Contribuições da cientista Lucía Tosi para os estudos de gênero e ciência no Brasil.

Abstract

Lucía Piave Tosi was a chemist, scientist, historian of science, and feminist who contributed significantly to these areas in Brazil. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she graduated in Chemistry and obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry. Lucia Tosi worked at several universities and chemistry labs, such as; the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). After the Brazilian military coup in 1964, Lucia Tosi and her husband, the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, were exiled due to violence and political threats in Brazil. During her exile in France, Tosi founded with Danda Prado the Grupo Latinoamericano de Mujeres en París, bringing together mainly exiled Brazilian women. The group ended up joining women from other Latin American countries, establishing itself to discuss issues about gender, feminism, and Latin American political agendas and starting to publish the bulletin Nosotras. As a result of her background in chemistry and interest in the feminist movement, Lucia Tosi became one of the pioneers in gender and science studies in Brazil. In this sense, this multi-paper thesis develops around the following question: what are the contributions of the scientist Lucia Tosi to developing Gender and Science studies in Brazil? Three papers concerning different elements are presented here to elaborate an answer to this question: Firstly, we present a biographical sketch of Lucía Tosi. We also discuss the relevance of Nosotras bulletin and Lucía Tosi’s role in its publication. Finally, we present an overview of Lucia Tosi’s writings on gender and science published in Brazil. For this, we explored primary sources, for example, the scientist's files, the publications of the bulletin Nosotras, her publications on gender and science in academic journals, as well as secondary sources that deal with the subject. From a feminist biographical perspective, we chose gender as a historical analysis category, allowing us to draw Lucía Tosi's obstacles and strategies to succeed in a science acculturated by misogynistic perspectives such as chemistry. Finally, we realized that if, on the one hand, it took her a long time to reach a stable career, with her career matching that of her husband, on the other hand, she became internationally recognized, working in important research centers. In this sense, we perceive the importance that feminism had in Lucía's life and her prominence in scientific activity. Thus, dialectically, the personal, private, and domestic of who Lucía Tosi was, meet the political, scientific, and academic in an actual intellectual catharsis. Lucía was problematizing, questioning, and an activist in the stories of others who preceded her. Still, she also created spaces, strategies, and tools so that her story could be told today.