Dialogues with Child of the dark and the experiences of black female medical residents

Introduction:  Medical residency, recognized as the gold standard for specialist training, is a setting that can paradoxically reproduce structural inequalities. This study focuses on the trajectories of Black women, examined through Carolina Maria de Jesus’s metaphor of the “quarto de despejo” (“junk room”) as an analytic lens for investigating mechanisms of institutional marginalization.

Objective:   To analyze, based on Carolina Maria de Jesus’s metaphor, the mechanisms of exclusion and epistemic violence in medical residency, as well as the strategies of resistance and solidarity employed by Black women physicians to confront them.

Method:   Qualitative, theoretical-analytical study grounded in a critical hermeneutic approach. The intertextual analysis assembled a tripartite corpus comprising Quarto de Despejo, scholarly literature on racism and sexism in medical education, and institutional documents. The analytic process followed the hermeneutic circle, integrating descriptive-categorical analysis with an analogy-based synthesis guided by the central metaphor.

Result:   Exclusion operates through disciplinary power, the hidden curriculum, and “politics of the negative,” materialized in institutional absences and omissions. Mental health emerges as a sensitive marker of these conditions. In response, Black residents develop tactics of resistance that reframe pain and convert it into collective strength through bonds of solidarity, such as those articulated by the concept of dororidade.

Conclusion:  The “quarto de despejo” metaphor proves to be a powerful heuristic tool, revealing medical residency simultaneously as a space for the reproduction of inequalities and for micro-practices of counter-power. The findings indicate the need for further research on these processes, which is relevant to informing an anti-racist and socially accountable medical pedagogy.

Keywords:
Internship and Residency; Racism; Sexism; Medical Education; Social Isolation