history of feminist production teaches us that what is usually outside the spotlight of the sciences, is weaving the production of knowledge and politics in relations that are established behind the scenes.

Enjoy your reading!

AGRADECIMENTOS

We would like to thank Luciana Camargo Bueno, executive editor of cadernos pagu , for the careful reading and for the daily interlocution, by means of which we have learned about the history of the journal and about the production of feminist political knowledge at the wings of academic production. We would also like to thank the members of the editorial commitee, without whom the idea for this new section could not have materialized.

Referências bibliográficas

• ALGRANTI, Leila. Casar ou Meter-se Freira: opções para a mulher colonial. cadernos pagu (02), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp 1994, pp.204-209.
• BELELI, Iara. “cara, cor, corpo” e a constituição do campo dos estudos de gênero. cadernos pagu (54), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2018 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800540008 - acesso em 29 de junho de 2022].
  » http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800540008
• HARAWAY, Donna. Saberes localizados: a questão da ciência para o feminismo e o privilégio da perspectiva parcial. cadernos pagu (5), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1995, pp. –41.
• KOFES, Suely. Categoria analítica e empírica: gênero e mulher. cadernos pagu (01), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1993, pp.19-30.
• LOPES, Maria Margaret. Apresentação. cadernos pagu (27), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2006, pp.7-8.
• STRATHERN, Marilyn. The gender of the gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.
• PISCITELLI, Adriana. Apresentação. cadernos pagu (01), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp 1993, pp.5-6.
• PODGORNY, Irina. Emma B. Documentos para servir al estudio de la estructura familiar de los coleccionistas de fósiles: El caso de Emma y Auguste Bravard. cadernos pagu (27), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2006, pp.479-495.
• PONTES, Heloisa; GREGORI, Maria Filomena. Mariza Corrêa: laços, memória e escritos,.cadernos pagu (54), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2018 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800540000 - acesso em 29 de junho de 2022].
  » http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800540000
• SCHIENBINGER, Londa. O feminismo mudou a ciência? Bauru-SP, EDUSC, 2001.
• SCOTT, Joan. Gender and the politics of history, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Sept 2022
• Date of issue
  2022