Virgínia Leone Bicudo (1910-2003): The Plurivalence of a Black Brazilian Woman Sociologist, Psychoanalyst and Engaged Intellectual

Virgínia Leone Bicudo (1910-2003) is at the center of this work for the excellence and vanguard of her studies of race relations in Sociology and Psychoanalysis in Brazil – despite the combined oppressions of race, gender and class, which impacted her adversely while black woman on the rise in São Paulo. Our access to Virgínia Bicudo happened through the research carried out by Janaína Damaceno, a Black woman and anthropologist whose scientific production has consisted of understanding Virgínia's life and research journey. Janaína Damaceno has paid special attention to the seminal studies of racial attitudes and color prejudice undertaken by Virgínia at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo in the 1940s and 1950s, and to her pioneering and painful journey as an intellectual Black woman, constantly subjected to racist and misogynistic ploys of neglect and erasure (DAMACENO, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2020). Virgínia Bicudo also is a socially engaged intellectual, especially through the dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge that she provided, in an inaugural way in Brazil in the 1950s, in her program on Rádio Excelsior called “O Nosso Mundo Mental”, and in texts published in the newspaper Folha da Manhã. I argue that Virginia's sociological and psychoanalytic production must be studied globally, and that it can contribute in a very special way to the field of Clinical Sociology studies.