Solitárias? Mulheres negras docentes na UFBA entre a presença e o isolamento na relação social de trabalho sob a política de cotas no serviço público (2014– 2024)

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze the social labor relations of Black female professors at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) between 2014 and 2024, a period marked by the validity of the Quota Law (Law No. 12.990/2014) and the advancement of academic neoliberalism. I draw upon the articulation between Anticolonial Marxism, Black Feminism, and Decolonial Critique to investigate how Black presence, although quantitatively expanded, is traversed by dynamics of isolation that update the colonialities of being, knowledge, and power. I defend the thesis of a Triple Burden, characterized by the overlapping of two movements of exploitation: the extraction of surplus labor in the productive sphere (teaching, research, and extension) and symbolic expropriation in the reproductive sphere (care work and the management of racial tensions). Methodologically, I adopted a mixed-methods approach: a quantitative stage, in which I conducted a census of Black female professors based on data from the Pro-Rectorate of Personnel Development (PRODEP), and a qualitative stage, in which I conducted a case study with semi-structured interviews, interpreted via thematic and narrative analysis. My quantitative results demonstrate that, although affirmative action expanded numerical entry, this expansion occurred as an incomplete inclusion, evidenced by the overrepresentation of Black women in precarious appointments (substitute contracts) and the maintenance of white hegemony in permanent positions of higher prestige. On the qualitative plane, the narratives revealed that the ideology of merit acts as a barrier and that loneliness operates as a technology of institutional containment, manifested through microaggressions, epistemic delegitimization, and racism by denegation. I identified that the convergence of these violences results in physical and mental illness, configuring a state of Triple Exhaustion. However, I conclude that Black presence in the university dialectically mobilizes strategies of re-existence, through which female professors forge solidarity networks and practices of aquilombamento that subvert the logic of isolation, tensioning university culture toward radical emancipation and the construction of new paradigms of belonging.