Disability, race, and gender in Brazilian graduate education: intersectional invisibility and the limits of inclusion policies

Abstract

The expansion of access to Brazilian graduate education, driven by affirmative action policies, has increased the diversity of the student population. However, significant analytical gaps remain in understanding how different social markers shape academic trajectories. This article analyzes, from an intersectional perspective, the presence of graduate students with disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, and giftedness, as defined by Brazil's National Inclusive Special Education Policy (2025), as well as students with specific learning disorders, in graduate programs at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), used as an empirical reference for examining structural issues in Brazilian higher education. Grounded in intersectionality, the social model of disability, the coloniality of power, and Black feminist scholarship, the study adopts a qualitative, documentary, and analytical-interpretive approach based on publicly available institutional data from 2021 to 2025. The findings show that disability, when examined as an isolated category, obscures inequalities produced through the interaction of race, gender, gender identity, and territory, revealing the persistent underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, transgender, and non-binary students within the population of students with disabilities. The study concludes that institutional policies based on single-axis categories tend to reproduce historical inequalities, underscoring the need to incorporate intersectionality as a guiding principle in the design, implementation, and evaluation of inclusion policies. By operationalizing the concept of intersectional invisibility in the context of Brazilian graduate education, this study contributes an analytical framework to international debates on inclusion and equity in higher education.