Feminism and the fall of Boaventura

Image by Ojala.

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • April 27, 2023 • Leer en castellano

The culture of feminism and anti-patriarchy is expanding in many spaces, including in universities. It spreads like humidity: constantly, usually in silence, and at times with dramatic impact.

We weave between many, we organize assemblies and working groups, we take advantage of opportunities to research issues we’re interested in, and we share creative solutions to the issues we encounter.

And there are many issues.

Feminists working within universities have begun to erode rigid forms of patriarchal domination that impact daily life in classrooms, lecture halls and laboratories.

The progress made has produced a massive reaction. That’s not a coincidence. 

We live and breathe the furious reaction that results when those subjected to violent and unfavorable power relations decide to speak out. The battles fought bit by bit, led by young women and dissidents, fight to change the way we distinguish between what is admissible and what is not, both in academia and in daily life. They seek to change how we exist and what we do in the university.

This is a difficult, tiring path that is strewn with conflict.

It’s especially tiring when it is an individual making a specific complaint against an aggressor. It often feels like nothing can be done. In these cases, official spaces in the university—when they exist—are called on to listen and attend to those who have been victims of aggression, and often end up spinning webs of complities and calculations.

Alliances between women and dissidents in the production of knowledge and the way it is shared are particularly important in altering hierarchies and changing the status quo. This is how the long path toward transformation is opened. 

Promoting the production of justice means taking sides in a major conflict to establish clear limits around what we are unwilling to accept.

When silence reigns, the walls speak

The book chapter “The walls spoke when no one else would: Autoethnographic notes on sexual-power gatekeeping within avant-garde academia,” written by  Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro y Miye Nadya Tom, is an important contribution in this direction. Over the past weeks, this chapter has been spreading like wildfire throughout university-linked feminist networks, especially in Latin America, Portugal and Spain.

The chapter describes in vivid detail acts of abuse, harassment and academic expropriation suffered by the authors in Coimbra, Portugal, while studying at the Center for Social Studies (CES), which is organized around a prestigious left intellectual.

While they don’t name him in the chapter, the writers are referring to Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

The authors go well beyond describing a problematic individual. Their analysis is structural: they make visible the hierarchy and power relations among academics, and the actions that sustain abusive conduct. They appropriate the analytical tools they’ve learned in order to dig into their lived experiences at Coimbra.

They also apply the fertile technique of autoethnography to show how the CES—which claims to be a leftist institution—encourages processes that impose silence upon and disciplines younger international colleagues.

Because of the above, their work goes well beyond a standard complaint.

The authors build an argument around the actions of three key figures: the “star professor,” the “supervisor” and the “apprentice” or “heir apparent” of the star professor. In outlining the actions of these emblematic figures, the authors reveal how it is that rigid and invisible power structures are maintained and regenerated.

Everyday power dynamics within the university, which are infused with subtle violence, are made plain. These are practices that are very difficult to describe, even when they are strongly manifested within the body, where they generate a strong sense of unease.

The chapter doesn’t reveal anything we’re not familiar with, but it outlines events at Coimbra in a useful manner that illuminates how a kind of ‘sexual power’ is defended within universities. It traces the sexual power of star professors over everyone around him, who are subordinated through mandates of institutional and personal loyalty. Masculine hierarchies, based on inheritance, designate what spaces are available for the rest. The uncomfortable position of those who oversee this structure doesn’t waver.

No abuser with such a high profile works alone. Without naming names, Viaene, Laranjeiro and Tom sketch out a factory of abuse, complicity and silence.

Subverting academia

The work of these three colleagues is inscribed within a larger project: the gargantuan and difficult task of subverting the patriarchal structure of academia.

Their chapter is part of the book Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an ethics of care in the university, edited by Erin Pritchard and Deyth Edwards, recently published by Routledge.

In this sense their chapter itself is also part of a much larger process which led to the publication of this book. It is a single link in a chain of multiple and diverse struggles taking place at universities around the world. Feminists and dissidents are putting into practice ways of producing justice at the same time as they fight for the reorganization of the structure and content of academic activity.

Institutions of higher education in multiple countries have been shaken by loud, non-conformist actions led by young women and dissidents who reject the rigid patriarchal culture and the violence, abuse and complicity they face in scholarly and academic activity.

The best known, most immediate and most scandalous such events have resulted from the most violent cases of sexual manipulation, direct harassment, aggression and rape. But individual cases are not the only factor at play.

After the shake-up produced by the calling out of an academic, there is almost always an institutional effort to seal the bad behavior off, presenting it as the “twisted” conduct of a single individual. But it is then that much deeper debates are opened up. Syllabi are changed, discussions take place about appropriate pedagogical practices, highlighting the need to question and transform what we understand by university education.

Among ongoing efforts to sustain processes of feminist teaching and learning, there is also a major struggle around knowledge and the conditions of its production. This dispute is about dismantling the structures that sustain star professors and their patriarchal defense squads.

Can the university produce justice?

Producing justice and transforming the university are ongoing tasks. The context in which these struggles are being fought is extremely difficult.

Students are heavily in debt, professors are precarious, academic culture is highly productivist, and quantitative evaluation that’s increasingly rigid are just a few of the elements that exemplify the structure of knowledge production in universities. As a constellation of practices, this structure forces young women to deal with multiple violences. All of this makes their struggles even more difficult. Regardless, they continue to fight.

Without claiming to be exhaustive, I’ll outline what I think of as two key areas of action.

First is the intense struggle to establish limits to violence and to reorganize how work, learning and research takes place. Second is the massive task of producing justice in specific cases of documented aggressions and repeated violences.

Regarding the latter, the work of Viaene, Laranjeiro and Tom serves as a very interesting example. The quality of their collective effort, as well as the extremely quick manner that it has been circulated through networks of politically engaged women academics shows that there is a deep resonance with the arguments made. I take my hat off to other compañeras who, in a very efficient and immediate manner, translated the chapter to other languages, including to Spanish.

Regarding the former, I’d like to share a few final thoughts about a potential obstacle to deepening the process of producing justice, which is the risk that everything brought up by these cases is smothered by the punishment of a sacred cow on the left, dissolving the significance of what so many of us are doing collectively.

We know that after a well known professor is denounced, punitive temptations arise, as does their correlation, the positioning of women as demobilized victims.

Of course we need abusive individuals to be brought to justice. But we also need to look at the structural nature of the problem, and not just focus on its most scandalous examples.

In the specific case of the star professor denounced by the former Coimbra students, it is paradoxical that a ‘scapegoat’ dynamic has been imposed.

Various academics and institutions have moved to sanction and punish the star professor for his behavior. With these actions they are again faking it: they’re acting as if they had no previous knowledge of these abuses. As if the ‘whisper network’ the authors detail in their text hasn’t been known for years. 

Feminist efforts to change the university don’t center on excluding or punishing an individual as their only goal. We must refuse the imposition of that dynamic—and resist distraction from the rest of what we are doing—at the same time as we ensure there are consequences for those who commit acts of abuse.

As we have seen, institutions swing like a pendulum. The oscillate between the refusal to recognize acts of sexual violence and a dynamic of individualized punishment of someone who previously seemed untouchable. 

The ‘scapegoat’ dynamic attempts to isolate and remove the abuse that can no longer be hidden. But it does so in a way that concentrates the problem on a single, sacrificial body. This kind of sacrifice does not take place out of a belief in justice. Rather, they think that through this kind of sacrifice, order will be re-installed.

But we don’t want their order. As our brave colleagues from the CES demonstrate, the problem isn’t just Boavendura. It’s the structure that awards him, that concentrates resources on him, that permits him to create dependency and organize his power so as to control those around him.

And though they’d like to ignore it, there’s something undeniably different about the present moment: the feminist era has begun. With it, unprecedented horizons of transformation have been opened, inside and outside of universities.

As feminists inside the university system, we must continue to learn from the experiences of other women and dissidents. Together, we must continue to build our methodologies and collective responses against abuse, dismantle patriarchal structures, and fight for public resources and the transformation of higher education.