Scientific practices and late colonialism in Portugal: On gender (in)visibility in daily-life narratives on asia

This article explores relations between gender, scientific practice and representations of space among portuguese academics working in Asia. Empirical focus is put in analising academic narratives of one woman social scientist, Graciete Batalha, in order to discuss it in comparison with other contemporary scientific narratives. In the summer of 1974, linguist Graciete Batalha travels to West Malaysia in a scientific mission to Malacca to apply a linguistic inquiry to a local population of Portuguese origin. We argue that her work is in a position of transition between two different modes of knowledge production, the colonial and the postcolonial.