INTRODUCTION:
Brazilian federal public universities remain shaped by racist, sexist, and elitist dynamics that unevenly affect women’s health and permanence. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the willful woman and the feminist killjoy, this study analyzed narratives of women in university-based collectives to understand how these experiences produce resistance, care, and health within academic contexts¹.

METHODS:
This qualitative study is part of a doctoral research project guided by a cartographic approach. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 women from collectives affiliated with different Brazilian federal universities across diverse regions. Narrative analysis was informed by cartography inspired by the Philosophy of Difference of Deleuze and Guattari, following processes, affects, connections, and becomings, and generating conceptual figures as analytical syntheses of the empirical material.²

RESULTS:
The narratives revealed recurring experiences of loneliness, silencing, institutional racism, harassment, and academic overload, often associated with processes of distress and illness in everyday university life. The willful woman emerged as a synthesis of narratives expressing persistence in the face of institutional violence and refusal to relinquish academic existence despite significant physical and emotional costs. The feminist killjoy appeared as the figure who names sexism and racism, disrupts institutional pacts of silence, and is frequently held responsible for the discomfort produced. Women’s collectives functioned as key dispositifs for transforming individual suffering into shared experience, fostering belonging, strengthening support networks, and sustaining collective practices of care and resistance.

CONCLUSIONS:
Women’s collectives in public universities constitute micropolitical spaces for the production of health by validating affects, amplifying voices, and challenging exclusionary institutional structures. By sustaining narratives that break silence, these collectives operate as dispositifs of care, prevention of institutional harm, and resistance, pointing to pathways for public health practices and university policies committed to equity and social justice.