The academic-scientific essay remains an understudied genre within Brazilian Applied Linguistics. Moreover, most existing research tends to examine the essay in educational contexts, treating it primarily as an assessment tool. Acknowledging the need to explore other sites of academic socialization for the essay, this article aims to analyze the conditions under which essays are produced and published in top-tier journals in the fields of Linguistics and Literature. To that end, we draw on the theoretical-analytical framework of Socio-Discursive Interactionism (Bronckart, 2023) to examine four (4) published essays and the submission guidelines of their respective journals. This qualitative-interpretive analysis reveals that, although the essay is rarely listed among the accepted genres in the journals’ editorial scopes, it is nonetheless frequently submitted, evaluated, and published. We therefore argue that the essay circulates, metaphorically, in a state of “clandestinity,” raising important questions about the (lack of) formal validation of the genre within the academic-scientific sphere.
