“A propósito de Pagu” [Concerning Pagu], written by Mariza Corrêa and published in 1993 as the first article of the first issue of cadernos pagu, offered a brief presentation about Patrícia Galvão (1910-1962), and her controversial and pioneer role in the arts, literature, journalism, and politics. According to Corrêa (1993)CORRÊA, Mariza. A propósito de Pagu. cadernos pagu (1), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1993, pp.7-18 [https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/1677/1659 – acesso em: 25 abr. 2023].
https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/in... , only sensitive readers understand that good authors must be returned to, and their ideas promoted, even if this does not necessarily mean they are truly recognized. As becomes clear at the end of the article, Pagu is one of these authors. Her ideas circulate until today, but her place in the canons of the arts and literature is not completely consolidated.

To give the name Pagu to the Nucleus for Gender Studies and the scientific periodical that arose from this nucleus, is simultaneously a type of “revival” of her ideas, and a recognition of the pioneer work and struggles engaged in by Patrícia Galvão, as Corrêa (1993)CORRÊA, Mariza. A propósito de Pagu. cadernos pagu (1), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1993, pp.7-18 [https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/1677/1659 – acesso em: 25 abr. 2023].
https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/in... affirmed. Moreover, and no less importantly, it says a lot about relations and exchanges involved in the production of knowledge, and about the constitution of the support and emotional networks inherent to feminist thinking and practice. Thus, Corrêa (1993CORRÊA, Mariza. A propósito de Pagu. cadernos pagu (1), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1993, pp.7-18 [https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/1677/1659 – acesso em: 25 abr. 2023].
https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/in... :17) affirmed “we choose the name Pagu for our Gender Studies Center as suggested by Beth Lobo, the cousin of Mara Lobo, for many good reasons”¹ 1 Beth Lobo, to whom Mariza Corrêa referred, was Professor Elisabeth de Souza-Lobo who stood out for her important work articulating gender, class, labor, and resistance. In 1991, at the time of the constitution of the Center for Gender Studies, now known as the Nucleus of Gender Studies, Beth was a visiting professor at Unicamp and was one of the main catalysts to the creation of the nucleus. She died that year, in a car accident in Northeast Brazil. Mara Lobo is one of the many names used by Patrícia Galvão in her writings for various communication vehicles. It is precisely in this fictitious and poetic kinship between them that we see the networks of support and affection to feminist thinking and practice. The library of the Pagu Nucleus for Gender Studies has been named the Beth Lobo Library, to celebrate the life and work of Elizabeth de Souza-Lobo. The library, as it could not fail to, includes the Beth Lobo and Mariza Corrêa archives, composed of works from the personal libraries of the two authors. .

In this first issue of 1993, Adriana Piscitelli elaborated the presentation of the periodical. In brief, although instigating words, she affirmed: “We present De trajetórias e Sentimentos, [From trajectories and Feelings] the first issue of Cadernos Pagu. This activity is a publication that is intimately linked to the interests and activities of a group: an interdisciplinary academic collective that intends to deepen knowledge of categories of gender through joint work” (1993:5, emphasis in the original). Since then, cadernos pagu has become one of the most important scientific journals in the field of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies in Brazil, and is recognized nationally and internationally.

During its 30 years of publication, various formats and publishing schedules were adopted. At first, cadernos was published twice a year, and exclusively in print, like most Brazilian and international scientific journals at the time. Thumbing through the printed issues of the journal we find not only pages dedicated to promoting other journals for gender studies and those in the social sciences – like Revista Gênero, from the Transdisciplinary Nucleus for Gender Studies (NUTEG); Revista Cadernos de Campo, from the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at USP; and the Revista Mora, from the Interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies of the University of Buenos Aires – but also a final page totally dedicated to the promotion of subscriptions to the journal, with various prices and forms of payment. Although cadernos pagu received public financing from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) since 1996, income from subscriptions and sales of the printed journal helped meet the expensive cost of mounting promotional stands for the journal at scientific events. The costs for participation of the cadernos in the sales areas of books and journals at congresses was also shared with other journals in the human sciences such as Mana, from UFRJ; História, Ciência e Saúde Manguinhos, published by FIOCRUZ; and REF, Revista de Estudos Feministas, published by UFSC.

Only in the first years of the decade of 2000 did the journal come to be published in digital format as well, and then became part of the Coleção SciELO. In 2014 the journal ceased to be published in print and became exclusively digital. Since 2016, in keeping with recommendations of SciELO and other indexing and evaluation platforms that confer legitimacy, credibility, and recognition to scientific journals, cadernos pagu began to publish three issues per year.

It must be said, however, that the production of knowledge from a feminist perspective is characterized by an always reflexive and critical use of scientific standards and codes, which are inescapably produced by data bases situated in the time frame and inequalities of power. As affirmed in the editorial for the release of the section Bastidores da produção do conhecimento feminista [Behind the scenes of feminist production of knowledge] published in number 65 of cadernos pagu, “we assume as constituent of this process the always unfinished and dialogical elaboration of feminist knowledge, seen here as a practice in constant transformation by the relations and debates established by its authors” (Padovani; Simões; Feltrin, 2022:1).

This is to say that the adaptations realized over the years by the journal can and should be read critically. We understand the need for evaluation criteria, but we do not completely agree with how these criteria are operated by indexation platforms. Nevertheless, cadernos pagu stands out in Brazil as one of the most important scientific journals in the country. For example, one of the measurements used by SciELO is the h-index of Google Scholar² 2 The objective of the index according to Marques (2013) is to simultaneously evaluate the production and impact of the work of a researcher based on their most cited articles. This same mechanism, Marques explains, was expanded to evaluate research groups and scientific journals. . Curiously, cadernos pagu is not listed among the 100 main scientific journals in Portuguese even though it has an h-index of 28³ 3 The h5-index concerns the past five years of publication by the journal. According to the table provided by Google Acadêmico in Portuguese, the data correspond to the five-year period of 2017-2021. The score on the índice-h5 of 28 attributed to cadernos pagu was thus obtained by a recognized and important tool used to calculate the metric known as “Publish or Perish”. To see the table of the main publications on February 24, 2023 we accessed the following address: https://scholar.google.com.br/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=pt-BR&vq=pt . This would place the journal between positions 17 and 20 of the main publications in the language.

We emphasize this point to demonstrate the tortuous and difficult routes that must be taken to maintain a scientific journal. The indexation in databases like SciELO, Scopus, and others requires that the journal convert the texts to be published to the XML extension. This procedure is entirely paid for by the cadernos pagu, which is currently maintained by resources from CNPq and the Education, Research, and Extension Support Fund of Unicamp (FAEPEX)⁴ 4 Processo CNPq - 407486/2022-4, chamada 12/2022; processo FAEPEX – 2015/22 – Edital Especial 10/2021 Apoio a Periódicos Científicos da UNICAMP. The Portal de Periódicos of Unicamp also contributes to the constant effort to index the journals it hosts, and the magazine benefits from this by expanding its indexation in new databases. See: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ppec/ - accessed 9 March 2023. . It is important to highlight that it is essential to attain and maintain good indexes in the metrics to receive financing for the journal and be able to maintain the cadernos as a journal that has open access and is free to readers and those who want to publish in it. We have contacted SciELO and Google to try and understand this absence from the top-100 list a number of times. We have never had satisfactory responses.

It is important to highlight that this arduous work was conducted by Rebeca Feltrin, who was the co-editor of cadernos pagu from 2021 to 2022. A researcher in the field of science policy, Rebeca spared no effort to use her knowledge to support the investigation and analysis of the indexes and metrics for the journal, and, with the data she gathered in hand, contact the staffs of SciELO and Google. She always received a frustrating response, with each blaming the “other company” (SciELO blamed Google, and Google blamed SciELO). Communications and frustrations in the relationships with the companies responsible for indexation and evaluation of metrics and indicators, as mentioned here, provoke questioning of the parameters for ranking academic-scientific knowledge on which cadernos pagu depends, and helps to produce. It is by confronting these ambiguities that we continue to move forward, publishing articles, and reflections important to feminist knowledge.

These details about financing practices, printing, and indexing of the journal in this editorial reveal that over its 30-year history cadernos pagu was produced by people who, from Mariza Corrêa until Rebeca Feltrin, dedicated themselves to the journal.

To speak of the 30-year history of the cadernos pagu necessarily involves speaking of the work of all those who have been involved in publishing the journal. The first issue of “our cadernos” (Piscitelli, 1993PISCITELLI, Adriana. Apresentação. cadernos pagu (01), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 1993, pp.5-6 [https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/1676/1658 – acesso em: 25 abr. 2023].
https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/in... ) was organized and edited by Adriana Piscitelli. In the second edition of the journal, published in 1994, Mariza Corrêa assumed the post of chief editor, a position she exercised until number 33, published in 2009. In the next issue and the following years Iara Beleli edited the journal. It is important to emphasize, however, that Iara had worked at cadernos pagu since its first issues. In number 11, published in 1998, Iara Beleli was already in the credits as “editorial secretary”, a position she occupied for five years, until she became executive editor for the special issue to celebrate the first decade of the Nucleus for Gender Studies and the cadernos pagu – edition 21, of 2003. Iara Beleli thus worked nearly uninterruptedly in publishing cadernos pagu from 1998 to 2011, and returned to the position of editor of the journal in 2018, where she remained until late 2020, when Natália Corazza Padovani assumed the post.

Luciana Camargo Bueno has also accompanied the history of the journal since 1998, when upon invitation from Adriana Piscitelli, she came to Pagu to work at the secretariat of the Nucleus. At that time, she helped prepare the editions for printing on sheets of tracing paper, while she got to know the texts, authors, and the women who were the guiding lights of the journal, through the pages and corridors of Pagu. In 2007 Luciana began to work exclusively at cadernos, participating in the processes of evaluation and selection of articles and elaboration of the editions. Edition 34 of 2009 is the first in which she appears as editorial assistant of the journal. In this period, the journal adopted online submission of texts, with its entrance to the SciELO Submission platform. This facilitated the arrival of articles from various parts of Brazil and Europe, mainly, and the organization of the process, given that there were already many submissions. In 2016, Luciana became executive editor of the journal, a position which she holds until today.

Over the years, Mariza Corrêa, Iara Beleli and Luciana Camargo Bueno have been able to count on support networks that made viable the gratifying work of producing the journal. Although she never formally exercised the role of editor, Adriana Piscitelli continued to participate in preparing the cadernos. Moreover, the journal always had support from members of the editorial committees and boards⁵ 5 The editorial board has a rotating composition that has changed over the thirty years of its existence. The names of most of the members of the committees can be seen in the printed issues of the journal and on the website of SciELO [https://www.scielo.br/journal/cpa/about/#editors - accessed 3 March 2023], which indicates the current compositions of the editorial committee and board. . In the years in which Mariza and Iara were responsible for editing the journal, they had collaboration from the work of Heloísa Buarque de Almeida – who also served as executive editor of the journal from 2004 and 2006 – and from Heloísa Pontes, who was a special editor of reviews, from 2007 to 2009.

The final years with printed issues of the journal were 2012 and 2013, When Karla Bessa was editor, and a member of the editorial committee, and she helped expand the scope of the journal to the fields of the visual arts and cinema. The transition from being a print journal to an exclusively digital journal was led by Regina Facchini, who was editor of the journal from 2014 to 2017. It was in this period, as we mentioned, that cadernos pagu began to publish three issues a year, growing not only in the number of articles received and published, but also in its reach. The journal, which was once affectionately known as “our cadernos” [our notebooks], became an international periodical, with articles published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with submissions from Argentine, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Danish authors, as well as those from many other nations.

cadernos pagu has never ceased to be a journal dedicated to the publication of innovative research in the field of gender studies and feminist theories. If, at first, its articles revealed the production of a research group composed of professors and students at Unicamp, over time the journal came to reveal the internationalization of the field of feminist theory and gender studies, branching out from a public university situated in a South American country.

Since she assumed the position of editor of cadernos pagu in 2020, Natália Corazza Padovani, one of the authors of this editorial, has sought to produce bridges between the past of “nossos cadernos” and the present of one of the most important periodicals dedicated to gender studies and feminist theories in Latin America. The return to publishing illustrations on the now digital “cover pages” for the cadernos pagu, with images selected from a public call for proposals, is exemplary of this. The printed issues of the journal, after all, were always recognized by the illustrations printed on their covers. The first issue of this year of 2023, in which the journal celebrates its 30 years of existence, once again has an illustrated cover, now digital, for “our cadernos”.

Similarly, since last year, the journal has included the section behind the scenes of production of feminist knowledge, which was considered and produced in a complex interlocution with its history. The objective was to create an authorial form of “open science” in the realm of feminist knowledge, considering contemporary demands of scientific production, focused on academic production proposed by those who founded our journal and the Pagu Nucleus of Gender Studies (Padovani; Simões; Feltrin, 2022).

Moreover since 2020, authors interested in submitting articles to the journal have access to all the steps through which their original texts pass. The information about the editorial process presented in the instructions to authors⁶ 6 See https://www.scielo.br/journal/cpa/about/#instructions - accessed 3 March 2023. , lists each one of the people who compose the behind the scenes of production at cadernos pagu and through whose hands pass the articles, reviews, interviews, and other texts submitted. From the editors to special student grant recipients at Unicamp⁷ 7 According to information on the site of the Serviço de Apoio ao Estudante (SAE) of Unicamp, the grant is aimed at undergraduate students, regardless of their year of study. The criterion for conceding the grant is socio-economic, and there is an annual selection process. In this type of grant, the student contemplated must conduct activities in projects within various areas of the university, always under the supervision of professionals in the given fields of competence, including professors at Unicamp, coordinators and other professionals. Currently, cadernos pagu has the grantees Letícia Condota Kuasne; Mariana Rodrigues Martins and João Pedro Cabral da Silva. , each one of the positions listed are occupied by people who participated in and continue to participate in the daily materiality of the journal. The cadernos pagu Instagram page was completely created and promoted by Gabriela Matos, an undergraduate student in the social sciences who began to work at the journal in 2020 with social assistance grants that are dedicated to keeping students at a university. The Instagram page includes the video series entitled “how many people does it take to make a scientific academic journal”. The videos show the faces, voices, and colors of those who each day receive, evaluate, process, administrate, layout, and publish the editions, from the more than six hundred texts that pass through the journal each year. This presentation is also a way to conduct open science.

The presentation of these people who produce our cadernos pagu, reveals an important aspect of its daily operations that few people know about: the relationship of the journal to education⁸ 8 In informal communications, Iara Beleli always insisted that the editorial activity of a journal be intimately related to pedagogical practice. Iara considers it to be so not only because the publication of articles is one of the main forms of evaluation that graduate programs are submit to, but also because editing a journal involves establishing a dialog with authors and works in process of elaboration. It implies learning to absorb pedagogical demands and to host, in the corridors of the journal, graduate and undergraduate students who come to work at the journal as part of their professional training. . Some of the people who work behind the scenes at the journal are interns, with and without grants, who choose cadernos pagu as the place for their projects. Beyond the essential support for the bureaucratic routines of a scientific journal, we understand that this relationship between the journal and the student body becomes a formative and educational element of the people involved in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.

Two exemplary people in this relationship are Jonatan Sacramento, a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in the Social Sciences at Unicamp in the research line “Gender Studies”, and Luiza Hortelan, who has a master’s from the graduate program in Social Anthropology at Unicamp in the research line “Gender, differences and corporality”⁹ 9 Jonatan is supervised by Maria Conceição da Costa, a researcher associated to the Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero Pagu. Luiza Hortelan was supervised by Adriana Piscitelli, a permanent researcher of the Nucleus. Both Jonatan and Luiza were supervised in their scientific initiation research by Iara Beleli, who is also a permanent researcher. . Initially contemplated with social assistance grants, for a few years Jonatan and Luiza were the “face” of cadernos pagu at scientific meetings throughout the country. They were the ones who presented and sold the printed issues of the journal at stands at Brazilian and international congresses. The work of each at the journal not only promoted the journal, but also made viable the participation of students at academic events. For a long time Jonatan was recognized for his ability to always promptly indicate which number of cadernos pagu addressed the specific theme sought.

More recently, in 2020, a project for training in publishing, completely implemented by students in the course of Literary Studies at the Institute of Language Studies at Unicamp, promoted another encounter between the journal and pedagogical projects. Interested in learning about the practice of “editing” a work, aware that this training would be essential in their educational trajectories, and that it is difficult to enter internship programs at book publishers, the undergraduate students, organized themselves and proposed to the journals of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas that they serve as interns, accompanying each of the processes at a journal. One of the interns at cadernos pagu in the internship program in 2020 was Beatriz Burgos, a student who is now copyeditor of the articles published in the journal in Portuguese.

In May 2022, with the departure of Rebeca Feltrin from the journal’s editorial board, Julian Simões came to share the editing tasks with Natália. As the histories of the grantees and interns reveal, the trajectories of Natália and Julian are also aligned to the history of cadernos pagu and its role in the education of scholars of gender studies.

Natália studied anthropology in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) at Unicamp, under the supervision of Adriana Piscitelli, and had the privilege of attending classes given by Mariza Corrêa about family and gender. As an undergraduate student in the social sciences at USP, Natália Corazza Padovani had been especially influenced by reading the article by Nadya Araújo Guimarães, “Os desafios da equidade: reestruturação e desigualdades de gênero e raça no Brasil”, [The challenges of equity: restructuring and inequalities of gender and race in Brazil] published in 2002 in the dossier of cadernos pagu, Gênero do Trabalho [Gender of Labor]. The article accompanied the research that Natália conducted as an undergraduate student in workshops that employed women in a prison situation in São Paulo state. Another article from issue 17-18 of the still print journal would accompany Natália both as a student and in the courses she taught in the line of Gender Studies of the PPGAS and in the Graduate Program in the Social Sciences, also at Unicamp. The article, written by Anne Fausto-Sterling, Dualismos em Duelo [The Duel of Duelisms], translated into Portuguese by Plínio Dentzien, and published in cadernos pagu, signified a change of paradigm in studies of gender and sexuality that influenced the academic choices later undertaken by Natália Corazza. This was particularly true during her master’s studies, when she focused on the history of the oldest female penitentiary in São Paulo state, considering how sexualities and pleasures were and had been governed (Padovani, 2010PADOVANI, Natália Corazza. “Perpetuas espirais”: falas do poder e do prazer sexual em trinta anos (1977-2009) na história da Penitenciaria Feminina da Capital. Dissertação (Mestrado em Sociologia), Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2010 [https://repositorioslatinoamericanos.uchile.cl/handle/2250/1340811 – acesso em: 25 abr. 2023].
https://repositorioslatinoamericanos.uch... ). Natália would return to reading Dualismos em Duelo, during her doctoral studies, now along with Mariza Corrêa, and benefited from the kindness that characterized Mariza’s teaching, which broadened the horizons of each text and article discussed, always relating them to research in progress in the graduate programs in which she participated. Through her teaching, Mariza always made the cadernos pagu a bit of “our cadernos”, taking to the classroom the text of her then doctoral supervisee, Luiz Henrique Passador, “‘As mulheres são más’: pessoa, gênero e doença no sul de Moçambique” [“Women are more”: person, gender and illness in Southern Mozambique], which, with data from fieldwork about shamanism and relations of care and health, would allow subverting logics of family organization and medical knowledge in the urban context of Mozambique.

Mariza Corrêa’s editing and teaching are great inspirations for the continuation of the editorial practice, and are interlinked to the way that cadernos pagu is capillarized through courses in gender studies and feminist theories in Brazil. Mariza was an inspiration for Natália Corazza, and certainly inspires the steps of Julian Simões.

Also in 2006, when Julian was in his second year of undergraduate studies in the social sciences at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), he was enthusiastic upon discovering a journal entirely dedicated to gender studies. At the time, he sought the instigating article by Gabriela Cano (2004)CANO, Gabriela. Amélio Robles, andar de soldado velho: fotografia e masculinidade na Revolução Mexicana. cadernos pagu (22), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2004, pp.115-150. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-83332004000100006
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-8333200400... about Amélio Robles and his participation in the Mexican Revolution, which had been published in the dossier “O gênero da moda e outros gêneros” [Gender of Fashion and other Genders], organized by Heloísa Pontes. Thumbing through the articles he found in issue 22, Julian had his first contact with the essential and classic text “‘Gênero’ para um dicionário marxista: a política sexual de uma palavra”¹⁰ 10 The article was originally published in English in 1991. The translation of classics of feminist thinking was one of the practices of the journal that continued over the years. The investment focused on the need to democratize access to discussions and productions of feminist knowledge, seeking to meet the demands of students and other people interested in the theme, but who do not have command of the original language of the articles. For example, of the ten articles most cited that were published by cadernos pagu, 8 are translations of texts by classic authors of gender studies. However, it is important to note that since the mid 2010s, the SciELO platform does not allow the publication of translations in scientific periodicals on the index. [Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: the sexual politics of a word] by Donna Haraway (2004)HARAWAY, Donna. “Gênero para um dicionário marxista: a política sexual de uma palavra. cadernos pagu (22), Campinas-SP, Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero-Pagu/Unicamp, 2004, pp.201-246. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-83332004000100009
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-8333200400... . Since then, cadernos pagu has occupied a special place in his educational process, which continued during his master’s studies in social anthropology and doctorate in social sciences, both at Unicamp under the supervision of Maria Filomena Gregori, a collaborating researcher at Pagu and a retired professor in the Department of Anthropology at Unicamp¹¹ 11 Julian is now also a collaborating researcher in the Pagu Nucleus for Gender Studies. In addition, he is a researcher in the Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero at the Universidade Federal do Paraná and a professor in the Department of Sociology in the field of gender and sexuality at that university. It is not an exaggeration to say that cadernos pagu was one of the main formative and educational elements in his academic and professional trajectory. .

cadernos pagu continues to be a mandatory reference for disciplines and educational courses in gender, and for all those who produce feminist knowledge, not only in the Brazilian national context. “Nossos cadernos” published texts that represent epistemic turns in the field. In these final lines of this editorial, we emphasize the effort, courage, pioneering work, and struggle of the tireless women named here and of the countless women authors who have contributed with publications over these 30 years of cadernos pagu. Once again, we turn to the inspiring reflections of Mariza Corrêa, an editor who was always attentive to innovative thinking, and a professor who was generously shared her knowledge. In an article in which she reflects on her trajectory within the themes of feminism and gender studies, Corrêa (2001) affirms:

It is with many more that we continue to make cadernos pagu. Hopefully there will be another 30 years, and many more women. Many more…

Referências bibliográficas

Publication Dates