PROFESSIONALISM, GENDERIZATION AND RACIALIZATION IN LEGAL ACADEMY IN BRAZIL

Abstract

The paper focuses on the Brazilian legal academy, and analyses how the process of genderization and racialization produces itself with the formation of the subjects, and the opportunities and constraints for their careers. The articulation of these social markers results in privileges and obstacles unevenly distributed between White men, White women, Black men, Black women. It discusses the research result in dialogue with studies on gender inequalities in legal academy in several countries, and the article suggests to approach the process in the perspective of differences. It points that such gradient of race and gender intersection also produces essencialism by fixing identities among the professoriate. The research hypothesis is that interviewers suture professionalism and difference as the result of experiences that constituted them as professionals, situated in genderization and racialization process that demand emotional work. The subjects handle the meanings of racial attribution and gender codes combining them in diverse and changeable ways, that do not turn into stable and essencialized identities. The fieldwork gathered quantitative data from the 2015 National Census of Higher Education, from the 2017 RAIS database on workforce and seventy qualitative interviews with women and men legal academics, from seven diversified Law schools.

Professionalism; legal academy; difference; gender; race