Gender, Sexuality and the Chilean Post-dictatorship

The Emancipated Spectator

2010-07-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009.

I cannot thank Dr. Mary Bryson enough for pointing this book at me.

Here, Jacques Ranciere engages on debates about how to understand spectatorship and spectacles. His main point being that there is no such thing as a passive spectator who is a blank receptacle of the flood of images and susceptible to ideological manipulation. Being a spectator is then not something negative on itself, as meaning is produced in an indeterminate way and thus cannot be calculated in advance. In this way, he counters Debord formula that the more a subjects contemplates (his/her own disposession), the less he/she lives. Ranciere proposes to understand viewing as an action in which spectators are also "active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them" (13), "who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the 'story' and make it their own story" (22).

Ranciere also takes issue with the left-wing irony or melancholy that anticipates any kind of social critique is already absorbed by the logics of capitalism and free market, as even acts of protests are already framed as ("youth radicalism") fashion, commodities, and spectacle. Instead, he poses an approach based on a different set of assumptions: "that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place...there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstruous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored. What there is are simply scenes of dissensus, capable of surfacing at any place and at any time.(...) It means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification." (48-49)

In this way, aesthetic experience is politically effective not so much in terms of offering a convincing rhetoric of what should be done as an agenda for emancipation, but as far as it can "change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible" (72). Since there is not direct and/or transparent relation between the artist's intentions and the effects on the audiences, this poses a challenge for "political art" that seeks to have an emancipatory effect. This fundamental indetermination is useful to think of art as a way to open up new forms of political subjectivation through the multiplication of connections and disconnections between signifiers.

Gendered Spectacles of Nationalism

2010-06-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

Taylor, Diana. Dissapearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War." Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Taylor's book is key to my research about militarism and neoliberalism as gendered spectacles, as it does several things at the same time:

1. It outlines a definition of spectacle as a central component of national imaginations. Spectacles offer universal canonical narratives for interpreting specific historical situations, they present a version of the world as inevitable and natural, and they interpellate the audiences in a way that it shapes what are the viable subjectivities in that context. Spectacle, performativity and theatricality are not terms opposed here to "reality," but rather have very real effects. Who is in control of the production of national public spectacles is what matters, who holds the power to manipulate desire and control the gaze.

2. It describes the ways that masculinity is performed in the context of militarism in Argentina's "Dirty War." The Junta enacted an old script of male individuation that is carried out on and through women's bodies. The presence of the female seems to mediate both in an Oedipal drama (in the role of mother) and to guarantee that the homosocial bonding of militarism is framed as an heterosexual. However, Taylor is critical of how the left has been trapped in the same script of disputing the "true" masculinity from the military by feminizing their opponents.

3. It points at the ways that resistance is always constrained in previous already scripted plots that are available in any given specific cultural and sociohistorical context. Emblematic would be the case of the Madres, already commented here. Because women (or "good women" anyway) have available a very limited number of viable roles to play, their oppositional practices tend to end up enacting those roles. This is not a call for paralysis, but rather to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions inherent to oppositional practices. Along with this, she writes about the dilemmas when writing about violence, and calls for a politics of spectatorship: it invites us to a responsible witnessing of violence.

On the notion of spectacle, part 2

2010-06-23T12:20:00.001-07:00

McClintock, Anne. "No Longer in a Future Heaven": Gender, Race and Nationalism in Dangerous Liaisons. Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997.

"All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous —" (89)

McClintock argues that nationalisms as historical practices are invariably built in the institutionalization of gender difference and that the nation is prefigured by the image of the family in order to legitimize power relations as natural. For example, when militarism and authoritarian regimes draw on notions of father's authority. Moreover, she describes how national time was domesticated under the European Enlightment, a process in which "history, especially national and imperial history, took on a character of a spectacle." (92) National time projected onto national space created national history in the shape of a spectacle. McClintock is convinced that national collective identity is experienced and transmitted through spectacle, a theatrical performance of invented community:

"...the single power of nationalism since the late nineteenth century, I suggest, has been its capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unity through the management of mass, national commodity spectacle. " (102)

In this sense, nationalism is lived through fetishism, and a pending task is to examine how women participate and resist male fetish rituals of national spectacle.

Chilean exile women in Vancouver: "They Used to Call Us Witches"

2010-03-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

"They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean exiles, culture and feminism" by Julie Shayne is based on her sociological research of the Chilean exile solidarity movement, with a focus on women, and particularly on how culture and emotions played a role in triggering and sustaining this movement. The book features sometimes painful but fascinating stories of women who came together in the exile solidarity movement from different places, for different reasons, and in different points in their life. According to many of these testimonies, Chilean exile women performed their political work mostly in the shape of social services delivered to the exile community and laboring in the production of "peñas", the most emblematic activity of the solidarity movement. Moreover, aside from working full time jobs and raising kids, these women even found time to collaborate in projects that mixed feminist politics, artistic creation and a transnational agenda of solidarity.

I encounter this book partly as an insider and partly an outsider. My personal history links me to some of the stories that are told in this book: I was born in Chile a year after the coup, and went into exile between 1975 and 1980 to Colombia with my sister and my parents, who were MIR —Revolutionary Left Movement— militants by the time of the coup. In 1975 my uncle was kidnapped and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where he later died but remains disappeared until today. Soon after that, my dad was abducted from home and taken to the same detention centre, only he was released the next day. We left right after that with the help of family networks in Colombia. We returned in 1980, my parents got separated, quit their militancias, and I grew up in dictatorship Chile. I am then situated in generational terms closer to the interviewees' children than to their direct experiences of the Unidad Popular, the coup and exile. This will shape the way that I read the accounts and the analysis in this book, for example in relation to cultural practices of the Chilean left.

Other aunts and uncles involved with the MIR established in Sweden, Canada and California and in total, on my dad side we are 17 cousins who are spread in four countries, all of whom speak at least two languages, and all whom have felt both at home and foreign in the countries were they were raised and in Chile. Exile, then, is an experience that I know more from the perspectives of my cousins, who complained often about being recognized as Chileans in Sweden, and as Swedes in Chile.

Overall, I am excited to see research on Chilean women exiles with a focus on feminism. I especially agree on the relevance of recording and archiving the amazing stories of exiles, and to further a serious political and academic exploration of both the exile experience of what the "post-exile" subject can mean, in terms of memory, identity and agency. Could this be a hybrid subject, maybe what Haraway describes as a cyborg, part reality-part fiction, opening new venues for narration? Could the stories of Chilean exile women be read under the light of Chicana and queer theory to understand better the idea of inhabiting borders?

In any case, the experiences of exiles, of suffering but also of success and satisfaction, should be taken seriously and with the most academic rigor, and for sure never with the pretense of generating a univocal, totalizing account of exile that is inclusive of all experiences. Many traumatic events precisely become traumatic as they escape signification and remain stuck in the social body as unspoken symptoms. Thus, the necessity to come to terms with the fact that this story is polyphonic, contradictory, incomplete, fractured, and constantly re-imagined, as memory does not work as a repository of information. Quite the opposite, it works in a reconstructive way with the parameters of the present.

Likewise, as a task of feminist archival, I am glad to see the documentation of "Aquelarre" magazine, of the band "Cormorán" and the organization of the "Fifth Canadian Conference in Solidarity with Women of Latin America." Both the narratives around the magazine and the Conference are illustrative of the challenges of organizing around the political identity of "women." Feminist archives are key for a transgenerational feminist legacy.

I appreciate the thesis about the central place of emotions in fueling social movements, though I do not see it restricted to women, and I would add that these emotions appear as ambivalent: the sorrow of the loss of a country coexists with a sense of realization and belonging in Canada. I also agree about the place of culture in shaping the movement. However, putting together Gender-Emotions-Culture-Women sounds like a dangerous discourse to me. It is still not clear to me either why women stories demand for a special emphasis on emotions and culture, or if using a 'gendered lens' is a strategy to look for emotions in the first place, but in both cases, the underlying assumptions are dangerously essentialist and ideologically charged. I do not understand for example, why exile men's activities such as weekend soccer games —pichangas domingueras— are not gendered cultural practices; or how feelings of sorrow, guilt and embarrassment mixed with pride are not relevant in shaping male's experiences of exile. (And I find problematic that the way to deal with male's voices is for the author to speculate on what they would probably say.)

I am especially troubled by the fact that a book published in North America about so-called "Third world women," links women's political practice to emotions. Likewise, to characterize women as the "mothers" of the solidarity movement is likely to invoke and reproduce a discourse of sacrificial motherhood that is essentialist and heteronormative. For example, when women talk about the incredible pressure and amount of work that they had to deal with, I found that there was a romantic heroic tone to it, as opposed to being critical of why Chilean men were not performing house work!

Early in my life I was introduced to the term "machista-leninista" by my mom and her friends, who would mock the rigid, sexist and sometimes mysogynist gender ideologies that many left militants held. Because my own research aims to be critical of these gender ideologies that have characterized the discourse of Left in the recent decades, I felt compelled while reading this book to hear more critical analysis on the descriptions of gender relations as experienced in the solidarity's movement, for example, about how women provided free labor for the peñas —fundraisers for the solidarity movement— and did a lot of other work that was not considered important or did not even count as political. In this point I think we agree, that political practice needs to be defined in broader terms so that it includes chopping onions for peñas and not only speaking in public. For the longest time both conservative and progressive discourse in Chile have reproduced ideologically charged tropes like women's natural inclination to be caretakers, and specific ideologies of motherhood that assert women's moral superiority. The argument of linking only women to the transmission of culture, failing to see that men in exile are also socializing their children and being socialized in gender ideologies by their peers and partners, may suggest then that our 'gendered lens' need a new prescription.

Moreover, the book tends to reify Chilean culture instead of recognizing it as a site of political contestation within Chileans. This can be dangerously normative, as it enables the distinction between more and less "authentic" or loyal Chileans, or to judge one's allegiance by the performance of rigid symbols of Chilean nationalism. In this sense, I insist we ought to remain critical of our own political practice, which includes the (gendered) cultural practices of identity making in a solidarity movement. The peñas for me are the paradigmatic case, because, from the generational perspective of someone who did not experience the Unidad Popular firsthand, to reduce the whole memory of this incredibly interesting, epic, futuristic project to empanadas, vino and sad songs may not be as politically enabling, after all. Again, my contention here with the book is whether these cultural practices should be just taken 'as they came' or if we ought to be more critical of them in terms of their political effects.

I acknowledge that a white North American researcher is positioned in a complex place to be critical of cultural practices that are framed in the context of political repression in Latin America. But I think there are ways to deal with these complexities, see for example how Diana Taylor incorporates a systematic reflexivity of her position into her analysis of the political tactics of the Madres in Argentina (pages 16-27 of "Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War'").

On the other hand, even though Shayne claims central the relevance of culture in shaping the specific tactics of the Chilean solidarity movement in Vancouver, at the same time she asserts repeatedly that the Vancouver case is a "mirror image" of the experiences of Chilean exiles elsewhere and that if we ought to change the names it would be the same account in any other country where Chileans sought political asylum.

More serious however, is my disagreement with the book's explicit heteronormative assumption. I find problematic that the author assumes the authority to define other's sexuality as opposed to asking openly about one's self identification and how it relates to one's political practice. I also wonder why homoeroticism is not even contemplated as a relevant component of this love/hate story of nationalism and transnational solidarity in exile.

I was delighted during the moments when we actually "hear" the women's voices in the book. I found they were rich in representations, ideologies, imaginaries not only about gender and sexuality, but about national identity and space. For example, I found incredibly provoking the notions of a Chile with an "interior" and "exterior," or exile as the Fourteenth Region. Along the same lines, the metaphors of the military coup as natural disasters: a "horrible storm" and an "earthquake" are threads that I would have liked to see developed. Super interesting were also some women's accounts about "manipulating" their privilege and the military's gendered expectations to escape situations of possible political repression.

Earthquake in Chile: Disaster Capitalism at its best?

2010-03-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

Image from La Segunda, March 1st 2010: "Chile faces the tragedy. The military protection is soothing."

Just some days after the huge earthquake and following tsunami in Chile, I find myself having a strange deja vu listening in the radio to narratives of dead, disappeared, toques de queda (curfews), shortages and social chaos. Many cities are currently being declared in constitutional state of exception by catastrophe, with curfews and heavy military and police presence to avoid what has been described in the media as violent and desperate looting of supermarkets. Many people from the middle and upper classes, afraid of shortages, have effectively created them by monopolizing fuel and food. But the focus in the media has been definitely on the apparent lack of control of the irrational masses who are raiding the superstores, not only for basic goods, but all kinds of electric appliances. From afar, I see the pictures of young men being arrested by the military in Concepción, face down on the ground for stealing TVs.

However, police and civil authorities in Santiago have also been denouncing a number of false alarms and the presence of people spreading rumors about armed gangs going around looting and stealing. Apparently, besides the confirmed looting, there is people systematically trying to create a sense of social chaos, which is something we have seen before in Chilean history (Campaña del Terror anybody?). People demanding more police and military presence to ensure the "security" and "safety" is another equation that we have heard before. This latifundista (landowner's) mentality that we hear so much lately believes that law enforcement forces are at the service of the ruling classes, and that the protection of private property is more important that the well being of entire communities. In my perspective, in Chile, as anywhere else, we DO NOT need more cops or military presence to be safe or solve our problems. People have reacted in many different ways, and many are already organizing the distribution of basic services and goods, sharing whatever they have, lending support to one another. Solidarity, I think, is the only thing that can make us safe. In contrast, the curfew translates into a soldier pointing his gun at a 13 year old boy who is stealing blankets from a chain store as seen yesterday.

It is undeniable that over three decades of neoliberalism in Chile have had their impact in the "social fabric" and the sense of community and solidarity among Chileans. Some of us have been bombarded for the whole length of our lives with messages of individualism, competitiveness and fear of the other. The dismantlement of social security systems based on collective savings and mutualism under Pinochet have created a sense of insecurity that translates into a general sense of fear, the UNDP Reports on Human Development reported in 1998. The progressive criminalization of poverty and state clientelism have mined traditional practices of collaboration.

And the sense of opportunity of the political actors wanting to further a neoliberal agenda is strikingly good: two weeks before taking power, the elected President Sebastián Piñera announces the several macroeconomic measures to "reconstruct" the country, and again, his focus has been rather on the punishment of looters over the safety of everybody. In this sense, this tragedy may become —yet again— the grounds of legitimation for the furthering of a neoliberal agenda and militarism, as according to Naomi Klein's analysis. OR, this could also be the disaster that awakens some of us from the mirage of ephemeral pseudo-happiness we have been living. It could make a few realize that we need to rebuild our trust on each other, that there may be a deeper sense of happiness to be found in collaboration and solidarity: a sort of a "disaster socialism." Not wanting to be extremely optimist or even naive about it, I believe then that the direction this catastrophe will take the country is not decided yet.

There are some voices in Chile and abroad saying "not to worry, Chile is not Haiti". Yes, Chile is not Haiti, but Chile is not Switzerland either as Rafael Gumucio just wrote. And Santiago is not Chile. The fact that the country has been fantasizing about being a white, modern, wealthy nation for the last decades does not mean that this wealth is shared (Chile has the 8th worst distribution of wealth in the world). While some actors have been working hard to project that image internationally, it is important to distinguish them from others who suffer and/or resist those images of prosperity. A large part of the population lives on poverty and social exclusion. And for sure, those shiny glass covered buildings aren't any indicator of modernity because they are all broken now. As somebody said on facebook, el terremoto rompió espejos y espejismos (the earthquake brought down mirrors and mirages).

Another take on the Chilean earthquake, disaster capitalism and comparisons with Haiti written by my supervising friend Jon Beasley-Murray can be find here.

Competing masculinities, homoeroticism and perverse subjectivities: a queer reading of Toy Story

2010-03-01T14:45:00.001-08:00

So, what can a 1995 Disney-Pixar animation film tell us about Chilean post-dictatorship politics?

Here, I am trying to develop a queer feminist eye for reading materials such as films, as I am planning to include this kind of material in my actual research. As a short exercise, I do here a very exploratory and preliminary reading of Toy Story (John Lasseter, Pixar - Disney, 1995). The reason I picked this film is because it has become my toddler daughter's favorite, meaning I get to see it VERY often...and because it has very interesting narratives. I will not summarize the plot, so if you have not seen the movie, please read short summary at IMDB or Wikipedia. I welcome all kinds of suggestions and comments on how to refine this eye.

Competing Masculinities
This is mainly a story about masculinities in crisis. A cowboy toy —Woody— is in crisis when he feels he is being replaced by Buzz, the full-of-fancy-gadgets space ranger new toy, invoking a social eroticization of technology — all the other toys from Andy's room admire Buzz gadgets and are infatuated with it. Later in the film, Buzz has his own crisis when he realizes he is not the original Buzz Lightyear but only a toy "copy." These crises can be read in several ways, here are some: Woody's crisis could stand for the tensions caused by competing models of masculinities due to historical changes in the US. In this case, cultural artifacts like film help making sense of the transitions from one hegemonic model to another one. Toy Story re-stages then a pattern staged for a long time in the context of police television dramas, where often the "feds" are a threat to the masculinity of the local police, or a new cop finds himself in conflict with the senior cop style of doing things. This kind of "suturing" through differences given by generation or region I think are useful to the collective imagining of the nation.

On a different thread, Buzz falls apart when he finds out he is a toy action figure, just a copy of the (imaginary) original Buzz character. Buzz's frustration relate to the impossibility of fully embodying masculinity for any concrete men: since nobody "owns" the phallus masculinity needs to invoked through signifiers as a daily performance (Butler, 1990). However, after his crisis, Buzz seems to be liberated from the script that he was presupposed to perform by programming so we could read a rather make a positive reading of the after-crisis.

Homoeroticism
In terms of desire and sexuality, even though there is an explicit heterosexual love plot between Woody and Bo, the main love investments driving the plot seem to be male-to-male: Woody loves Andy, that is why he is so jealous about Buzz; and then through the story the main love relation at stake is actually between Woody and Buzz. What initially is a relation based on mistrust, jealousy competitiveness ends in a true loving friendship. In the sequel Toy Story 2 (where the plot revolves around Buzz going to rescue Woody) there is a scene where a sexually assertive Bo is trying to get a kiss from Woody, who complains: "Not in front of Buzz!" Going back to Buzz's super gadgets, Taylor has linked the exhibitionistic display of signs of potency like hardware and weaponry with the erotics of the military's performance of masculinity. Taylor describes how in military discourse there is an explicit heterosexual plot and yet at the same time, the eroticization of male violence suggests an undergoing homoerotic desire.

Perverse subjectivities
While Andy is the loving sweet good-to-his-toys boy, his neighbor Sid enjoys torturing toys — in his room, a group of tortured "mutant" toys, who have been torn apart and recomposed with mismatched parts, live hiding in the dark and are mistaken as cannibals by Buzz and Woody. In reality, as they find out later, these apparently scary toys are scared themselves and they are not cannibals: they help other toys not become mutants by fixing them. When the main characters decide to work together with the mutant toys, they are able to give the torturer kid a good scare, using their own "monsterhood" to regain their agency and show Sid that they are not dead passive objects, they are alive. Interestingly, Sid the torturer kid looks almost the same than Andy, only with braces and a skull t-shirt, suggesting that maybe the good and the bad character are, in fact, two parts of the same subject (I credit my partner Francisco for this observation). I am interested in this subnarrative to put it in dialogue with the notion of perverse subjectivities already discussed here. Let's remember how Frazier suggests that by embracing perverted subjectitivies as a subject position, one could resist the characterization of political practice as monstrous, and reclaim a subjectivity and agency in these terms: "...[one] who is able to look in the mirror to assemble the pieces of her memories, reconnect them with her scarred body, unpack the structure of domestic discipline and the story imposed upon her, and ultimately, by recognizing the gun, reclaiming the capacity to act". (277)

On the Chilean "transition" part 3 1/2

2010-02-24T22:23:00.000-08:00

Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent and influential critics of the transition in Latin America, suggests too that we cannot identify a clear-cut division between the dictatorship and the transition. In consonance with Moulian, Richard sees the democratic governments as merely the new managers of the inherited political and socioeconomic order, rather than having re-found it. Moulian and Richard agree with Willy Thayer about the true "transition" that operated in the transformation from a state-centered society to a post-state economy, where the state is not the subject but the object of the economy. More broadly, Richard is embarked in the project of criticizing the pretended "transparency" and neutrality of disciplinary language because these have been the tools that have made power, bureaucracy, and technocracy converge. Her work aims then to denounce the theatrical and staged artifices that construct meaning by presenting social reality as mono-referential.

Richard argues that the experience and memory of violence cannot be inscribed in the transitional surfaces of representation or, translated into the clean, coherent official discourse of the post-dictatorship. Transitional politics have managed to subordinate the practices of memory to their official representation in the Rettig and Valech ReportsOn 2003 President Ricardo Lagos created the Commission on Political Prison and Torture under the direction of Monsignor Sergio Valech, which issued a report nicknamed as the "Valech Report." and to its monumentalization in memorials which relegate dictatorial violence as something that happened in a far away past, not something that continues to happen (poverty, discrimination, police repression, the denial of justice, etc.) now, under the legitimation of a democratic system. Thayer coincides with Richard in that the disciplinary languages are complicit in trying to introduce sense there where sense cannot be found, inscribing events that cannot be represented —such as torture— into a representational structure. As Thayer insists, the "post" in post-dictatorship does not mean "what happened in the past", is not the preterit. Torture cannot cease to happen, and "[n]ot to insist on the relationship between the Coup, torture, Dictatorship and contemporary triumphalism would be to become acolyte of the continuum of violence and progress" (39).

Richard indicates that the cultural mechanisms of consensus and the ephemeral pleasures of consumerism have acted as forms of pseudo-integration and gratification of the social body, harmed by the violence of the coup and dictatorship. At a more affective level, Richard notes that the post-dictatorship can be seen as a pathological state of mourning, where the absence of movement is compensated by a the manic exaggeration of the gestures, causing the illusion of dynamism in a paralyzed subjectivity. In the same vein, Thayer attributes the consumerist euphoria of the post-dictatorship as an equivalent to the manic phase of the loss of object. In another analysis that reinforces the idea of the transition as a static state, Moreiras reads post-dictatorship subjectivity as marked by the depression of the social body, the mourn for the loss of historicity, and for the impossibility of constructing sense.

Under the logics of the democracy of the consensus, the so-called transition has transformed political practice —formerly understood as antagonistic— into a series of exchanges and transactions. A forceful unanimity around the need to "tone down" and moderate the discourses, and to be "realistic" (as in Correa's discourse) transformed the political field into a predictable, programmable field of mechanical procedures. Moreiras also claims that the violent processes of "modernization" sustained in Latin America in general, have relied on the refoundation of the symbolic order at the cultural level by insisting on establishing and policing a totalizing single meaning of history. Politics then, have ceased to be the field where historical meanings and sense are constructed and contested. This in turn, has affected the possibilities of resistance, restricting the possible subject positions to one-or-the-other side and to a suffering victimized subjectivity.

Furthering Thayer's interpretation of the transition, Bret Levinson postulates that the 1973 coup not only never ceased to happen, but moreover, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship. Here, the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but just as what is, or "goes without saying." In this new scenario, to challenge the reality of the market economy means actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hit with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find that there is no possible discourse available to account for their experiences. When violence does get recognized, is under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes for compensations in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. In contrast to Moulian, who sustains that forgetfulness is necessary for the transition, Levinson argues that the order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on the accurate remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.

Also concerned with the more subjective effects of the transition, Gareth Williams notes that Moulian gestures towards a residual affective world that cannot find itself representable in the clean, transparent surfaces of the Chilean post-dictatorship official national narrative. This affective excess unsettles the image of a smooth transition: "an affective world of signification that remains senseless (for democratic hegemony), and ungraspable for the order of disciplinary reason and for institutional knowledge as a whole," "a world of residual affects that has been included into democracy as democracy's zone of (necessary) exclusion." (286, 288).

This affective surplus that cannot be contained in discourse and can be found in cultural expressions such as art and literature, could also be interpreted as what causes different sectors to 'act out.' In September of 1998, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup, commemorations from supporters, and protests, barricades and marches across the country from detractors of Pinochet left behind a toll over two hundred arrested, thirty one wounded, and two dead. A remarkable point, the majority of the arrested in street protests were under twenty-five years old, meaning they had grown up in dictatorship but were not born when the coup itself happened. Were they protesting then for the coup as a present fact, not as something of the past? As these issues continue to irrupt in such violent ways, as this affective excess manifests at the slightest provocation, it is unavoidable to ask what can reconciliation possibly mean in Chile's post-dictatorship? Who are to be forgiven and by whom, if the bodies of the disappeared are still missing and the names of their torturers and assassins still unknown, under the democratic governments legitimation?

Of course, the cases mentioned above that challenge the notion that there is a “transition” or a democratization process in place, and of a national reconciliation, seem to wane in the face of Pinochet's later detention in London in October 1998. Here, performative or expressive politics reached their peak. On the one hand, the event performed on the international stage the idea that the crimes committed under Pinochet's rule were not only against a nation, but against humanity. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, was asking extradition to Spain from England, where Pinochet had traveled for medical reasons. Pinochet's supporters immediately took the opportunity to exploit the fact that it was a Spanish judge, invoking the idea that colonial powers were questioning Chile's status as a sovereign state, interfering with domestic issues that had already been dealt with. Frei's administration also went along with this kind of nationalist discourse, adopting a strategy of defending Pinochet's immunity (a central part of the transition 'pact') to bring him back to the country. Frei himself met with top military officers to ease their anxieties and to reassure the economic and corporate elites that the stability of the transitional order was not in danger. At a social level, this event prompted everyday confrontations, and media debates over the interpretation of the Unidad Popular, the military coup, the dictatorship, and the nature of the transition.

On the side of the right, performative politics included Pinochet supporters staging regular demonstrations in the streets, raging upper-class women calling for the British Embassy to be burned down, right-wing leaders paralyzing the congress for two weeks, and Major Labbé refusing to collect the garbage of the Spanish and British Embassy for several weeks. Actors from both sides became polarized and re-adopted the rhetoric characteristic of dictatorial times, in a general scenario of clear social unrest. Anxieties about how to give a definite closure to the "divisive issues" that threaten the transition's discourse of reconciliation and social peace re-emerged in the Concertación circles. Alliances and alignments that had been carefully built were shaken at the base.

If the "renovated socialists" had distanced themselves from Allende a while ago, a "renovated right", represented by political leaders like Joaquín Lavín had also worked hard to clean their image distancing themselves from the figure of Pinochet. And now, here they were again in 1998, vehemently —and some, hysterically— defending him on the grounds of nationalism and also, of the logics of the transition itself, making implicit and explicit threats about democracy's stability, while many detractors of Pinochet within the Concertación could not hide their joy. But for many, it was the image of the democratic government of the Concertación, with many state representatives who had been themselves victimized by the dictatorship, defending Pinochet from International Courts was close to surreal.

On the Chilean "transition" part 4

2010-02-24T12:05:00.000-08:00

Towards furthering a queer feminist analysis of the transition.

There is something unsettling about the literature reviewed. Garretón dedicates a line of his two-hundred-page book to mention gender relations in relation to democracy, and blatantly ignores the women's movement as a relevant actor in the dictatorship and transition. Moulian uses the term 'travesti' to designate what he sees as a farce, a lie. Politics, for the most part, is defined by the analysts of the transition as something done by respectable masculine men and politicians in the public space. Salazar seems to be one of the few intellectuals of the left that recognizes how the neoliberal economy has been productive of new kinds of female subjectivity that remain unstudied: the legions of women who sustain the political and economic system through their work, their strategies for mobilizing traditional roles or challenge them, their domestic work, as well as precarious conditions in the formal market sector. It almost seems like the academic field re-stages the masculine epic of the leftist revolution, where women are defined by their relationships to men, and where gender relations are seen as "outside" the political, as part of the natural, domestic, unimportant world. There is, then, an urgent need to analyze the sexualized and gendered ideologies that dominate the dictatorship and post-dictatorship; to consider the role of homoerotic desire, homophobia and heteronormativity in shaping these discourses; and to recover Kirkwood's insights about the links between the authoritarian domestic order and sociopolitical order.

Many feminists have been busy for almost the last two decades debating the effects of institutionalization under transition (see Tobar, Frias, and Guerrero for a more recent discussion), and have failed to follow these cues. Many others have taken pains to document the role of women in the left in their political struggle against the dictatorship and their role in the survival of communities through their grassroots organizing (see for example the work of Claudia Serrano, Marisa Weinstein, or Teresa Valdés). Only a few researchers, like Ximena Bunster and Margaret Power, have really paid attention to militarism as a gendered ideology, looking both at the involvement of women in supporting the military regime, and at the long term cultural effects of militarization on social relations. However, these analyses continue to be too few and too marginal.

A line of feminist analysis of the transition that does go beyond the institutionalization debate is the one put forward by Grau et al, who read public debates around gender and sexuality as severely constrained by the logics of transition. They conclude that all these debates have been dominated by the image of the traditional 'family' as the suturing metaphor of the wounded social body, and by the identification of traditional gender roles as national values. In the same vein, Olea explored the discursive mechanisms through which the government's efforts to introduce debate on gender equality have been identified with a totalitarian state, and a foreign ideology linked to Marxism. Still, it looks like there is a lot more to be explored about the specific intersections of nationalist discourses, gender ideologies and heteronormativity in Chile.

Richard develops useful insights to further a feminist analysis of the transition by posing 'the feminine' as a sign of disruption of a masculine economy of representation and an oppositional political identity that can be articulated in relation to the context (as opposed to an essentalist identity based on the assumption of commonality of interests between women). In a context where difference is accepted as part of a neoliberal diversity, that is, as a mere juxtaposition of differences that do not threat each other nor the larger project of social peace and reconciliation, we seem to require more mobile and fragmentary tactics. Following Richard, it is possible to formulate a queer feminist analysis of the transition and post-dictatorship in Chile. Feminist, because it will pay attention to gender ideologies and the power relations that they legitimize, along the lines of Grau and Olea's respective analyses. Queer, because it will take feminist practice as a contingent and situated practice of interrogation of heteronormative discourses. This kind of analysis would engage in politics in the same vein that Pedro Lemebel rejects the representation of a clean, respectable and masculine global gay identity, by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS.

It is relevant from this perspective to look at some of the initiatives that are already happening in different spaces in terms of multiplying and transforming the meanings assigned to gender and sexuality. In a rather academic level (but also looking to influence public policies) the constitution of a network of studies in masculinities, red de Masculinidades y Equidad de Género (www.eme.cl), is productively making links between hegemonic masculinities and domestic violence and militarism in the region, bringing together militarist ideology and everyday patterns of gender relations anchored in many countries in Latin America. More of a cultural manifestation, there was recently a political performance called the "Contra-Parada Militar" organized by teenagers of anarchist inspiration, hundreds of whom marched as military clowns in parallel to the official military parade, questioning the link between hegemonic masculinity, nationalism, homophobia, domestic and war violence (see the convocatory for last year in electronic newspaper "El Ciudadano".)

On the Chilean "transition" part 3

2010-02-24T12:04:00.001-08:00

The static transition to the same: "radical" critics of the transition

For the intellectuals and political actors of the left who are openly critical of the Concertación and their political and cultural strategies, the difference between "transition" and "post-dictatorship" is not insignificant. "Transition" denotes movement, whereas the "post-dictatorship" designates that moment where it is retrospectively possible to look at the whole process of the coup, dictatorship and transition as part of the same movement. The transition is then the continuity, the successful final phase of the dictatorship, not its overcoming.

Willy Thayer makes the argument that the transition is what happened during the dictatorship, that is, the transformation from the modern state to the market economy, where the state stopped being a referent for political activity and social change, or more broadly, as the referent for the conduction of a national project. This transit throws into a crisis the main modern categories that acted as the referents of politics (the State, the People, progress, and so on).This is a point with which even Garretón agrees, but gives a different interpretation. While for Garretón economy and political order and not mutually determined, for Thayer the political order is the object of the economy. The social climate of boredom and immobility and sameness that accompanies the post-dictatorship is related to the end of "the epic" and with the innocuous proliferation of ideologies, not as antagonistic historical projects, but as a cosmetic diversity of the neoliberal consumerism menu. One of Thayer's main points is that neoliberalism and globalization as inaugurated by the coup never stopped happening, but rather constitute the everyday event of contemporary Chile, expressed in urban marginalization, class discrimination, the violence of the educational system, of the health system.

Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian, in his book Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito argued that the transition can be seen as a transvestism: the planned adjustment of the dictatorship to "dress with democratic garments," involving a process of whitewashing, where the narratives of oblivion and consensus are imposed over a perplexed, traumatized and still fearful civil society. Oblivion is necessary, says Moulian, because the past is presented as incompatible with the future, so that in order to live together as a society we can only forget. Whitewashing, as a series of operations aiming to re-found Chile without the recent history of the political and social confrontations, the conflicts, the violence. The transition as a transvestism aims to make Chile a marketable product abroad, to attract investors, to reinvent our identities as a modern and developed country. This was evident when using the Expo Sevilla in 1992 as an international stage, the transitional governments performed Chile's modernity and "clean act" by representing the country with a piece of a real iceberg. Another example of whitewashing for Moulian was the mockery or "simulacrum" of justice that was performed with the imprisonment of human-rights criminals Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza described above.

For Moulian, the formal end of the dictatorship and the transition to a representative democracy —with a restricted electoral political system— was always subordinated to furthering the neoliberal model. Since the dictatorship managed to establish the economic and social model, democracy only came as a "minor adjustment" to invest with rationality and institutional legitimacy (and sustainability) what had been imposed by brutal force. Moreover, the real victory of the dictatorship was not only to establish the model and anchor it in a virtually unchangeable constitution, but to win the ideological battle, convincing many of its former adversaries (Moulian points in particular at Eugenio Tironi and Alejandro Foxley) that the free market was the only alternative possible. The current socioeconomic order was "naturalized" to the point that no alternative project could be visualized or deemed feasible (this is evident in the discourse of "political realism" of the Concertación). Moulian opposes Garretón's thesis of the "authoritarian enclaves," as he deems the whole political order authoritarian and subordinated to the continuation of the free market economy. Contrary to Garretón's perception that the state and the economy run through different and autonomous channels, Moulian sees the political order based on Pinochet's constitution as creating the necessary conditions to sustain the economic system.

In cultural terms, an endless transition has had its main symptom in the depoliticisation of Chilean society, where any divergence is seen not only as undesirable, but straightforwardly as irrational. There is yet another dreadful effect that Moulian notes: the disconnection of the contemporary effects of the neoliberal economic system with the dictatorial past. In this way, as he notes, many people discontent with the precariousness of the public health system, the pension system, poverty and marginalization, by 1999 were starting to give their vote to the candidate of the right, Joaquín Lavín, without making the connection between Lavín and Pinochet, and Pinochet and the neoliberal model, and between the neoliberal model and their malaise (Tomás Moulian. "Chile; la transición eterna o la inmutabilidad del régimen semi-representativo". Revista Persona y Sociedad. Vol. XV, n.1. Santiago, May 2001). This is in Moulian's eyes, a direct effect of the way the Concertación, since the inauguration of the civilian democratic order has identified with the free market model and adopted the rhetoric of "modernization of the state." The real transition, was the one operated under the dictatorship from a strong developmentist-state to a free market society, which transferred the focus so that citizens are not defined by their social rights as workers anymore, but rather by their individual capacity as consumers.As historian Gabriel Salazar has also made clear in his analysis of the worker's class historic subjectivity, under the neoliberal paradigm of the dictatorship they were stripped of their status as subjects who negotiate their rights with the state. In the post-dictatorship, they have been stripped further of their historical political identity and agency to become passive "beneficiaries" of social policies. This is accompanied by a nationalist triumphalism represented by discourses of Chilean economic leadership in the region, as well as the illusion of social integration via credit indebtedness consumerism, contribute to the cultural climate of living in a "successful" system, one of which we all ought to be proud.

More relevant at the symbolic level, Moulian goes on to describe the transition as a surgical operation by means of which, Pinochet was transformed from Dictator to benevolent Patriarch. Sustained on the pact of the impunity of the military, Pinochet acquires in the transition the symbolic status of guarantor of the new democratic order. As Brian Loveman also notes, the fact that he remained the commander chief of the army after he stepped down the presidency in 1990 reinforced the idea that the nation needed his “guiding presence” to ensure the order that he had established through his regime. Politico-institutional order: subordinated to the economy. Socioeconomic order: in direct continuity with the dictatorship. Cultural-symbolic level: whitewashing, ahistoricism, oblivion. No transition anywhere, just transvestism.

On the Chilean "transition" part 2

2010-02-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

While Agüero argues that the Chilean transition is still an unfinished process, leftist intellectual and academic M. A. Garretón contends that the transition is long over. Indeed, he is uncomfortable with the term itself and instead prefers to talk about the consolidation of an "incomplete democracy" and of a "stalled democratization." For Garretón, also in dialogue with transitology literature, there are three types of processes of democratization, even though they cannot be seen as existing in a "pure" state: The first ones are democratic foundations (existing for the first time). The second ones are properly transitions, "the passage from a formal military or authoritarian regime to a basically democratic regime, however incomplete or imperfect the latter may be" (42). The third type are democratic reforms. Using this typology, he goes on to affirm that the Chilean transition "ended some time ago," even though the problem of the quality of democracy persists, and argues —in a quite irritated tone— that claiming that the transition is still going on, or is unfinished, means that we are aiming at too perfect of an objective, rendering the concept of transition useless altogether.

The Chilean transition, according to Garretón, was triggered by the 1988 plebiscite and ended with the inauguration of the first democratic government in March of 1990.Even though he is completely opposed to the idea that the transition has not taken place, or that we are still under a transition, he seems to contradict himself in other parts of his argument, when he says that the end of the transition involves overcoming authoritarian enclaves. In this way he takes issue with the interpretation of the transition as a "transformism" put forward by his former intellectual collaborator and co-author Tomás Moulian, claiming that Moulian is driven by a nostalgic and dogmatic perspective, still "dreaming" of a transition between modes of production (this allows Garretón to situate himself along the lines of "political realism"). For Garretón, two problems can be identified in Chile's incomplete democracy: the persistence and consolidation of institutional and ethical-symbolic "authoritarian enclaves" and the fact that the national state is no longer the referent for decision-making processes, making democracy virtually irrelevant.The factors that make democracy flawed are the institutional and representational weakness of the democratic regime, the cultural weakness due to the lack of basic societal consensus (the "illusion of consensus", plus the deep seated fear of disagreement and conflict), and the deterioration of the state as a referent for national cohesion (147). However, he claims that the transition was successful in other areas such as building of a stable political coalition and the administration of the economy. In any case, he argues that the unresolved problems of the Chilean transition are "inherent to any transition and were unavoidable" (149) and that for that reason "cannot be criticized" (150).

On the other hand, Garretón is not ingenuous, he does challenge the idea that Chile has achieved a successful "double transition" to democracy and to market economy. But, he radically disagrees with the view represented by Moulian that emphasizes the continuity of the neoliberal model inherited from dictatorship. He argues that both of these perspectives conflate democracy with an economic system, either with "free market" or with socialism. He distances himself from these views and accuses them of being ideologically driven (implicitly suggesting that his perspective would then be "uncontaminated" by ideology), challenging the idea that any given economic system leads to a particular political system altogether, arguing that these two realms are not mutually determined, and that democracy has a value on its own right.For this reason he also takes issue with Marxists analyses coming from CEPAL, as they would make democracy a dependent variable of economic dynamics (class-based conflicts, domination, foreign interests, etc.) in an immutable, deterministic manner that does not leave room for historic specificity or variation, nor makes the study of other aspects of society necessary.

Garretón contends that the problem is that there are different ethos confounded in the notion of democracy, resulting in different assessments of processes of democratization. From a liberal ethos, democracy is equated to "freedom"; while from a socialist ethos, democracy is identified with social equality; and finally, from a communitarian ethos, democracy means belonging to a community. As a result of a series of brutal dictatorships throughout the region, democracy came to be equated in Latin America with the end of the dictatorships, even if this would not necessarily put an end to capitalism or exploitation. Democracy conceived as what is not dictatorship implies of course a narrow definition, that does not specify what kind of society a democracy should be. Yet, he also notes that democracy has been invoked as an ethical principle to be extended to other areas such as school, family and gender relations, what Garretón sees as a necessarily "metaphoric" extension since democracy refers only to the institutional political regime based on competitive elections between political parties (showing his own narrow conception of democracy).

The process of democratization was then successful in terms of replacing the authoritarian regime for a system of competitive electoral politics; however, Garretón himself seems to suggest that despite the existence of political parties, the mechanisms that channel citizen's interest in their programs are flawed, citizens are for the most part excluded from decision-making. Garretón shows great concern with the fact that democracy, or any other political regime for that matter, have become irrelevant since the state has been displaced as the referent for citizenship and decision-making by national and transnational de facto powers. Historically, under the national-popular project, political practice in Chile was formulated as the field of negotiation of social rights between the citizens and the state. When that model of society was dismantled after the military coup and replaced by an authoritarian neoliberal model, the meaning of citizenship was transformed, and political practice deemed unnecessary: under this model, citizens are considered only as expected to obtain services and goods in the market according to their individual capacity. So, politico-institutional order: democratic, but flawed and irrelevant. Socioeconomic order: independent from politics. Cultural-symbolic order: flawed, filled with challenges, such as making the state a referent for politics and for national unity. Transition, over and unquestionable. Democracy, incomplete.

Also sympathetic but moderately critical of the governments of the Concertación is political scientist from FLACSO, Justo Tovar."La Negociación de la Transición Democrática en Chile (1983-1989)." Estudio de caso no. 42, Universidad de Chile. Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial. Santiago de Chile, 1999. He agrees that what Chileans have witnessed is a series of limited changes that still do not to lead to an "authentic democracy." Furthermore, he documents how the dictatorship was formulated as a process that involved three distinct phases: of "recuperation," characterized by the military coup and the establishment of the 1980 constitution; of "transition," with a mixed government formed by elected civilians and designated actors; and of "normalization," when the congress would be formed completely by elected members, but the armed forces remained as the guarantors of the new institutional order and of national security. These logics were explicitly formulated by Jaime Guzmán already in 1979, when he talked about the need to create a reality such that "if the adversaries ever get to govern, they see themselves so constrained to take actions not very different than one would pursue." (Jaime Guzmán, "El Camino Político." Revista Realidad, Año 1, n. 7, Santiago de Chile, 1979. http://www.revistarealidad.cl/archivos/1979/diciembre_n_7/numero7.htm (My translation).)

Tovar emphasizes the transactional nature of the transition, driven by a pragmatic search for areas of consensus and the exclusion of "divisive issues," but acknowledges the complex scenario and the precarious conditions for negotiation the political actors faced then. Writing in 1999, he goes on to conclude that the transition has not finished, but disagrees with the perspectives that only emphasize continuity, arguing that is undeniable that there have been advances towards democratization as a process, such as the reform on municipal elections and the progressive ability of civilian presidents to have an influence on the promotion and removal of military personnel. Moreover, he criticizes Moulian's thesis, claiming that the transition was always formulated at the political-institutional level, and not as a confrontation of antagonistic models of society. Tovar acknowledges however, that social reconciliation is one of the most unsolved aspects of the transition.

The following examples help us illustrate the kind of constraints that democratic governments faced in the post-dictatorship:

In May 1995, another incident re-staged and made evident the power that the military still held. DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional: Pinochet's intelligence agency, responsible for most of the human-rights violations under dictatorship through Operación Condor and Operación Colombo) director Manuel Contreras received a sentence along with another military officer, Pedro Espinoza, for the killing of Orlando Letelier, a case that was not covered by the 1978 Amnesty Law and which involved a US citizen (Letelier's secretary Ronni Moffitt). Also in a defiant attitude and with the complicit help and protection of the military, they both resisted imprisonment for many months, and eventually negotiated to do their time in a luxury prison specially constructed for them (“Punta Peuco”) and under the custody of military (rather than civilian) guards. If yet technically the case ended on a judicial success of trying and convicting Contreras and Espinoza, symbolically the incident made evident once more the little power and authority that civilian governments had over Pinochet's collaborators.

And then, in 1998, by the end of Frei's administration, Pinochet stepped down as army commander and became a Senator for Life in the National Congress. In another example of what Alexander Wilde calls the "expressive politics" of the transition, many members of the congress received him on his first day as a civilian with banners, booing him. For many, this was an unbearable reminder of his impunity, granted by the way that the transition had been 'pacted' a decade before. When some legislators from the Concertación made an attempt to impeach Pinochet, Frei's government opposed such measure, fearful that it would result in a political destabilization and that it would discredit the whole transitional process initiated with the previous administration.

On the Chilean "transition" 1

2010-02-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

Transitions as democratization processes: the "global trend" of the 1990's?

Conventional understandings and theoretical elaborations within political science and sociology around the term “transition” are part of an extensive body of work known as “transitology.” Guillermo O'Donnell is a key theoretical referent to analyze processes of authoritarianism and democratization in Latin America, and especially cited for the case of Chile are his concepts of "bureaucratic-authoritarian state" and of "pacted transitions." Conventional theories of democratization and transition also often make reference to the so-called "third wave of democratization" proposed by Samuel Huntington which groups together processes in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. According to this literature, democratization is the major trend of the twentieth-century, and it is caused/triggered both by internal factors such as pressure coming from elites and mass movements, and external ones, such as the new requirements for economic aid of international financial institutions.

Much of the literature on transitions to democracy coming from political science, or "transitology," converge in one point despite differences: the world seems to be moving progressively towards democratization as a result of an increased awareness of the benefits of democratic orders.They conceptualize these processes as subdivided in three: the initial breakdown of authoritarian rule, the transition to, and the consolidation of democracy. And even if many of these authors are cautious or moderately critical of the results of processes of democratization, they seem to engage in teleological explanations that assume a global movement of this kind within a narrative of progress. Conventional elaborations on processes of democratization seem to take as their premise that authoritarian regimes cannot sustain themselves forever as they eventually face crises of legitimacy and/or fail to obtain support from the bases. In any case, this kind of analysis suggests that authoritarian regimes enter crises because of lack of support and legitimacy, which can be misleading to analyze the Chilean case, constructing the image that a) the regime actually ended, and b) it ended because it failed to obtain popular support.

Linz and Stepan have noted that in the Chilean case, in contrast to the processes of democratization carried out in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, the military was legitimated by the strong support it received from the bourgeoisie, a support that largely continued after the dictatorship was over, even when official reports on human-rights violations were issued. In the 1988 plebiscite more than 40% of the electorate voted for the continuation of Pinochet's government, and in the 1989 presidential elections, over 40% voted against the Concertación, that is, as Loveman puts it, “the military government from 1973 to 1990 neither existed in a vacuum nor imposed itself with deep roots in civil society” (311). It is not a secret either that the ideological designers of Pinochet's regime (such as Jaime Guzmán, its key ideologue) foresaw that the military regime could only be sustained for a limited amount of time. At some point, a process of "normalization," the return to a democratic political order, would be necessary.

Then, as critics of the transition have pointed out, it can be argued that the regime only changed its institutional form because it was planned from the beginning that it would eventually transition from a military dictatorship into a civilian government. The creation of these "models" for political transitions is also problematic because they suggest a rather functionalist/systemic view of societies, constructing them as systems whose processes can be described and predicted by their own mechanisms, largely ignoring the weight of historicity and local/regional particularities, the cultural contexts and the specific meanings that each of these processes carry.

Linz and Stepan, whose work is devoted to the analysis of different cases of democratization around the world, emphasize that the question of whether a transition to democracy is over is not an intellectual, but a very concrete political problem. Declaring a transition over, like the first democratic government of Patricio Aylwin did by the end of his mandate (1990-1994), presents a scenario where struggles for further changes are not seen as necessary and therefore, they are not seen as legitimate.Under the criteria proposed by these authors for a completed transition, Chile has definitely not achieved this point, given the constraints imposed by the 1980 constitution, and will not fully complete a transition until the “authoritarian enclaves” are overcome and civilian governments have the power to formulate new policies without those constraints. In fact, I would add that because in the post-dictatorship the situation is assumed to be normalized, much of the remaining political activism is demonized and actors who continue to engage in political struggles are constructed as "extremists." In turn, to claim the end of the transition renders the authoritarian features of democracy invisible or makes them appear as acceptable.

I will focus on discourses around the transition in Chile, discussing the different meanings attributed to the post-dictatorship, and considering the potential cultural effects that different versions and interpretations may have. In Chile, political actors and intellectuals have long held conflicting views on the notion of transition, its content, and its evaluation. While the most optimistic insist that the transition was a completed and successful process, others are more cautious and while declaring the transition over, point at some of its problematic or unsolved aspects. Moderate critics of the transition see it as an unfinished process, but still give the process some credit for, at least, "moving towards" democratization. Finally, the more "radical" critics of the transition contend that the only transition there was (understood as a transit, transformation, movement) occurred under the dictatorship, when Chilean society transited from a state-center development to a free-market economy. I put the word "radical" on quote marks because this label could lead to a negative connotation of their radicalism, especially since moderation has been elevated as the most positive value of the post-dictatorship by official discourse . I will then consider how critical readings of the transition delve into the symbolic, subjective and cultural dimensions and problems of the transition and post-dictatorship that dominant frameworks coming from political science and sociology cannot apprehend.

Altogether, the elements that these conflicting positions take into account when assessing the transition and the post-dictatorship could be organized as the politico-institutional order, the socioeconomic order, and the cultural-symbolic order. Like all categorizations, this one is tricky because it creates the illusion that these three orders are clean cut, distinct realities that are independent for each other. Of course, the politico- institutional, such as the 1980 constitution is key to maintain the socio-economic order, as well as the cultural-symbolic, which in turn is a result of the economic model. However, many of the authors reviewed here use these kind of distinctions as if we could think of them independently. If it is useful as a disclaimer, I will add "for analytical purposes."

The way that different actors define and weigh these dimensions will often explain their diverging positions. At the same time, all the accounts and analyses of the transition and post-dictatorship mentioned here will be taken as necessarily partial and situated. Since this generation of Chilean intellectuals was for the most part directly and actively involved in the political processes they analyze, differences in their narrations are also determined by their personal experiential, political, and ideological position within these events. None of them are distanced nor are they detached from their object of analysis. They are invested in engaging with this topic so that part of their lives is explained too (in a similar way that the author of this essay is invested in the post-dictatorship).

However, I do not consider this a handicap in terms of objectivity. Instead of trying to determine which of these versions is closer to the "truth," I suggest that as a whole they conform the multiple (but not infinite) possible accounts or discursive repertoires that construct and give sense to the also multiple and conflicting historical experiences of the coup, the dictatorship and the transition. This is not to say that all accounts are equivalent, that everybody should have their "own version" and be left alone with it. But it means to accept that the project of a single history or interpretation of these events is just not possible, and we will have to live with the ambiguity, incompleteness and irreconciliability of the Chilean sociopolitical history. The multiplication of these accounts, from their always partial, situated and fragmented positions, may in fact be, as Nelly Richard suggests, one of the possible ways to resist state power in the form of totalizing and monolithic narratives of the transition and the post-dictatorship. Finally, I will ponder what a "queer feminist analysis" adds to the analysis of the transition and the post-dictatorship, indicating possible directions for my future research.

Chilean Transition: "successful," "long over," "unfinished"...?

In their official discourse, the governments of the Concertación have insisted that the transition is over. 'Renovated' socialist Enrique Correa, spokesperson of the first democratic government of the transition and one of the protagonists of the negotiations with Pinochet, is a clear example of the dominant position within the Concertación. Correa argues that the Chilean transition has been the "most successful of Latin America," (Qué Pasa 11, my translation) and that Aylwin's government "unified the country." He declares that political practice today consists in the conciliation of diverse interests, and speaks of the need to overcome the idea that there are antagonistic contradictions in society, as he says to have believed along with his socialist comrades in their "more fervent ideological years" (ibid 11). This shift in relation to politics and social conflict is also characteristic of the Concertación and is, in fact, what allows them to understand the transition as finished and successful. Correa, for example, attributes the success of the transition to the fact that his generation was driven by a "political realism" when they recognized "capitalism as a reality, liberal democracy as a great regime, and negotiation as the best strategy as opposed to confrontation" (ibid, 12).

Correa thinks that this success is measured by the ability they had to make agreements, thanks to the wise gradualism and reformism of the Concertación. At the same time, he acknowledges the weakness and vulnerability that Aylwin's government had when they negotiated with Pinochet, implicitly indicating how these "agreements" were taken under Pinochet's direct threats of going backwards. He indirectly recognizes it was driven by fear that the Aylwin administration decided that removing Pinochet of his role of commander in the army would put stability at risk. Still, talking about the night of the results of the 1988 plebiscite, Correa gets very enthusiastic: "that night politics not only showed all its potency and superiority to arms, but it was also the moment when the whole country took a turn forward. There, the country that the whole world admires was born" (ibid). In sum, he sees the politico-institutional order as democratic; the socioeconomic policies as successful; and at the cultural-symbolic level, reconciliation achieved. Check mark in all areas for Correa. This position summarizes the discourse that the Concertación —with more or less arrogance, undisguisable regret, or awkwardness— has defended.

But despite Correa's triumphalist perspective, the precariousness and fragility during democracy of the first two governments was made evident in a series of events that pitted the civilian authorities against the military: the "ejercicio de enlance" in 1990, and more dramatically, the “boinazo” of May 1993, when the army performed publicly a gathering of troops dressed in battle gear in downtown Santiago as an explicit threat in response to a judicial investigation of Pinochet's son fraudulent checks, and to the possible prosecution of high officers for human-rights violations. The "boinazo" forced Aylwin to engage in exhausting endless negotiations with the military and political leaders of the right, and to eventually deactivate the prosecution against Pinochet's son's fraudulent checks.

According to Loveman, the "boinazo" made evident that the army's de facto power held the government hostage, and one of its results was Aylwin administration's fear of proposing any further reforms that affected the military, such as the derogation of the 1978 Amnesty Law, which was a key component of the Concertación's original program. Pinochet's confident defiance was also expressed in his declarations after the Rettig ReportThe National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation was created by Aylwin in 1990, which issued a report on human rights violations during the dictatorship in February of 1991. This report was dubbed "The Rettig Report" for the commission's director name, Raul Rettig. was made public and Aylwin had asked for “gestures” of forgiveness. He stated that there was nothing to ask forgiveness for, as the military had saved the country from international communism and that, given the circumstances, he would act in the same way.The right-wing also went on to declare all attempts to prosecute members of the military for human-rights violations as characteristic of a resentful left driven by the desire for vengeance. And Loveman notes that if Aylwin's government had any plans of using the Rettig Report to open a public social debate on human right's violations, the assassination of Jaime Guzmán, shortly after the report was issued, buried all the possibilities and instead forced the government to change the focus of their public discourse towards terrorism. It also gave grounds to the right to claim that "they too" had victims on their side (316).
Many intellectuals of the left who are sympathetic to the Concertación have articulated moderated criticisms of the transition, still in dialogue with the literature on transitology. Agüero's review of the literature on democratization processes make evident that most authors agree to refer to post-dictatorship democracies in conditional terms, such as “fragile”, “hybrid” or “delegative”. He acknowledges that radically different assessments of the Chilean democratization process coexist: these go from optimistic views of the "consolidation of democracy," to more skeptical (or "pessimistic," in his view) evaluations that, at least, take into account the authoritarian enclaves of the democratic order, or straightforwardly see this new order as a façade for the continuity of an authoritarian structure.He attributes these differences to the chosen focus used when assessing democracy. If we are comparing democracy to the immediate past of the country, we will have a different assessment that comparing Chilean democracy to democracies in other countries. Also, it will depend on how we conceptualize the relationship between the political and economic order, and the very notions of "transition" and "democracy." On the other hand, in Agüero's view, the concept of consolidation is problematic for various reasons: it assumes a teleological, linear sequence "towards" consolidation, automatically assuming that post-authoritarian regimes are already democratic and moving further in that direction, thus not challenging the democratic nature of these new regimes at all. Furthermore, Agüero points out that while some of the criteria used to assess the consolidation of democracies is useful —such as the notions of authoritarian legacies and enclaves— there is an intrinsic risk in the notion of a “consolidated democracy” altogether, as it can be used to put closure on democratization processes by declaring the full achievement of a democratic order.

Agüero describes democratization processes in Latin America stating that in general, the military has receded in their influence and that fear has ceased to be used as a political currency in the region, even though this point is completely arguable. Beyond the institutional continuing influence of the military,Pinochet's constitution of 1980 (approved in a fraudulent plebiscite) meant the imposition of an electoral system that gave the military continuing influence and allowed for the over-representation of conservative sectors in Congress once the dictatorship was over. The effects of a pacted or negotiated transition could be seen later in the democratic government's inability to deal with issues of human rights, and the adoption of uncomfortable official discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation without justice. we can identify a deep-seated culture of militarization that permeates the whole society. In fact, in March 1994, shortly after taking office as President, Eduardo Frei faced another episode that made evident how the transition was not over, in spite of the official discourse . Sixteen carabineros were convicted for the kidnapping, killing and beheading of three communist teachers in 1985. Frei then requested the chief of Carabineros Adolfo Stange, who was being charged with obstruction of justice, to resign, a request that Stange defiantly rejected by invoking the 1980 constitution. He finally retired voluntarily in October 1995 and became an institutional Senator in 1998. Likewise, fear continues to articulate social life in the post-dictatorship in the form of social insecurity and distrust, as several UNDP reports have showed.See for example, "Desarrollo Humano en Chile: Las Paradojas de la Modernización." Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. Santiago de Chile, 1998. And the ideology of the national security doctrine, that demonized politics and represented ideology as a destructive and divisive force, is well alive in Chile, as demonstrated by Olea's feminist analysis of Chile's participation in the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

Furthermore, Agüero argues that processes of democratization have been accompanied by economic reforms that have translated into a "vigorous economic recovery," which has helped to increase the legitimacy of democratic governments, because the public has tended to perceive the strengthening of the private sector as a way to limit the power of the state.Even though this is not Agüero's own perspective, this kind of discourse strategically tends to confound "private sector" with "civil society," and often refers to the developmentalist state in negative terms, stressing its "discretionary" or "arbitrary" power, thus implicitly conflating state=dictatorship and democracy=free market. Using this discourse, the most aggressive neoliberal intellectuals often oppose the regulations of the state to the market as an attack on freedom and democracy, implicitly and many times, explicitly opposing state to democracy. But if for Agüero the economy has legitimized democracy in Latin America, it is rather the opposite that can be said for the Chilean case: a democratic "modern" political system served to finally lend legitimacy to an economic model imposed —probably nowhere else as drastically as in Chile— under a violent military dictatorship.

To be sure, Agüero does not hold a naive or too optimistic view of the Chilean transition: he considers it an unfinished process, noting that under the democratic governments there has been an uneven development that he visualizes as "faulty lines" using a geological metaphor, where different tectonic plates encounter each other causing friction and pressure. As many other social scientists sympathetic to the Concertación, he praises the economic policies as one of the positive aspects of the transition, as if they could be evaluated independently from the "underdeveloped tracks" of the transition, namely the (lack of) political reforms and justice for human rights violations. For example, when he analyzes the progresses and challenges of democratic governments, he conflates the term "privatization" of public education with "modernization," paying compliments to decentralization —a process implemented under dictatorship— in terms of the improved efficiency of the state. For him, the main problem lies in those uneven strands of modernization: while the economic one stands ahead, others strands regarding legal reforms, social inclusion and diversity, still lag behind.

At a more cultural-symbolic level, Agüero is critical of the way the Concertación presented the first democratic government (Patricio Aylwin, 1990-1994) as the "transition government" and then pretended that the process was over, making the next government (Eduardo Frei Jr., 1994-1998) appear as the "modernization government." The first two democratic governments failed to successfully address human-rights issues which finally ended up being largely avoided and considered "divisive," —what Agüero rightly describes as the "skunk in the garden party"—, but then the party was definitely ruined when Pinochet was detained in London in 1998, and the skunk re-entered the party now with international legitimacy, making it evident that the "transition" was far from over.

With Pinochet's detention, unresolved human-rights themes recovered protagonism and the political forces re-aligned around him, for and against, disorganizing coalitions and breaking the illusion of consensus that dominated the first decade of post-authoritarian democracy. Under the first decade of democratic governments, most actors across the political spectrum, with the exception of the extra-parlamentary left, had built a consensus on the areas of economic development and state "modernization" and avoided “divisive” issues. For Agüero, the re-emergence of long pending issues of human rights that resulted from Pinochet's detention was an evident sign that the transition was unfinished, and that these issues would continue to haunt the postdictatorship, not allowing for a closure as long as they were not dealt with.Agüero makes a good point when he suggests that many of the faulty lines of democracy are not a product exclusively of the dictatorship, but rather, rearrangements of features already present in pre-authoritarian regimes, that acquire new shapes in the post-dictatorship. This last point is also consistent with Loveman and Lira, who make a convincing argument about the long held authoritarian tradition of the Chilean state. Loveman, Fernández, and Salazar have all showed that Pinochet did not invent authoritarianism in Chile nor state violence, but just resourced to historic mechanisms of legitimizing, rationalizing and later forgetting the use of force under states of exception. That is, politico-institutional order: half a check mark, in process of democratization. Socioeconomic order: check. Symbolic-cultural level: the skunk at the garden party. Transition, unfinished.

On the notion of Spectacle

2010-02-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

When I started watching the Chilean documentary TVN: 40 Años, the first thing that struck me was how much emphasis the military junta had put in the production of high-end "spectacles" to be broadcasted nationally during the dictatorship: To project prosperity and normality the years that followed after the coup, Pinochet's regime payed for huge international stars like Julio Iglesias to appear on a regular basis on televised national shows. The spectacle was gendered: there was television made for the housewife, then sports and "entertainment" for men, and programs aimed at "the family." And the spectacle was sexualized: it featured both the sexualized bodies of women (vedettes) and the eroticized representation of consumption, by linking commodities with pleasure and happiness (consumerism).

So, I got interested in the concept of spectacle to analyze post-dictatorship in Chile.

In Society of Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord's argument, following a Marxist analysis, is that in industrialized societies the modes of production are organized in such manner that the workers are separated from their product, thus from themselves as well as from other workers. The "spectacle" works as a notion that describes a mode of social relation dominant in highly industrialized societies where workers experience a pseudo-integration with themselves and others through the consumption of images (publicity) and of commodities. That is, through consumerism fragmented commodities return to fragmented subjects. Debord also notes the central commodities of industrialized societies are products that further social isolation, such as cars and TVs. The spectacle presents a world dominated by commodities, where the Earth itself is unified as a global market. In the spectacle, only commodities appear, while the production process disappears. When commodities have colonized the whole of social life, then that historical moment can be described as the spectacle.

Lo que liga a los espectadores no es sino un vínculo irreversible con el mismo centro que los mantiene aislados. El espectáculo reúne lo separado, pero lo reúne en tanto y en cuanto está separado. (29)

El movimiento de trivialización que, bajo los multicolores entretenimientos del espectáculo , domina mundialmente la sociedad moderna, la domina asimismo en cada uno de los puntos donde el consumo desarrollado de mercancías ha multiplicado, en apariencia, los roles y objetos a elegir. Las supervivencias de la religión y de la familia —que sigue siendo la forma principal de herencia del poder de clase— y, por lo ranto, de la represión moral que ellas aseguran pueden combinarse como una misma cosa con la afirmación redundante del gozo de este mundo... (59)

Queering the class struggle.

2009-10-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

Palaversich, Diana. “The Wounded Body of Proletarian Homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán”. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 2, 99-118 (2002).

Pedro Lemebel's writings effectively challenge triumphant narratives about Chilean's economic model, pointing at the marginal subjects that inhabit the city. As well, it emphasizes the "transvestism" of Chilean identity, especially in terms of class and race. He also shatters any project of unitary or global "gay identity" by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS. Moreover, Lemebel engages with three traditions and political projects —gay politics, the Left political agenda, and postmodernism— without being subsumed by any of them. Lemebel's resistance to the global anglo-centered gay identity project (which has also been adopted by Latin American homosexual groups) is based on a twofold critique: for one thing, this model is easily complicit with neoliberalism and consumer culture; while on the other hand, it elevates (gay) masculinity as the ideal aesthetic, putting effeminate gays in the margins. Class and gender then become entangled so that masculine gays are seen as respectable and clean, while "locas" are poor, marginal and dirty. He also addresses the left in their sexism and homophobia, claiming they have always seen homosexuality "as a sign of bourgeois decadence or the effeminized degradation of the male and is therefore incompatible with the revolution and its (ultra)masculine signifiers." (108)

Queer Latino/a Performances.

2009-10-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Lockhart, Melissa F. “Queer Representations in Latino Theatre”. Latin American Theatre Review, 1998.

As "gay culture" becomes progressively more mainstream in North America, what can we consider "queer" in queer theatre? For Lockhart, when issues of class, race and culture are left untouched, then queer theatre looses all subversive potential. In turn, while queer culture has tended to move from margin to mainstream, " queer Latino theatre essentially becomes hyperqueer by enacting the multiplicities and contradictions of living within multiple marginal subjectivities". (68) Lockhart does not identify the term "queer" with gay, but rather with any "gender disruption". She locates the relevance of queer theatre in the potential for transforming the (self) representation of the Latino/a community and collective identities. The works analyzed by Lockhart emphasize stereotypes, hybridity and through the dynamics of "passing", the performative aspects of gender, class and race.

Latino/a performance in the 1990's.

2009-10-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153.

Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was also fueled by the irruption of AIDS as a global pandemic. These works challenge stereotypical narratives of Latinidad and of a unitary cultural/gender identity, while not being obliging to an ideological project for either the gay/queer or the Latino/a community.

National romances: romantic love and nationalism.

2009-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sommer, Doris. “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation”. Cultural Critique 16 (Autumn 1990), pp. 109–28.

Through the analysis of national novels Sommer is set to tackle the relationship betweeen politics and erotics in Latin America. She argues that narratives of love have been central to the disciplining of subjects within national projects, marked by the conflicts and eventual coming together, reconciliation and amalgamation of different (class, race, region, religious, culture) sectors, producing the effect of: suggesting the productive (though transgressive and heroic) union of different actors in favor of a national project, and at the same time, creating the effect of (sexual, romantic or familial) intimacy among national subjects, resulting in a "passionate patriotism." While romantic love engenders the nation, nationalism is based on romantic love. She produces a dialogue between Foucault's "history of the bodies" and Anderson's "history of national bodies", looking for the productive intersection of their claims about sexuality, the self, and national fictions. Just as in modern societies it becomes inescapable for subjects to have a "true sex" that defines the self, it is to have a nationality. In this way "foundational novels are precisely those fictions that try to pass for truth and to become the ground for political association." (124)

Latin American Feminisms.

2009-10-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

Saporta, Nancy; Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk and Sonia E. Alvarez “Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogota to San Bernardo”. Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 393-434. The University of Chicago Press.

The authors take issue with the North-American assumption that Latin American women do not define themselves as feminists, or that feminism is not a priority or even relevant for women in Latin America. For this purpose, they trace the trajectory of the feminisms in the region through the Encuentros held biannually since 1981. They situate the emergence of contemporary feminisms as part of the broader women's movements in close connection to the Left in the context of the repressive regimes of the 1970's and '80s. There was a tendency then to reject the label "feminist" or to perceive feminism as another cultural imperialism from the North. This is explained here by the way it was stigmatized among male-dominated and sexists politics of the Left.

In the first regional meeting of feminists, the conflict between "feministas" (or "autónomas") and "políticas" was evident. While the former saw feminism as a project in its own right, the latter considered that feminism needed to be part of a larger struggle for socialism. The second one made evident not only fractures of interests among women of diverse backgrounds, but also proved that there was a clear difference between the "movimiento feminista" and the "movimiento de mujeres." Progressively the Encuentros demonstrated that feminist and women's movements were becoming broader, more diverse and heterogeneous in terms of class, race and sexuality, which has posed further challenges in terms of organization, representation and political priorities.

Tango and football in the construction of Argentinian masculinities

2009-10-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

Archetti, Eduardo P. “Multiple Masculinities. The Worlds of Tango and Football in Argentina” in Sex and sexuality in Latin America Edited by Guy Balderston and Donna J. Guy (eds.) New York and London: New York University Press, 1997.

Archetti considers tango lyrics and football fans chants as texts, and analyzes them as sites for the construction of masculinities in Argentina. He emphasizes that masculinities are multiple, heterogeneous and compete with each other. Lyrics in tango songs present a symbolic gendered world at odds with the traditional familiar order. The narrator is always a young man, nostalgic of the past, that aches to find romantic love, which is determined by women's individual choice rather than duty. Masculinity relies on the ability to obtain romantic love from a woman, rather than subordination and domination.

In the world of football chants, an exclusively male symbolic space, masculinity is a sign of victory. Fans from opposite teams point at each others as non-masculine to signify defeat. The opponents are reduced in these texts as either children with no autonomy (and the victors as fathers) or as homosexuals who are penetrated by the victors (whose masculinity not only remains untouched but it is further asserted).

Gender and politics in Latin America.

2009-10-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

McGee Deutsch, Sandra. “Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Twentieth-Century Latin America”. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1991). Duke University Press.

McGee departs from Scott's statement that politics construct gender and gender constructs politics. She shows how traditional gender roles have been historically used as a paradigm of society. Likewise, power relationships of class and labor have been expressed in gendered terms. In this way, gender ideologies have often served to instill, legitimate, and to make seem "natural" values of industrial/capitalist societies under which the citizens are disciplined. Gender has allowed state discourse to project relationships from the familial to the national order (i.e., symbolizing state-citizens relationships as Father-children bonds). This, in turn, argues McGee, means that to transform social relationships and hierarchies we would need to re-imagine and reformulate the gender relationships, that are their material and symbolic support, in more democratic ways.

McGee is interested in the ways that gender is mobilized in the context of political change, looking at revolutionary Mexico, Argentinian Peronist administration, Cuban revolution and Chilean Unidad Popular. A common feature is that in all these cases the state's efforts and discourse, far from being a unitary and monolithic one, is rather heterogeneous and contradictory. McGee notes that at one level, the Mexican revolution discourse was formulated as oppressed men reclaiming and re-asserting their manhood, thus requiring female subordination for their project of social change. Women were then incorporated in the revolutionary project as secondary and subordinated subjects, companions of men. While the revolution promised to free women from capitalist oppression and church control, at the same time, the desired outcome was that women could perform better their roles as respectable mothers and wives. Moreover, women's moralizing role controlling men's behaviour was seen as key for the production of disciplined productive citizens, as in the formula “well order family = well ordered state.”

In regards to the Argentinian case, she notes that Peronist ideology wanted to incorporate women in their traditional roles and without challenging gender ideologies, so they distanced their discourse from feminism by defining it as foreign and “anti-national.” The Perons as a couple (Juan and Eva) projected the image of parents of the nation and promoted values that overall confirmed conservative gender roles, while standing for women's participation in paid work and in politics (though defined as “social” concerns).

Within the Cuban revolution, the socialist project claimed that gender roles were in need of transformation in order to achieve complete equality. This translated into many concrete policies, legal changes and programs that enabled women to become workers, political actors and to receive state support. Still, the revolution's rhetoric sustained a normative vision of Cuban revolutionary womanhood, expecting women to perform a sober (heterosexual) and attractive femininity. In a sometimes contradictory and ambivalent discourse, Revolutionary Cuba still makes old traditional notions of womanhood coexist with an emancipating view of gender equality. In turn, revolution detractors have presented these changes in gender roles and social hierarchies in terms of family 'disorder' and 'promiscuity.' McGee also notes that even though the Cuban revolution has made a conscious effort to achieve gender equality, its has emphasized a target on women and not men.

Finally, McGee looks at the Chilean socialist project, which assumed that overthrowing capitalism and capitalist exploitative relationships would automatically ensure gender equality and women's emancipation. However, the socialist government had a contradictory discourse and practice in relation to women's and gender equality. In their rhetoric, leaders of the UP relied frequently on traditional gender roles and presented workers dignity and empowerment in terms of restoring their masculinity. Furthermore, like the Cubans, Chileans socialist leaders put little effort in making men a target for changes in gender relations.

Scholarship on gender and nation-building in Latin America.

2009-10-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

Hutchison, Elizabeth Q., “Add gender and stir? Cooking up gendered histories of modern Latin America” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 267-287.

Hutchinson reviews some of the recent work on gender in Latin America and points at some of the most prominent features of it:

A progressive engagement of historians with gender issues has meant, beyond studying women, raising new questions, opening up new research problems and looking for new sources. Recent research has proved how central issues of gender and sexuality have been to the articulation of both state power and subaltern agency in Latin America. The studies under review, all look at the specific ways that historical processes are "gendered." Some of them have challenged teleological narratives of linear progress for women, and present the postcolonial period as offering a contradictory scenario for women, with both gains and losses. For instance, how colonial gender ideas were not simply carried along into the modern period, but rather, elites refashioned and appropriated these notions to make them fit into national projects. The scholarship reviewed emphasizes hegemony rather than domination, where actors involved engage actively in negotiating and accommodating meanings.

Gender struggles in the Chilean Agrarian Reform.

2009-10-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

Tinsman, Heidi. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. (2002)

Tinsman explores the ways that two decades of Agrarian Reform (1950-1973) shaped meanings about gender and sexuality in rural Chile, and more broadly reflects on the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized to enable or oppose political projects. The Agrarian Reform was a contested negotiation between state discourses (which were in turn also contested within the state) and the actors that exercised their agency, accommodating and stretching these meanings for themselves. In their everyday lives, campesinos negotiated meanings over respectability and equality with their bosses, partners, and children. Patriarchy operates then as a series of multiple, local arrangements that make it heterogeneous and contradictory rather than a universal monolithic system of domination.

Even though the Agrarian Reform operated directly on men as heads of households for land distribution and technical training, the Reform also promoted a rhetoric of gender mutualism, solidarity, and equality that women used to negotiate and attain their own goals. For instance, ideals of masculinity circulated under the reform expected responsibility from men, and women used this to have more power within domestic relationships. From the perspective of the state, the national project required a male subject dominated by rationality, a provider, responsible worker. From the perspective of rural women, these arguments were useful to demand from their husbands the fulfilling of their needs and protection. Marriage was then perceived as an exchange where male and female actors had to play their part adequately. In this context, it became central to the project of Chilean modernization to discipline unruly sexualities, such as husbands infidelity and young women's promiscuity. Despite the evidence that women had agency, they could not do away or subvert meanings over respectable femininity, and altogether, the Agrarian Reform not only left male authority over women in the household unchallenged, but rather relied on the patriarchal family for the creation of the new rural social order. However, the legacy that the Agrarian Reform left was key to shape the rural activism under Pinochet's dictatorship.

Three other aspects of Tinsman's analysis are of my interest:

First, for Tinsman it is through sexuality that gender meanings are assigned. Men's control over women's sexuality, was key to assert masculinity and define women's proper gender identity.

Second, she shows how racialized notions are used as markers of class difference. While the governments of the popular front promoted a discourse about "la raza chilena" as a myth of mestizaje, in their daily interactions, campesinos and patrones relied on notions like indios, rotos, chinitas y gringos to establish racial hierarchies. Tinsman argues that these racialized notions that coded relationships of service were a legacy of colonial times. Racialized women (chinitas or indias) were in turn coded as sexually available, so sexuality, gender and race were deployed in these notions in ways that made them inseparable. At the same, time, modernization as a process operated over the opposition of barbaric pasts to civilized futures, so that campesinos represented a group that needed to be educated to be incorporated in the national project.

Finally, Tinsman timely challenges the ideas that a) all women opposed Allende and b) that the Unidad Popular altogether ignored women and/or the issue of gender. Tinsman shows how this was a much more complex and nuanced process, in which both feminist men and women struggled to incorporate a more radical transformation of gender relationships to the socialist project, while at the same time, many actors within the UP, including Allende exalted women only as sacrificial mothers, wives and companions, or even daughters. The socialist project had to defend its program to change gender relations and empower women while at the same time demonstrate that it was not "anti-family".

Respectable workers, decent housewives.

2009-10-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. Gendered Compromises. Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950. Introduction pp. 1-25. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

This book revolves around the argument that the modernizing project in Chile during the first half of the twentieth-century was formulated as a gendered project, in which the state drew a line between respectable men (workers), respectable women (housewives and mothers), and the undisciplined "other". Moreover, they opposed rationality —linked to modern citizenship— to uncontained sexuality. This was in turn linked also to the racialized aspect of the national project: the whitening of the nation. Thus, trough the control over sexuality the racial boundaries of the nation were to be sustained.

Rosemblatt analyses diverse sources, such as state documents and fiction, to document the project of the popular front (the center-left coalition that governed in Chile between the 1920's and the 1950's). This project was immersed in the logic of progress, modernization and evolution that influenced most Western processes of nation-building. The state looked for rationality and science to become the grounds for social intervention. Professionals were indoctrinated in the idea of the educating state, and introduced a gendered professional practice, where women were incorporated as the 'social hygienists'. A healthy and well-constituted family were deemed as a requirement for the nation's advancement. Antagonist political projects all claimed the family as their ideal model of national conviviality and kinship. A gendered citizenship was promoted by policies and wage systems operated over the idea of the nuclear heterosexual male-headed family.

Rosemblatt looks at the processes of nation building as centered on the state as a site of contestation and negotiation of meanings with social and political actors. However, she recognizes that there are power structures at place that do not make this an equal bargain. State policies were shaped during this period both by the disciplining effort of the elites and by the ways that subaltern subjects negotiated with the state within these restrictions. That is, says Rosemblatt, there can be agency without autonomy. The state is not a monolithic entity either, but rather an heterogeneous body that reaches hegemony instead of complete control or domination.

The women who helped bring Allende down.

2009-10-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Power, Margaret. La Mujer de Derecha. El poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador Allende, 1964-1973. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2008.

Power analyzes the right-women's movement, its role in the opposition to Allende's socialist government in Chile (1970-1973) and in the military coup itself. Power makes a convincing argument that gender ideologies were put at play and performed dramatically during the military coup and the events that lead to it. Women presented themselves as the a-political mothers who were defending their private homes (family) and public home (the Fatherland, the nation) and the opposition to Allende exploited this idea. Women interpellated men in their (lack of) masculinity to defend women and children. They used their kitchen pans as symbols of female domesticity to protest the government, which they accused prevented them from fulfilling their natural roles properly. The public performance of conservative women in acts like the Marcha de las Cacerolas Vacías provided a sort of "trascendental" legitimation for the supporters of the coup.

There is short episode that illustrates the way that gender ideologies dramatically shaped the conflict: Carlos Prats was the last high-ranked military officer that remained faithful to Allende, and was receiving a lot of public pressure from conservative women, who were constantly calling on his manliness (and the whole military's). Amidst a lot of tension, one day driving his car, he saw somebody sticking out their tongue at him. He lost his temper and started shooting his gun at the car. Later, he realized that whom he thought to be a man offending him, was actually a woman, Alexandrina Cox: an upper class woman that wore short hair and no make-up. His embarrassment (notably, only for pointing a gun at a woman, not for becoming violent altogether) was such that he resigned his position (allowing Augusto Pinochet to become the next head of the army).

Power argues that historically, the right-wing and conservative sectors in Chile have been more effective in obtaining women support by calling on their roles as mothers and wives, which define many women's identities given Chile's traditional dominant gender ideologies. Conversely, the Left has traditionally focused on organizing and politicizing men through their role as workers and heads of house-holds, and has tended to dismiss women as "conservative" by nature. During the elaboration of the "Terror Campaign" for the elections of 1964, the US and the CIA channeled generous funds for the dissemination of propaganda. Most of it, Power shows, targeted women as mothers, suggesting that communist were to kidnap their children from their families to be indoctrinated in socialist countries.

The female masculinity of Mistral, the queer mother of the nation.

2009-10-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation. The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

This book is key to understand how intentional and deliberate was the deployment of modernizing nationalist narratives in Chile, and Gabriela Mistral's participation on them. It shows, furthermore, how Mistral was highly influential to the crafting of Chilean and Latin American gender and racial ideologies.

Fiol-Matta's careful research verses on Mistral's relationship to the Chilean (and later Mexican and Latin American) state cultural politics and how she established a persona that played along with the state's gendered, raced, and sexualized deployments of "national culture." Mistral contributed to the creation of images of motherhood and nationalist womanhood while in her own life not adjusting to heterosexual patterns of sexual performance nor of national identity. The fact is that she consciously made her image to coincide with a mythical image of womanhood, aligning it with nationalist discourses of progress and modernization that positioned the image of the female-schoolteacher as a model of exemplary female citizenry and patriotic subjectivity.

Fiol-Matta reflects on some unsettling aspects of this:
- Why was the state invested on Mistral's queer figure, her unequivocally ambiguous sexuality, or straigth-forwardly, why was the state interested in her female masculinity?
- What kind of maternal discourse is unfolded through her image as the Schoolteacher of America, and the Mother of Chileans?
- How did a queer achieve the status of the guardian of the Chilean heterosexual family?
The author explores the complicated ways that heteronormativity, racism and queerness are intertwined in her public persona and performance. For example, the image of schoolteacher functions as a sort of transitioning figure between the children's real mothers (with whom the state is in competition) and the state. Also, because symbolically children in Chile are all "huachos" —orphans of father— her image would be fit to be offered by the state a site of constant identification and disidentification for the citizens.

More woman than "just" a woman.

2009-10-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

Kulick, Don. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Kulick presents a detailed ethnographic work on travesti sex workers in Salvador, Brazil. He is interested in the ways that travestis understand and give meaning to their daily practices and identities. Kulick argues that studying the lives of travestis can tell us a lot "about the ways in which gender is imagined and configured in Brazilian society." (11)

1. Travestis in Kulick's research do not identify themselves as women, but as homosexual men who derive pleasure from looking like a woman and triggering (masculine) men's desire. They also do not label transsexuals as women, and refuse to give up their male genitalia as a source of sexual pleasure (I suspect that also as a source of sexual power). In this way, all the analysis that want to elevate travesti subjectivity as the ultimate post-modern condition of a non-identity miss the point that travestis claim a homosexual identity for themselves.

2. Travestis practices and discourses help us understand better how gender is seen as a binary that does not separate irreversibly women from men. Travestis rather seem to think in terms of a gender binary that is not determined by anatomy, but rather by sexual practice, and more specifically, determined by who is in the place of penetrating. Penetration then is the definitive act that defines gender binary, thus holding a transformative gender power. In this binary, women and homosexual men share the same gender.

3. The figure of the travesti has a symbolic role in national discourses and cultural imaginaries in Latin America, and is frequently used as a metaphor for the national character in many different directions.

4. Travestis see themselves as "perfecting" femininity. Whereas their female co-workers are destined to be "just women", travestis have the possibility to become "more woman than woman", by taking the performance of femininity to an extreme.

Kulick's agenda is to challenge stereotypes, misrepresentations and myths about travestis that inhabit bot academic and common discourses. His research moves away from pathologizing them and presents them as subjects who display survival skills and who manage to make sense of their lives amidst and despite poverty, marginalization, homophobia and violence.

Queer masculinities

2009-10-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

Prieur, Annick. Mema's house, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Prieur's book is based on rich ethnographic evidence and contains her reflections on the role of homosocial and homoerotic male desire in the construction of masculinities in Mexico. She argues that homophobia, machismo and male bisexuality are all at the same time imbricated in the construction of masculinities: Prieur shows the concrete ways that masculinities are constituted in the stories of 'mayates', men whose bisexual practices do not make them think of their identities as "gays" or less masculine. Since these men can retain the power of labeling others (as homosexuals) they can get involved in bisexual relations without 'losing' their masculinity. Some authors (Carrier, Lancaster) have indicated that given the extension of male bisexuality it ought to be a largely tolerated practice in Latin America. Prieur introduces more complexity to these claims by demonstrating that male bisexuality is a tolerated practice as long as it remains invisible, "so long as it is kept within a purely male context, so long as it is not talked about, so long as certain rules are respected, and so long as it is euphemized." (189) Prieur also points at the ways that the practice and discourse of 'mayates' are in open conflict; they either deny, condemn their own practices, and/or go to great lengths to self-explain and justify their behavior. Conversely, 'jotas' and 'vestidas' need to assert their transgender femininity by only admitting to having a passive sexual role even though they frequently penetrated 'mayates'.

In the same way that masculine men can label other men as homosexual to assert their own masculinity, they also have the power to define women through the practice of 'piropos' (addressing a passing woman in a sexualizing way, often aggressive). Prieur agrees with authors that suggest that sexual intercourse is frequently used as a metaphor for exploitation, or that in general, references to the body must be seen in the context of their use as references to the social body. However, she reminds us that this should not mean that gender and sexual metaphors are only a metaphor for something else, as these metaphors also signify something about gender and sexuality. In this way, when Mexican men tease each other about their (homo) sexuality they are using the language of gender and sexual difference to subvert class domination but also signifying something about gender and sexual relations.

Queering development in Latin America

2009-10-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

Lind, Amy and Jessica Share. “Queering Development: Institutionalized Heterosexuality in Development Theory, Practice and Politics in Latin America”. Feminist futures : re-imagining women, culture and development edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran and Priya A. Kurian. London ; New York : Zed Books ; New York : Palgrave, 2003.

This article argues for the need to challenge institutionalized heterosexism in development theories and practice. Along with this, addresses the uneasy relationship between heterosexual and queer feminists in Latin America, and the role of transnational networks of solidarity and activism, as well as globalized consumer culture in making some discourses of "gay rights" available in LA.
Lind and Share analyze the dynamics of development "aid" and policies, most of which peaked in the 80's in the context of the AIDS pandemic. This allowed many gay groups to become "ONGized" and get funding for their activities. The groups struggled for self-definition in tension with Western categories and US imperialism. Interestingly, agencies and organizations working in prevention of AIDS in Latin America encountered the challenge that not all men who practice sex with other men define themselves as "gay", questioning the whole paradigm of global "gay identity" discourse that expanded across Latin America through AIDS prevention dollars. On the other hand, the authors note that the easy assumption that "gay identity" is a Western or First World "import" that does not have application or relevance in Latin America, has an impact of the ability of queer people to exercise their citizenship: "Seen as traitors to nationalist movements and/or as too Westernized, queer women in Third World contexts have been oppressed by both the political right and left." (67)

Lind and Share argue for the need to establish a dialogue and connections between gay and lesbian literature and development theories, or to "queer" the development field by challenging heteronormative assumptions that have gone unquestioned so far. The call is not for an intellectual exercise but to seriously consider the material and concrete effects that these norms have in term of exclusion and invisibility of many women. For example, to rethink about the ways that the families are defined, that normally exclude queer women (I would add that these involves furthermore doing more careful research about the ways that men are also involved at the practical level with domestic chores and responsibilities, even if they do not openly talk about it at first, like Gutmann suggests). Development practices are currently operating with a discriminatory way, so that we need to include the notion of sexual rights as part of our definition of citizenship to make them more inclusive to queer women, sex workers and women (an men) who live under different family arrangements.

Studies on male homosexuality in Latin America

2009-10-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

Nesvig, Martin. 2001 “The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality”. Hispanic American Historical Review 81(3-4): 689-729.

Nesvig argues that it is relevant to look at the sexual mores of the colonial period as many of these notions persisted into the modern period in Latin America. He notes that homosexuality was considered the ultimate sin against Nature, God, and the Crown. However, this did not stop the fact that it was a fairly common and semi- institutionalized practice. Because cities offered more opportunity for anonymity and for the development of a clandestine subculture with its own slang and codes it was rather an urban phenomenon. Reviews historiographies of homosexuality, informed by the paradigm of honor/shame, where sexuality is a key component. The metaphor of penetration is contained in the myth of La Malinche, makes being penetrated something that equates being colonized, degraded and defeated. Nesvig argues that scholarship on male homosexuality have been framed within these notions of sexuality and "conquest", so that it is frequently assumed that only the passive agent of penetration was subject to stigmatization and punishment. Nesvig notes that historians of Latin America have had a hard time documenting the transition from homosexuality as a sinful "act" (within religious discourse) to an "identity" (within medical and legal discourse) in the same way that has been described in Europe. In early twentieth century there is evidence that in some countries like Argentina homosexuality was considered both a disease and a social threat to the national order. There is the need to analyze more carefully the relationship of sexuality and power.

The late twentieth-century period has been more dominated by scholarship coming from sociology and anthropology (which makes sense since in this period there are direct accounts available from the studied actors) focusing on the meanings assigned to practices, identities, social stigma and social negotiations of meanings. Contradiction and ambiguity seems to be the features of discourses and practices of homosexuality in contemporary Mexico and Brazil, complicating the relationship between sexual practice and gender identity.

Lesbian, gay and queer scholarship in Latin America

2009-10-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

Lopez-Vicuña, Ignacio. “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies”. Latin American Research Review - Volume 39, Number 1, 2004, pp. 238-253 . University of Texas Press.

This article reviews scholarship on gay and lesbian studies in Latin America. The growing body of research has been more marked by diversity and complexity than by confluence. Literary studies have started to "queer" the canon by reading texts through queer desire. Queer studies from the social sciences, have tended more to build bridges between homoerotic desire and narratives of nationhood, between discourses of national identity and sexuality. They pay attention to the interplay of power, desire and race, including the analysis of the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Vargas Llosa's work. The fact that many of the writers of the Latin American literary "boom" (1960's and 70's) rejected dominant masculinity and machismo does not mean that they still would not use homophobia and misogyny to re-assert themselves (243). In this way, studies of masculinity have moved away from a model of acceptance versus rejection of hegemonic gender identities to more nuanced readings of how different models of masculinity circulate. Lopez-Vicuña laments that some studies miss out on how both homophobia and homoeroticism are so constitutive of modern masculine identities. Other studies have missed to understand that masculinity is constructed and performed rather than "expressed" or interpreted. Cynthia Weber has made a provocative analysis of the ways that gender and sexuality constitute international politics: she reads US foreign policy towards the Caribbean in terms of phallic loses, restauration of masculinity, castration/penetration, and finally queering and travestism.

Other line of studies have documented the history of the gay and lesbian's movements in Latin America. The most comprehensive one, by Norma Mogrovejo, documents how throughout Central and Latin America, gay and lesbian movements emerged or re-emerged in the 1980's in the context of the opposition to dictatorships. They were at the same time influenced by international gay discourse and feminism, but looked to appropriate these discourses of gay rights and gay politics of identity in particular ways so that they would not be complicit with US discourses of imperialism. Mogrovejo's research also documents that the majority of the feminist movements were highly heterocentrist and for the most part excluded lesbian interests so that lesbian women often were active in both feminists and homosexual movements. Finally, studies based on ethnographies and life stories have emerged. Notably, Hector Carillo study on AIDS and meanings around sexuality in Guadalajara illuminates the ways that research on gender and sexuality can be relevant and bring insight to public policies and programs, in this case, health policy.

Los estudios historiográficos de género en Latinoamérica

2009-10-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

Caulfield S. “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America”. Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001 - Duke Univ Press. Pp. 449-490.

Caulfield hace un intento por revisar lo que se ha escrito sobre género en Latino América. A partir de los años 80s comienza una serie de estudios inagurados por Asunción Lavrin que usan género como categoría central de análisis. Nota la falta de diálogo entre lo que se produce en el Norte y en el Sur sobre LA. Examina la historia de las corrientes políticas y académicas que han influenciado los análisis de género en la historiografía de LA (452). El peak de los estudios de género se producen en el contexto de las postdictaduras cuando hay recursos institucionales y respaldo internacional para una agenda global “de género”. La influencia del post-estructuralismo francés resulta en un énfasis en los discursos y las representaciones, las mentalidades, y de los estudios de la mujer se transita a los estudios sobre la feminidad y la masculinidad. La influencia del pensamiento marxista se traduce en que género se usa (casi) siempre como categoría ligada a clase (o etcnicidad). Las historiografías ponen mucha atención en la relevancia de la familia y su relación con estructuras políticas y económicas. Estos estudios han ido de a poco reconociendo más la agencia de las mujeres en estos procesos más alla de verlas como meros instrumentos o víctimas de ellos. Atención también a procesos de hegemonía y de contrahegemonía. Y como la construcción de masculinidades y feminidades normativas se cruza con discursos estatales, populares, contraculturales.

Garretón y su Incomplete Democratization

2009-09-18T14:43:00.001-07:00

Garretón, Manuel A. Incomplete democracy: political democratization in Chile and Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

En este libro, Garretón sostiene que Chile comenzó su transición durante el plesbicito de 1988, que la democracia se consolidó con el primer gobierno democrático en 1990 (cuando se estableció que no se podía regresar a la dictadura militar) y que el problema es que la democracia chilena es hoy una democracia incompleta, mediocre, con enclaves autoritarios. Cuestiona la idea de la exitosa "doble transición chilena" —a la democracia y al libre mercado— pero se enoja con Moulian y con otros intelectuales de izquierda que niegan que haya habido transición democrática o alternativamente, que ésta haya terminado. Garretón cree que esto último negaría lo específico del concepto de transición y le quitaría sentido a su uso. Para Garretón el desafío es volver a reconstituir al Estado, los actores sociales y los partidos políticos como referentes de la vida política y poder articular un proyecto de país.

Argumenta que los enclaves autoritarios son parte inherente, esencial de las transiciones del tipo de la que ocurrió en Chile. Sin embargo, también reconoce los errores que cometieron los actores que negociaron la transición y el error garrafal del gobierno de Frei en defender a Pinochet durante su detención en Londres. Aparte de los enclaves autoritarios de tipo legal (Constitución del 1980, sistema binominal, etc.) Garretón nota que hay aspectos más culturales que hacen que la democracia sea incompleta: la ilusión de consenso, pero actual falta de debate público sobre temas de fondo; la amenaza permanente de la derecha de que ciertos temas no se pueden abordar en nombre de la estabilidad y gobernabilidad del país; y el trauma de diversos sectores frente al conflicto y el discenso. A propósito de esto último, pareciera que Garretón es mismo está afectado por este "trauma."

Garretón observa que a nivel regional, la paradoja latinoamericana consiste en alcanzar regimenes democráticos cuando el Estado y lo político pierden relevancia y dejan de ser un referente, pues los centros de decisión están ubicados en la economía transnacional. Por lo tanto, se hace necesario reconstruir la relación entre lo político y lo económico para que las democracias sean relevantes.

Es ejemplar del discurso de la izquierda "renovada" su mea culpa acerca de las responsabilidades compartidas y específicamente en el rol que supuestamente le cabe a la izquierda en la polarización política que llevó al golpe, donde todos los actores dejaron de actuar en base a un "proyecto país" para empujar su propio proyecto ideológico:

"In our view, what happened from 1970 to 1973 is that all the actors behaved in such a way that they tended to erode institutionalism and, therefore, the legitimacy of the democratic system." (107)

Describe las motivaciones ideológicas de los militares como la convicción de estar defendiendo los valores occidentales de la libertad, en oposición a la amenaza de expansión del comunismo Soviético, a través de fuerzas cultivadas al interior de cada país. Esto último justificaba la idea de enemigo interno y la idea de los militares como el repositorio moral de la nación, garantes de la unidad nacional (112).

Es escandalosa su omisión sobre el movimiento de mujeres y el feminismo de la oposición. Habla de la multidimensionalidad del poder y de las políticas identitarias en términos de "adscripción", inspirado en Touraine y notando que se han diversificado los terrenos desde los cuales reclamar ciudadanía. Pero parece no aplicar eso a su análisis.

La transición que no transita

2009-09-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

Thayer, Willy. La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (Epílogo del conflicto de las facultades). Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1996.

El argumento central de Thayer, en lo que concierne a mi tema, es que la transición es lo que ocurrió durante la dictadura, el tránsito desde el Estado moderno a la sociedad de mercado, donde el Estado deja de ser un referente de conducción ideológica del proyecto nacional. Este tránsito hace caer en crisis las categorías modernas de la política (Estado, Pueblo, progreso, etc.) que le servían de referente. El estado de ánimo de aburrimiento que acompaña la post-dictadura tiene que ver entonces con el fin de la épica y la proliferación inocua de las ideologías, ya no como confrontación de proyectos históricos, sino como un consumo cosmético dentro del menú neoliberal. El capitalismo tardío entonces, no requiere de una ideología ni de un orden político en particular.

Operational whitewash and negative communities

2009-09-15T18:21:00.000-07:00

Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. “Chapter 7: Operational Whitewash and the Negative Community”. Pp. 273-304. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

In Latin America, nationalist projects have been based on the establishment of normative identities and communities that indicate their limits in opposition to non-normative identities. Hegemony, thus, constitutes at the same time the grounds for subalternity (6). Subalternity is understood by Williams as "the often violent subject effect of national and post-national processes of social subordination, but also as the epistemological limit at which the nonhegemonic announces the limits of hegemonic thought and of hegemonic thinking". (10) Williams is looking for sites at the limits of current operations of whitewashing of both the relations between past and present violence and of heterogeneities collapsed under the idea of the national (such as the "chola" identity). But subalternity is not a project per se, least a romanticized project, as it can be performed (as in the case of ethnic tourism) within the narrative of neoliberalism to continue to assert colonial superiority and global market inequalities.

Williams notes that Moulian's Chile Actual gestures towards a residual affective world that can not find itself representable in the clean, transparent surface of the Chilean post-dictatorship national narrative (epitomized by the 1992 iceberg) and thus unsettles the image of a smooth transition (or of a transition at all for that matter). Now, the operational whitewash is not specific to Chilean transition (the suppression of historical relations between past and present), but is part of the strategic penetration of transnational market forces. Aligned with Nelly Richard and with Brett Levinson, William argues that there is "an affective world of signification that remains senseless (for democratic hegemony), and ungraspable for the order of disciplinary reason and for institutional knowledge as a whole" (286), "a world of residual affects that has been included into democracy as democracy's zone of (necessary) exclusion." (288) This world rather than becoming a community itself, points at the impossibility of any project of community based in equivalence and rationality. The implications of this would be to think of a notion of the social not grounded in complete and discrete identities but rather in "intimacy's and communion's dispersed and scattered interruptions, fissures, fragments and residues". (301)

Performing the Other

2009-09-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

Velasco, Juan. “Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His “Dangerous Border Crossings”. Latino/a Popular Culture edited by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero. New York, London: New York University Press, 2002.

Velasco looks at Gómez-Peña body of work which comprises performance and writing, and points at several issues raised by it:
- commodification of indigenous identities
- connections between the production of the 'authentic Other' and the new world order
- performative nature of identity
- colonial discourse as relying on a binary between colonizers and colonized identities
- strategies by which colonized subjects can subvert this binary

Anzaldúa has previously constructed the notion of the 'border' as a site for articulation of a 'new mestiza consciousness', a type of subjectivity that refuses to be on one side or the other. Gómez-Peña however, seems to be more skeptical about any 'positive model of cultural hybridity' since it can be assigned any meaning, commodified and consumed in the context of contemporary American politics. Instead, he seems to suggest identity as a permanent interrogation and a "Latina/o performativity that alternates between sincerity and subversion, irony and compliance" (217), while advocating for a more complex and situational mestizo subject.

Gender components in myths of mestizaje

2009-09-15T15:56:00.001-07:00

Smith, Carol A. “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations”. Journal of Latin American Anthropology . September 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 148-169.

Smith examines how "mestizaje" emerged linked to nationalist ideology but has also been appropriated in different ways by the identity politics of some "new social movements" in Latin America.

The myth of mestizaje entails at the same time the illusion of homogeneity and the affirmation of internal racial hierarchies. Hegemonic national culture needs to be produced and controlled by state institutions. Mestizaje is presented as the "natural" or biological basis for the project of a national culture, and it is then a key ideological and mythical component of nation-building processes in LA. However, as subaltern subjects have more access to the means of production of images and discourses about them, they can manipulate these meanings.

Smith is specially interested in the gendered components of mestizaje, as "myths of mestizaje create gender/sexual distinctions and rankings" (156). She identifies a matrix of gender/ethnicity within myths of mestizaje that aligns mestizo, Spanish and criollo men with virility, in opposition to Indian men as powerless and emasculated. In the meantime, Indian and mestiza are aligned together as sexualized and fertile ('chingada') in opposition to Spanish and criolla women who are absent in the myth, but implied as the 'gente decente'. This means that gender actually divides mestizos in different ethnic identities. When the response to this myth from the women affected by it is to try to prove their sexual respectability to navigate the whitening scheme, then Smith argues that "they do not frankly confront the real issue in the myths affecting them: the right of all women to situate themselves politically (and ethnically) irrespective of their marital and reproductive situation or their sexual conduct". (160)

New identity politics in LA, claims of subaltern subjects like the Mayan movement in Guatemala, suggest that mestizaje is a way more complex of a process, and that it was not as successfully completed as it was thought before. In the other hand, women's movements and feminist movements show a case of fragmented identity politics. This has been according to Smith both the strength and the weakness of these movements.

It goes without saying

2009-09-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

Levinson, Brett. “Dictatorship and Overexposure: Does Latin America Testify to More than One Market?” Discourse - 25.1&2, Winter & Spring 2003, pp. 98-118.

Levinson argues the 1973 coup never ceased happening, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship, when the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed, as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but as what just is, or "it goes without saying". To challenge this is actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hits with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find there is no possible discourse available to account for the experiences. When violence is recognized, is done under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes of one side in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition.

"Transition consequently commands a poetics (the language of analogy, of tropes), the invention of a language that does not belong to dictatorship or democracy but to their relation, one that neither of these fields can offer." (108)

The order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (the memory of state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.

The multiplication of information about the dictatorship is of information that does not mean anything because it cannot be used to testify for justice given the amnesty laws that were not reverted in the post-dictatorship:

"Overexposure of the Same (story), within the news or within all public testimony, today replaces underexposure (suppression) of the Other." (117)

Mi tío Pedro, el revolucionario y chacotero.

2009-09-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Como el universo se empeña en ser paradójico y sorprendentemente absurdo, el tiempo y el espacio se doblan como un pañuelo y hoy el 11 de septiembre me encuentra reflexionando sobre la dictadura y la postdictadura en Estados Unidos, en la casa de mi tío que es veterano de los marines, con mi otra tía viuda de un detenido desaparecido y mi primo Roberto, que nació de esa relación pero no alcanzó a conocer a su papá.

Mi tío Pedro está detenido desaparecido desde el 14 de Febrero de 1975, cuando tenía 22 años y además de estudiar Historia era dirigente del MIR. Yo tenía menos de un año cuando esto ocurrió y mi tía Lucía estaba entonces embarazada de 5 meses de mi primo Roberto. Esto ha sido una tragedia familiar de la cual se habla poco, y de a poco, al enterarme de más detalles, he comprendido por qué. En esa época (en la UP y al principio de la dictadura) varios de mis tíos, tías y mis papás militaban en el MIR. Mi primo Roberto es como mi hermano porque vivió con nosotros intermitentemente muchos años. De chicos, le dijeron primero a mi primo que su papá había muerto en un accidente. Después supimos que estaba "desaparecido". Lo único que me han contado mis papás es que mi tío me quiso mucho, que era chacotero y super alegre. Mi primo se crió entre Estados Unidos y Chile y hoy está casado con una niña gringa muy dulce y de familia republicana y cristiana.

El relato al interior de la familia indicaba que lo habían detenido agentes de la DINA en su departamento y le habían pegado un tiro. Y hasta ahí no más sabía yo. Hasta ayer. Escribiendo a propósito de la performance como práctica política y de la Agrupación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, ayer me topé con la ficha completa que reconstruye su caso. Mi tío fue baleado, pero se lo llevaron detenido igual a Villa Grimaldi, donde fue torturado. Luego, llevado al hospital de la DINA y de vuelta a otro centro de tortura. Mi mente ahora borró algunos detalles que no quiero volver a revisar. Testigos indican que en el hospital de la DINA se mostró preocupado por la seguridad de su polola embarazada. Por lo que he leído ahora sobre las prácticas de tortura, deben haberle dicho que le habían hecho algo o le iban a hacer algo a ella también.

Y hoy, a la hora de almuerzo, viendo las noticias sobre las conmemoraciones del 11 de septiembre gringo, mi tío ex-marine me pregunta cómo reaccioné yo con el ataque de las torres gemelas. Yo le dije que lo primero que había pensado era que Estados Unidos no era una víctima ni un país inocente y que en realidad tenían bien merecido recibir un ataque dentro de sus fronteras ya que siempre estaban en guerra fuera de ellas. Mi tío tiene 89 años y es muy ignorante, a estas alturas se supone que ya no peleamos, pero tenía demasiado fresquito lo de ayer. Le dije, "sino fuera por los Estados Unidos, posiblemente el papá de Roberto estaría ahora con nosotros".

Nelly Richard y el feminismo deconstruccionista

2009-09-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

Richard, Nelly. Feminismo, género y diferencia (s). Colección Archivo Feminista. Santiago: Palinodia, 2008.

Este libro contiene una serie de ensayos, algunos ya publicados antes pero aquí revisados y expandidos. A través de ellos, Richard establece los siguientes puntos:

El feminismo puede ser visto tanto como un movimiento social; una teoría; o como una operación que problematiza las relaciones de poder desde "el signo mujer" como significante o metáfora de lo subordinado, lo marginal, lo no-hegémonico. En este sentido, el feminismo y "lo femenino" pueden ser formulados como una crítica a las tecnologías de la representación que postulan a la identidad como lineal, unitaria y fija. Ser mujer no coincide siempre en este sentido ni con "lo femenino" ni con lo feminista (en el caso de la literatura, por ejemplo). "Lo femenino" entonces sería un proceso de significación constante, siempre imbuido en una intertextualidad, que permite articular múltiples modos de subjetividad en función de diversos contextos de actuación.

Una vez que nos hacemos cargo de la crítica postestructuralista que cuestiona la identidad femenina como esencial, nos topamos con la tensión entre la deconstrucción de la categoría identitaria "mujer" y la necesidad de articular identidades políticas a nivel práctico. Para Richard, el impasse se resuelve en que las feministas no están obligadas a elegir entre un extremo y otro de la tensión, sino que pueden desplazarse tácticamente entre ellos para articular un "nosotras" o su deconstrucción en función del contexto.

La diferencia sexual, lejos de ser "otra diferencia más", sería la diferencia que por excelencia sostiene y estructura la economía simbólica de la representación. Por esto mismo es que podemos valernos del "signo mujer" para impugnar más ampliamente una economía de significación masculina. Sin embargo, es necesario situar en su contexto material específico e histórico a los cuerpos de quienes ocupan la posición "mujer".

El feminismo de los ochenta pierde su vigor durante la transición una vez que se profesionaliza, se institucionaliza, y se "ONGiza". No basta buscar entonces en el lenguaje militante-burocratizante de la "agenda feminista" las claves para generar transformaciones culturales, sino que es necesario examinar esos espacios donde se cuestionan las bases de las agendas políticas que han sostenido tanto la izquierda como la derecha durante la dictadura y la transición. El arte y la literatura suelen ser espacios donde se apunta hacia la fragmentación, la incompletitud y se denuncia la pretensión de totalidad y la ilusión de coherencia de los sujetos y de sus grandes narrativas ideológicas:

"El arte y la literatura saben torcer los esquemas identitarios, desviarlos hacia los bordes donde se alojan las materias simbólicamente más complejas por turbias, convulsas y fracturadas. El arte y la literatura impiden que se dogmatice lo femenino en el yo sin quiebres ni residuos del lineal sociologismo de género que trabajan, aburridamente, los informes académicos y las comisiones públicas relativos a "la condición de la mujer" y a los "derechos de las mujeres". (63)

Por último, Richard hace notar como las distinciones que algunas feministas latinoamericanas hacen entre "experiencia" versus "teoría", reivindicando la primera por sobre la última, refuerza una serie de binarismos que habitan la imaginación neocolonialista, al sostener que Latino América es el campo de la experiencia o "el cuerpo", mientras que el Norte sería por excelencia el campo de la teoría, el discurso, o "la cabeza" (imaginario también de género donde se feminiza LA y se masculiniza el "Primer Mundo"). Esta distinción asimismo reivindica la búsqueda de "lo latinoamericano" original y no-contaminado, haciéndose complice de las narrativas que esencializan y comodifican la cultura sin reconocer su caracter híbrido, dinámico y contradictorio.

The marches of silence: post-dictatorship and social movements in Argentina

2009-09-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

Bergman, Marcelo and Monica Szurmuk. “Gender, Citizenship, and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.

This article deals with the case of the murder of a young, dark-skinned, working-class woman in Argentina —in which the son of a senator was involved— and the following movement of "marches of silence" that emerged to demand justice. The authors make the argument that in post-dictatorship Argentina, ideas and expectations about citizenship have changed, and that the way of doing politics has been profoundly impacted by the Madres as they inaugurated "public grieving and public suffering as political praxis" (391). While in other times this case would have been quickly dismissed as an individual crime, in this new context it became profoundly politicized, and triggered broader demands to change a corrupted political and economic system that conceived working-class women's bodies as disposable. Moreover, this case represents a change in the gendered conception of citizenship and democracy: in this context only becomes possible to claim citizenship and rights for a sexually active young woman, and to challenge the distinction between subjects who are deserving and undeserving of state protection.

Feminisms and women's struggles in LA

2009-09-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

Radcliffe, Sarah and Sallie Westwood. “Gender, Racism and the Politics of Identities in Latin America”. “Viva”: women and popular protest in Latin America. Pp. 1-29. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.

In this chapter, Radcliffe and Westwood make the following points:

1. Women's gender and political identities and practices have to be understood in their specific contexts, as they are ever shifting and multiple.

2. It is not possible (and also inaccurate and harmful) to talk about a unitary category of Latin American women, as one can speak of LA as a whole region only in conventional terms. If we do not acknowledge the fractures and multiple locations that women in LA, we contribute to silence and render invisible the women who are indeed oppressed by other women, i.e. working class, indigenous and other racialized women. It is also necessary to look beyond the commonplaces and stereotypes that exoticize LA, as this is part of a racist and eurocentric narrative.

3. "Gendered is lived through racisms and social constructions of 'race' in Latin America" (6) That is, gender identities and relations are shaped by race relations. In turn, "ethnic identities and class identities are always constructed and refracted through gender identities" (8). As a consequence, we cannot look at gender, race and class

4. The ideological construct of the nation and its narratives rely on invented ethnicities, i.e. mestizo identity, and the exclusion and othering of indigenous subjects.

5. Symbols of nationhood are highly gendered: the masculine military and the mothers of the nation. However, these discourses are also racialized, as only some mothers are deemed as patriotic in contrast to unruly or racialized motherhood. Women in different contexts of political repression have strategically appropriated this symbol of motherhood to resist violence, i.e. the 'motherist' groups such as the Argentinian Madres or the Chilean Relatives of the Dissapeared have evoked the images of suffering and sacrificial motherhood promoted by the Catholic discourse.

The tools of violence: race, gender, sexuality and military campaigns in Mexico

2009-09-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

Stephen, Lynn. “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico”. Perspectives on Las Américas: a reader in culture, history and representation. Edited by Matthew Gutmann. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003.

Stephen examines the gendered and sexualized patterns of militarization and torture in Oaxaca and Chiapas, and how in these processes, long held myths and stereotypes about women and indigenous peoples are mobilized in what she calls "the cultural packaging of violence", that is, the construction of subjects who can be targets of violence. She notes based on her ethnographic work that gender and ethnicity are critical for the construction of the worthless, subversive, dangerous subjects of violence (for the analysis of violence in Chile, we would need to add class as another critical factor, and the racialization of working-class subjects). She also points at the continuity of colonial discourses and themes, especially the feminization and sexualization of the conquered/victims. Given that the modern Mexican state has promoted the ideology of mestizaje, indigenous peoples have continued to be constructed both as part of a romanticized past, and as inferior and backwards. But the emergence of the EZLN in the early nineties came to dislocate and subvert narratives of mestizaje, and the equation one nation=one state, destabilizing the political legitimacy of Mexican institutional power. In response, the government launched an aggressive military and paramilitary campaign in the areas of indigenous insurgency, which has included constant practices of surveillance, harassment, detention and torture of anybody of is deemed a "suspect". As a result, self-censorship and fear have become part of people's daily lives.

The racialized, gendered and sexualized patterns of repression are expressed in:
- the feminization and demasculinization of men during practices of detention and torture
- the use of racial insults for both men and women
- the use of rape or threat of rape as a tool of violence against women who are politically active (they are accused of being whores and looking for sex)

A house is not always a home.

2009-09-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Stephenson, Marcia. “The Architectural Relationship between Gender, Race, and the Bolivian State”. The Latin American subaltern studies reader edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.

This article tackles the relationship between narratives of nationhood in Bolivia, race, gender and space. It argues that the idea of Bolivia as a modern nation-state requires to put in place the ideology of mestizo identity (the progressive whitening of the population), the "othering" of indigenous populations, and a gendered and racialized conception of space to domesticate the heterogeneous social body.

Taking as a start point the planning and development of rural houses, Stephenson analyzes the ideological implications of their spatial distribution: hegemonic discourses of modernity and citizenship carry gendered distinctions between the inside/domestic and the outside/public, as well as the demand for the acculturation of indigenous communities, who are expected to become mestizo citizens to become part of the nation (it is to note that in Bolivia this rhethoric has been challenged ever since the arrival of Evo Morales to institutional power, this article was written just before that). In this way, "the physical layout of hegemonic houses structures processes of ethnic and racial acculturation at the same time that it organizes dominant constructions of gender" (370).

The production of the ideology of the domestic and the familiar, and the boundaries between inside/outside is closely linked to the idea of the nation as a safe, familiar order. Unruly indigenous female bodies are seen as a source of pollution and disorder, and thus a threat to the project of a modern nation. However, this idea that the inside is a protected, safe space is readily challenged by the voices of indigenous women who become domestic workers and experience sexual harassment, exploitative work relationships and racism in this space.

Nacionalismo, militarismo y masculinidad hegemónica.

2009-09-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Nagel, Joane. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations”. Nations and Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Nagel examina la relación entre el nacionalismo y la construcción de la masculinidad hegemónica, particularmente en Estados Unidos; como el nacionalismo requiere de la exaltación de un cierto tipo de "hombría" y de feminidad; así como la sexualización de la guerra y del militarismo en general.

En primer lugar, Nagel explora como la cultura del nacionalismo y el militarismo es inseparable de la cultura e ideología de la masculinidad hegemónica. En Estados Unidos, la masculinidad hegemónica se construye a través de las ideas de superioridad nacional y el imperialismo agresivo. Es más, las ideologías de la masculinidad, el colonialismo, nacionalismo, militarismo e imperialismo son inseparables entre sí y emergieron de manera conjunta a fines del siglo XIX. Temas como la valentía, el deseo de aventura, el honor y el deber forman parte de este conglomerado significante. En contraste, quienes cuestionen estos proyectos ideológicos son rápidamente acusados de "falta de hombría", cobardía, homosexualidad.

Respecto a la construcción de una feminidad nacionalista, Nagel se apoya en Yuval-Davis y Anthias para señalar que a pesar de la participación concreta de las mujeres en los proyectos nacionalistas, a éstas se les adscribe más bien un papel simbólico, que las incluye en estas narrativas como símbolos (madres, mujeres honorables, putas) pero tiende a excluirlas a nivel práctico. Las frecuentes analogías de la nación como una familia encabezada por un padre heroico, una madre honorable y unos hijos subordinados indican que esta metáfora de género es perfecta para presentar estas jerarquías y roles como parte de un "orden natural". Así, la sexualidad de las mujeres (y su vigilancia y control) toman un papel central en la construcción del honor masculino y de la nación en general. En oposición, la sexualidad femenina ingobernable y desordenada representa una amenaza tanto para la masculinidad como para la nación.

Finalmente, el discurso sexualizado del militarismo y de la guerra implica la construcción de un enemigo que es, o bien sobre-sexualizado (hombres violadores/ mujeres promiscuas y fáciles) o sub-sexualizado sólo en el caso de los hombres (eunucos, cobardes). Las campañas militaristas e imperialistas se sirven de una serie de significantes sexualizados, especialmente el de la penetración ("Bend over, Sadam" escrito en los misiles de la guerra del golfo; el discurso de que con Jimmy Carter EEUU le estaba "abriendo las piernas" a la USSR). Las mujeres del lado enemigo en este contexto son construidas como sexualmente disponibles y como objetos de penetración (la feminización del enemigo permite así mismo su penetración y por tanto, representa su apropiación).

Mi problema con este artículo de Nagel es que ella termina preguntándose por qué las mujeres no han sido capaces de cambiar las instituciones masculinas cuando entran a ellas, adscribiéndole en forma esencialista características fijas y naturales a hombres y mujeres, en lugar de ver que hombres y mujeres son producidos bajo estas prácticas.

Macho, macho man...?

2009-09-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

Gutmann, M. “Gender Conventions” in The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. By Matthew C. Gutmann. Pp. 1-10 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Gutmann enfoca su trabajo etnográfico en los significados asociados a la masculinidad y la paternidad en ciudad de México. Uno de sus objetivos es cuestionar la premisa con que han operado hasta ahora los estudios etnográficos en asumir apriori una categoría homogénea del "hombre mexicano" que frecuentemente es caracterizado como macho-machista, violento, borracho y ausente de la crianza de los niños. De hecho, Gutmann está preocupado por la forma como las/os antropólogas/os han contribuido a fijar este estereotipo, haciendo notar que es imposible encontrar una identidad masculina unitaria debido a fracturas generacionales, de clase, región y etnicidad; y que los significados sobre qué significa "ser macho" han ido cambiando a través del tiempo. De hecho, a Gutmann le parece un poco problemático y racista apuntar constantemente a esta figura del macho, implicando que el sexismo más extremo se encuentra sólo en México. Para él la situación es bastante más compleja, con patrones más variados e inestables, con una relación no directa entre lo que los hombres declaran y cuales son sus prácticas cotidianas concretas.

2009-08-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

Melhuus, M. & Kristi Ann Stølen. Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Verso, 1996.

Este volumen es una recopilación de estudios de casos hechos por antropólogos en Argentina, México, Peru, Ecuador, República Dominicana y presentados en una conferencia en Suecia sobre el poder de los imaginarios de género en LA. Aspectos en común entre estos artículos: influencia de Bourdieu y Foucault, esfuerzo por complejizar de las relaciones de poder de género más allá de las categorías de opresor vs. víctima, uso de la nociones de discurso, imaginarios, hegemonía para explicar y comprender las relaciones de género y de raza.

A partir de esta lectura, se desprenden algunas ideas importantes:

a) Los discursos y representaciones sobre las diferencias de género sirven para articular diferencias de clase y etnia, por ejemplo, la representación de la sexualidad femenina (mujer decente vs fácil) sirve para vehiculizar diferencias de clase y raza en las que grupos dominantes construyen a grupos subordinados como moralmente inferiores y así legitiman y naturalizan relaciones de poder explotadoras.

b) A su vez, discursos y metáforas de género sirven para articular discursos nacionalistas. El lenguaje de género provee una serie de analogías que se mobilizan para construir discursos de identidad nacional. Es más, el lenguaje de género se utiliza para articular nociones de legitimidad política.

c) No se puede hablar de UN discurso dominante ni de UN discurso alternativo unitario y coherente, sino más bien de que ciertos elementos discursivos son mobilizados en diferentes momentos/contextos en función de ciertos objetivos por determinados grupos.

d) Identidades de género son construidas relacionalmente, contextuales, performativas, ambivalentes y contradictorias.

e) Los grupos subordinados si bien no tienen una agencia que les permita articular libremente un discurso alternativo, son capaces de reapropiar, acomodar y negociar significados e imaginarios de género para alcanzar sus propios objetivos, aunque esto no significa que con esto logren revertir los efectos de poder o cuestionar representaciones dominantes; frecuentemente, estos procesos reafirman nociones hegemónicas de género.

f) En LA, es posible identificar una gran narrativa de género asociada a la ideología del mestizaje, donde lo femenino se analoga con lo retrógrado, lo tradicional y lo masculino con el progreso, lo moderno. La metáfora es la mujer indígena violada por el conquistador, cuya prole serían los mestizos.

Queer Latinidad

2009-08-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad. Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003.

Rodríguez emphasizes "place" and "space" as sites for the articulation of identities, and sees place as critical to understand performative practices of identity as situated. Inspired by Foucault's notions of regulatory practices and disciplinary discourses, as well as by Judith Butler's idea of gender as performative, she regards subjectivity more as a product of discursive practices rather than pre-existing them. Also quotes Alarcón's notion of "subject-in-process" to point at the paradoxical and contradictory character of identities. Every particular space contains pre-existing discourses and narratives in which subjectivity is embodied in a —culturally specific— intelligible way; however, there is no discourse of identity that can contain subjectivity, there is always an excess of the subject that resists to be contained within the discursive boundaries of identity. Thus, we move through these different spaces learning sometimes by force to understand their codes, and rules of meaning. [I agree, signifying practices are not an intellectual problem, they can be a matter of life and death if we cannot achieve the parameters of humanity/respectability of a place] Practices of identity can only be read in relation to the context in which they emerge.

In regards to the dynamic construction of meanings around queer latinidad:
Latinidad is already a contradictory term that contains all the paradoxes of the colonial encounter. Yet it can be used to articulate a subject position that is marked by geographical and cultural displacement, occupying the position of a daily translator between cultures and languages. Latinidad has been as well exploited as a stereotype in US productions through images that balance the exotic with the familiar, and through the sexualization of female racialized bodies. Rodríguez suggests a "rhizomatic" reading of the term, tracing the directions that different constructions of Latinidad take. Likewise, she proposes to use "queerness" as a sort of methodology for breaking down categories, play with meanings, and question the very will behind the drive for categorization. Spanish (and Spanglish) with its highly gendered language would provide with plenty of opportunities for queering discourses. Queer latinidad can be seen as an art form, that remains open to reinscription and reinterpretation. (29)

On Queering Mestizaje 2

2009-08-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

On the other hand, Latinidad is a notion that is subjected to different power regimes than mestizaje, and that in the context of transculturation in LA, relates more to the Western/North fantasies and to the commodification and fetishization of racialized bodies. [I had done the experiment of googling for images of "latin american" versus "latina" women and had realized about this before too, on the first case I got Frida Kahlo, in the second, Salma Hayek, JLo, and a bunch of pop-up porn ads featuring Latinas]. However, Arrizon is interested in asking for example, how can Latinidad be linked to queer desire, and to understand how different cultural productions —from Hollywood movies to experimental performance— create particular genealogies, "marking counterhegemonic systems that reassert the possibilities of culture and ideology in representation" (10).

Arrizon also points at the performativity of race, as "the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved" (12). That is why she suggest we pay attention both at the ways that the nation-state is mapped onto racialized bodies (through the notion of mestizaje) and how transculturation provides a site for not only subjection, but for the political performative agency of the body. After all, we must remember that queer mestiza identity is not a post-modern fantasy, but a late-global-capitalism and neocolonial reality that provide space and call for political initiatives that articulate living in-between cultures, racialized bodies and queer desire (like the politics of disidentification that JE Muñoz advocates for).

The culture of terror

2009-08-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror--Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497.

In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population).

“...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointless. For behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning-structures of feeling- whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.” (Taussig 471)

Beyond “market pressure”, the use of ritualized violence against the indigenous population relates then to the cultural construction of evil, and also can be viewed as a way of male bonding between businessmen. Using Taussig's framework, we can understand state violence as anchored in its civilizatory project (in opposition to the savagery of the jungle), in which capitalism is its core content. In fact, Taussig points out that the resistance of the Putumayo's indigenous people to engage in exchange was presented by the rubber company owners as evidence of their savagery. But modernity is a violent project driven not only by the rational of profit, as there is also an element of mystic fear, hatred and awe towards the “savages”. Torture and violence would then be a way not only to obtain labour, but is linked to a culture of terror based on the myth of the cannibal savage (which we could maybe connect later with the popular image of the “baby eating communists”?). In sum, the rubber company owners systematically sought to inspire terror because they were themselves terrified of the jungle, constructed in colonial imagination as a space of death.

“To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion, certainty-and-doubt, becomes infinitely more than a "merely" philosophical problem. It becomes a high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium of political practice. And in the Putumayo rubber boom this medium of epistemic and ontological murk was most keenly figured and objectified as the space of death.” (Taussig 492)

The use of violence and torture was an effective way to assert complex hierarchies of race and class (many of which persist today to some degree in Latin America). Torture as a systematic and ritualistic practice, in this context, became not only a mean, but a mode and aim of production of power and meaning. This is all helpful to understand how ritualistic violence is intrinsic (rather than opposed) to the bureaucratic rationality of the state.

On Queering Mestizaje 1

2009-08-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

Arrizon Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Queering relates to refusing or resistance to occupy or be identified with a single subject position. Queer subjects occupy an identity “in between” (hybrid), which is useful to de-essentialize identity.

Mestizaje, as a postcolonial condition, has been both an ideology linked to nationalist narratives and to an (oppositional) identity linked to power struggles over representation, autonomy and authenticity in Latin America. On one hand, mestizaje provides a narrative that gives meaning and direction to colonial violence and processes of transculturation through the idealization of Spanish and Indigenous blood (note that the blood is the metaphor to talk about filiation and genealogies of race) and gives historical meaning to racialized bodies. This narrative represents the colonial encounter as a racialized and gendered romance between the male Spanish conquistador and the “Indian” women, a narrative that stands for the violence of the actually exploitative relationship between Spanish men and Indigenous women. Just as multiculturalism does in their abstract celebration of cultural difference, the ideology of mestizaje mascarades the actual power differences and relations based on racism and racialization.

Modern narratives need an 'other' to construct the 'self', but the dialectics of dominant/subordinate are way more complex, so we speak of 'contact zones' (Arrizon quotes ML Pratt and Cherríe Moraga in this notion) where bodies are constituted in opposition as a result of particular power structures, and perform 'difference' according to historical imaginaries. Inspired by Anzaldúa and Sandoval, Arrizon suggests that 'mestizaje' is a site for the potential articulation of an oppositional consciousness, that is, instead of adscribing certain pre-fixed meanings and contents to what mestizaje means, suggests we should keep it open as a “borderland” identity, or an epistemological disposition that resists (Western) hegemonic discourses and knowledge.

Mestizaje, “as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, [...] raises questions about historical transformations and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites”, and has become a way to speak about difference not necessarily from an essentialist perspective of identity, but as a political category of resistance to Spanish colonialism and US imperialism. Arrizon's stance is to introduce a “queering” of mestiza politics as a way to read critically and challenge normative discursive practices. By queering mestizaje we get rid of all discussions around authenticity and instead of looking for origins to sustain identity, we “recognize the continuing influence of cultural performances” (3). Only then a transcultural paradoxical feminism will be able to effectively engage with paradoxical, incomplete and hyphenated identities.

Que será de mi torturador?

2009-08-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

TRISTE FUNCIONARIO POLICIAL
SAD POLICE FUNCTIONARY

Mauricio Redolés y Son Ellos Mismos
Album: Bello Barrio (1987)

Que será de mi torturador?
Que será de mi torturador?
Habrá ganado un viaje a Panamá?
o a EEUU agarro beca, quizás?
o tal vez al final no pasó na'
o tal vez al final no pasó na'

Whatever happened to my torturer?
Whatever happened to my torturer?
Did he win a trip to Panama?
or maybe grab a scholarship to the US?
or maybe at the end nothing happened
or maybe at the end nothing happened

Se le habrá caído el pelo?
con tanto golpe, se habrá puesto más feo?
se le habrá caído un diente?
con las cabras amarradas, seguirá tan caliente?

I wonder if he lost his hair
with so much beating up did he get uglier?
I wonder if he lost a tooth?
with the girls tied down, I wonder if he's still so horny

Me pegaba en forma profesional
quería algo confesional
me pegaba en forma diligente
¡Confiesa que eres dirigente!

He used to beat me up in a professional way
he wanted something confessional
he beat me up in a diligent way
Confess that you are a leader!

Se habrá retirado del servicio,
estará viejito en un hospicio?
soñará con muertos como yo
o soñará con desfile de banderas rojas como vos?

I wonder if he retired from the service,
is he a little old man in a care house?
I wonder if he dreams of the dead, like me
or if he dreams of a parade of red flags like you do

Que será de mi torturador?
Que será de mi torturador?
me habrá visto en la micro,
me quería poner corriente en el pico
coopera, hueon, coopera
salva a Chile comunista infeliz

Whatever happened to my torturer
Has he seen me in the bus?
Did he try to put electricity in my cock?
Cooperate, fucker, cooperate
save Chile goddamn communist

Nunca en nuestra vida tan solos estuvimos
yo y mi torturador esa noche el sueño perdimos
al final me pegaba con desgano
tantos muertos tenía que uno más era rutina
al final yo gritaba con desgano
morir era la solución a toda esta lesera

Never in our lives we were so lonely
me and my torturer lost our sleep that night
at the end he beat me up without enthusiasm
so many dead, one more was routine
at the end I screamed without enthusiasm
to die was the solution to all this silliness

Que será de mi torturador?
Que será de mi torturador?
Que será de mi tortura....aaaarrrrgghhh!

Whatever happened to my torturer?

Performance art: Coco Fusco, Nelly Richard, Lotty Rosenfeld and Francisco Casas

2009-08-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

Fusco, Coco. (Ed.) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Introduction and pp. 203- 222. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Fusco notes in the introduction that the body is the most suitable material for political performance in Latin America, as it is also the material and concrete site where political power is (violently) articulated. The body can be seen then as the 'stage' for the individual and the collective to come together, and the support for social reproduction and sexual domination. The performances compiled here by Fusco all construct particular versions of the body and address that violence inflicted upon the body politic. Fusco sees the problem in sustaining the existence of a sort of regional and national performance art, and the risk to equate art with a certain political project or one singular meaning (like in nationalist art), but many artists themselves are ever struggling not to become tokenized as representatives of a singular identity. It is also true however, that many artists too engage actively with their historical contexts so that we can see some common aspects across art practices in LA: they frequently infuse them with "social concerns", they address the state through the use of public space, and they use the body as the substrate, maybe precisely because the presence of the state in the public space has been primarily been in the form of violence over bodies —we must note though that the state has also often blurred the public/private divide through state terror and the invasion of the "private". Fusco emphasizes also the use of the ephemeral in experimental performance as a way to escape from the logic of capitalist value and exchange.

The third part of the book, entitled "Stepping toward an oppositional public sphere" includes includes an extract from Nelly Richard's Margins and Institutions followed by a one-page text by Lotty Rosenfeld and a short text by Francisco Casas on Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Richard talks about the actions of CADA and how they took a distance from art as subordinate to a (single, totalizing) ideological message; instead, their art actions were rather incomplete gestures that needed the interaction in daily life with the spectator to happen and acquire meaning. The harsh repression to whatever was perceived as a political discourse forced artists further to use ephemeral bodily gestures and to avoid the use of precoded images in their actions. [I would like to address the action Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte in way more detail after I read Nelly Richard's full book, because so far I haven't found any mention on milk, which is used here as a signifier of poverty and hunger, also as gendered (mother's milk) and sexualized (leche being a synonymous for semen in Spanish)].

Richard looks at Leppe's work as well as Zurita's and Eltit's performances in Chile, and how they addressed —by different routes— the ideological the uses of the body. According to Richard, their work showed how different ideas and representations of what is normal and deviant are constantly inscribed upon the body, or as Leppe put it, the body understood as a tissue of quotations (209). Through the use of parody, mimesis and simulacrum, these artists made reference to the wounded and violated social body; pointed at the bodily excess that escapes and resists language; as well as challenged a transparent relation between the body and the self. The other common strategy of these artists is that they all manipulated and played with categories of sexual difference in their work (Zurita postulated that the subject was so fragmented that it never achieved a complete sexuation as female or male). Rosenfeld postulated her work as "exposing the operations of official power and the conflict zones in which bodies are submitted to margins and borders" and embracing fugitive identities and hybrid embodiments that transgress surveillance and capital. (219) Francisco Casas declares in his article that him and Pedro Lemebel reinvented their bodies as to become a female body through their performance, Las Yeguas, "to denounce the raped and homicidal fatherland" and insisted on bringing back the body upon which the violent crime was committed.

Wounds as weapons: Agency, performance and gender in Argentina's Madres

2009-08-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

Image from: http://www.larepublica.com.uy/mundo/256063-madres-de-plaza-de-mayo-cumplen-hoy-30-anos

Taylor, Diana. “Opening Remarks”, pp. 1-16 and "Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo", pp. 275-305. In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latina/o America. Edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

In the introduction, Taylor points at the complexity and contradictions of using the terms Latina/o and Latin American, as they are themselves contested sites of signification. One cannot think "that Latino/as occupy any one positionality (be it in terms of ideology, class, gender or sexual preference, or race) or that they occupy it in any one way." (6) Taylor is investing on the politics of community —as opposed to identity— with the concept of cultural competence at core as a notion that would enable to speak across divides. The position as Latin Americans can be thought then not as an essential category of identity, but rather a political one that derives from the shared historical experience of oppression from colonial and imperialist powers.

In the chapter on the Madres, she notes that it is useful to expand our understanding of performance to include not only different kinds of performance art and public performance, but also daily roles that have been internalized associated with gender, sexuality and race. For example, Taylor uses this notion of performance to analyze politics of oppression and resistance in Argentina in two gendered "spectacles": the theatrical tragedy of the Motherland saved by the military (with its associated narrative), and the performance of the Madres in the public space that brought national and international visibility to human rights violations. Taylor argues that the strategy of performing the Mother in this movement has been both their limitation and their strength, and that we need to pay attention to the kinds of subjectivities produced in the process of these public performances.

In the first case, we have the gendered language of the military that declared itself the "supreme organ of the Nation" (277) and exalted masculinity in saving the bleeding feminized nation, which was present in multiple performances that included: constant display of weaponry and hardware, parades, staged confrontations, and the displaying of religious images that associated the military with (Catholic) sacredness. The narrative of the military re-founded the nation upon a national romance that looks more like an act of rape, and that in fact, this narrative rationalized and legitimized rape as an action against "las putas and locas". [Could this idea be key to understand the sexualization of torture?] In fact, military discourse reduced the female body to the maternal body, and opposed the suffering image of the virgin to that of women as the embodiment of evil: as crazywomen, witches and bad mothers, who deserved complete elimination in order to save the purity of the Patria. They did this by feminizing the enemy in general, and by reducing women to their sexual and reproductive parts in torture practices, sustained by this distinction virgin/whore. Taylor points that furthermore, female submission is a pre-requisite for the plot of male individuation in the military's narrative (and the individual subject is functional to the new plot of neoliberalism). And as the ideological conflict is prefigured in term of sexual difference, actual bodies experienced the effect of misogynistic fantasies in Argentina's "dirty war": "Thus, individual and collective fantasy of control and domination, played out against castrated, feminized, and penetrable bodies (literally and/or metaphorically), meshed into a highly organized system of terror in which hatred of the feminine was not only the consequence but simultaneously, its very reason for being." (285)

By performing motherhood in the public space the Madres both politicized motherhood and at the same time, reasserted motherhood as the only socially valued and authorized role for women to speak from. Taylor sees the limitations of this strategy but also points out that performance allows for a transition from the performance of this role unquestioningly, to the conscious performance and manipulation of these images (the use to control them). If they had to resort to feminine images of passivity, and even in their performance to the image of the suffering virgin, it is not so much because the Madres held themselves an essentialist view of gender, but because in the military's grammar, public women are crazy or whores and good mothers are at home: "Insofar as they could not control the discourse, those involved in oppositional movements, like the Madres, had no choice but to manipulate its grammar, logic and vocabulary". (302)

Cultural agency of wounded bodies

2009-08-07T23:59:00.000-07:00

Nelson, Diane M. “The cultural agency of wounded bodies politic : ethnicity and gender as prosthetic support in postwar Guatemala”. Cultural agency in the Americas edited by Doris Sommer. Durham : Duke University Press, 2006.

Nelson's argument is that the cultural construct of La Mujer Maya works as prosthesis for wounded bodies in the context of the national project in postwar Guatemala. The use of the prosthetic metaphor is useful to understand how imaginations in the postwar and fantasies of healing of wounded bodies are gendered. The idea derives from cyborg, feminist and disability studies, all of which challenge binaries like self/other and body/technology, and question the supposed sovereign, autonomous and complete subject of liberal discourse. On the other hand, prosthesis are not always metaphoric. Even as we think of neoliberal restructuring in Latin America, these economic changes have relied on the naturalization of women's and indigenous free or cheap labor as an expression of their natural character and not as a product of history. Even the language of economic programs as "aids" for a suffering economy invoke the idea of a prosthetic relation.

La Mujer Maya then, as imagined and constructed in Guatemala's postwar discourse, stands for something perceived as missing or lost, as they are linked to culture via ethnicity and gender (95). As modernity has been gendered as masculine, the cultural continuity of the nation is projected into the image of La Mujer Maya. However, not only the project of the nation-state relies on this image, as the Pan-Mayan movement has also depended on it as La Mujer Maya stands as a defender of traditions and language, in a discourse that also tends to naturalize women's labor and reproductive capacity. But the image of La Mujer Maya offers to concrete Mayan women more than a passive ground and more than a position as passive victims, as they engage in transnational indigenous and feminist struggles and affect the meanings attached to this image (for instance, re-signifying traditional textils as cosmopolitan).

In the sites of intersection of material gendered and recialized bodies with larger bodies politic, Nelson sees a prosthetic relationality, that cannot be described as a unidirectional relation but rather of cyborg dialectics. These are for Nelson the conditions of possibility for Mayan cultural agency: "...a complex relationality with a somewhat active participant —not a fully synthesizable, not a passive ground, and also not the rational free agent of liberal humanism, but a semiautonomous prosthetic in intimate connection with the self." (100)

Violencia, subjetividad y agencia: más allá de la categoría de víctima.

2009-08-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Piper, Isabel. “La retórica de la marca y los sujetos de la dictadura”. Revista de Crítica Cultural, n.32, Santiago: November 2005.

Se pregunta por la efectividad política de la categoría de víctima como posición de sujeto en la postdictadura. Tiene varios puntos consistentes con el análisis de Frazier; por ejemplo, que las posiciones de sujeto disponibles delinean también las posibilidades de acción en la medida que no hay un afuera del poder. Piper identifica en las narraciones sobre la dictadura una retórica de la marca, la metáfora del trauma como principio organizador de la experiencia de la represión que ofrece una interpretación universal sobre el daño inscrito como una cicatriz (de nuevo la metáfora del cuerpo que se puede sanar de sus heridas). Por su parte, las políticas de reparación post-dictadura también han operado con esta retórica, pretendiendo borrar las cicatrices del fracturado cuerpo social y nacional. Pero en la medida que, en general, la violencia represiva permanece impune por tres décadas, el miedo continua no sólo permeando sino estructurando las relaciones sociales y las posibilidades de hacer política (otro punto en común con Lessie Jo).

Para Piper poner las determinaciones de la subjetividad en el pasado en la forma de sujetos traumados es un camino poco prometedor. Y lo que lo hace tan ineficiente políticamente es que "la retórica de la marca no deja espacios para la transformación de dicho sujeto ni del conjunto de las relaciones sociales; lo único modificable (e incluso lo es con límites) son las marcas" (18). Los discursos sobre la dictadura tienden a construir un significado universalizador sobre la experiencia de la represión política, un eje configurador de la identidad: sujetos "marcados". Aunque Piper le reconoce cierta funcionalidad estratégica en ciertos contextos, la categoría de víctima asume un carácter esencialista (y a ratos normativo) que tiende a tener como efecto la inmovilización política, ante la percepción de que se posee una subjetividad dañada, patologizada: el foco se mantiene en el pasado y no en las relaciones actuales de dominación y resistencia.

Usando a Butler y Haraway, Piper sugiere: ver la construcción y regulación de la subjetividad como procesos de simultánea autorización de unos sujetos y la desautorización de otros, donde siempre están en juego las normas de inteligibilidad de los sujetos y la delimitación de su humanidad; y propone: articular subjetividades parciales, fragmentadas, contradictorias e incompletas como posición subjetiva que permita una práctica política más efectiva. La inmovilidad de genera la categoría identitaria de víctima reside en que asume una identidad universal, una interpretación común que reproduce la violencia de imponer un sentido único a la experiencia. Las posiciones subjetivas posibles que genera la violencia política no se reducen a víctima y victimario, aunque Piper se da cuenta que esta afirmación puede leerse como una trivialización y minimización de la violencia represiva y contribuir a argumentos a favor de la impunidad. Lo que ella espera de su argumentación es una nueva forma de pensar la identidad y la agencia, y la capacidad de transformar las relaciones sociales autoritarias actuales en la post-dictadura.

The gendered space of death

2009-08-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Frazier, Lessie Jo. “Gendering the Space of Death: Memory, Democratization and the Domestic”, in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.261-281. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007

Frazier builds on Taussig's notion of the "space of death" and thinks of it as a site of both production and destruction of subjectivities in the context of the Chilean dictatorship, a space where acceptable and unacceptable —perverted and monstrously embodied— subjects are defined. She points out that this space can be perpetuated or dismantled by practices of memory, as it is a contested field, critical for struggles over political power. According to Frazier, "[i]n authoritarian regimes of state terror, the space of death is a patriarchal, bourgeois, and domestic space." (262)

Through the experience of torture, a perverse kind of intimacy between oppressor and oppressed emerges. And because in the Chilean transition governments have promoted "reconciliation" instead of justice, they have failed to address this effectively and terror continues to shape and structure social life. The military regime organized the disciplining and domestication of the national body, a sort of purge from ideological contamination, by the depoliticization of the body (as a surgical procedure). The body was in fact at the core of the organizing metaphors of the doctrine of national security: the nation as a body that reacts to contamination by fighting the disease (ideology, politics, the foreign Marxist cancer) with its antibodies (the military); along with the language of wounds, scars and healing in the post-dictatorship, this language contributes to the consideration of state violence as natural and necessary —if yet painful— for the greater good of neoliberal restructuring. Opposing political practice to national security, political subjects were constructed in the military's discourse as contaminated by ideology and a threat to the continuity of the nation.

Torture itself represented a cult of masculinity and "security personnel who refused to torture were themselves interrogated about their (homo)sexuality and allegiance to the fatherland." (264) Under this doctrine, a relationship between heterosexual masculinity and violence was produced, through the promise of security in both the domestic (house) and the public space (nation). Chilean feminists, specially Kirkwood, had already argued that there was a defining connection between an authoritarian rule (public) and a patriarchal domestic space (private). Dismantling authoritarism in the post-dictatorship requires to challenge domestic authoritarian and patriarchal relations. A gendered analysis of state violence is necessary to understand how the domestic and the national space are mutually constructed. For example, in her analysis of her fieldwork in Chile, she concludes that mental health programs operated in the post-dictatorship have tended to depoliticize domestic violence, by precisely domesticating it: by reducing it to a "cultural" problem as opposed to a political one, and by treating women as the object of intervention as opposed to challenging hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal relations of power.

Frazier identifies a gothic trope in these narratives, in the modernist dichotomy human/monster and the misrecognition of who is the monster. The narrative that needs to be challenged here is precisely the demonization of political practice and the distinction between deserving and undeserving victims that it supports. Frazier proposes the use queer theory and methodology to read against the grain and interrogate gendered representations of subjectivity. This would enable a kind of agency that derives from the position of the "last girl" of horror films analyzed by Judith Halberstram, that girl who succeeds to survive the horror of the violence she faces only when able to re-appropiate the phallic weapons used against her. By embracing perverted subjectitivies as a subject position, one could resist the characterization of political practice as monstrous, and reclaim a subjectivity and agency in these terms: "...who is able to look in the mirror to assemble the pieces of her memories, reconnect them with her scarred body, unpack the structure of domestic discipline and the story imposed upon her, and ultimately, by recognizing the gun, reclaiming the capacity to act". (277)

Nash and Safa 76

2009-07-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

Nash, June and Helen Icken Safa. Introduction and Chapter 1: "A Critique of Social Science Roles in Latin America". Pp. x- 24. In Sex and Class in Latin America. Praeger Publishers: New York, 1976.

In the introduction the editors acknowledge the conflicts that erupted in the 1975 UN sponsored conference in Mexico between women delegations from industrialized countries and from the "Third World": the first insisted in an agenda of exclusively women's issues, while the second refused to abandon issues of global unequal development and political issues for the analysis, arguing that in their contexts, class inequalities take priority over sexual inequality (xi). For instance, the fact that cheap and unprotected female labor is needed for First World production and consumption of goods.

In the first chapter, Nash seems to be in dialogue (and take issue) with dependency theory and Marxist analyses that have blatantly ignored women's activities or seen them acritically in the context of the patriarchal nuclear family. Nash takes issue especially with the faulty models of analysis in development research and dependency theory based on stereotypical understandings of gender roles, which see women linked to the domestic-unproductive realm and fail to acknowledge the economic activities of women.

Surviving Beyond Fear

2009-07-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Bunster, Ximena. “Surviving Beyond Fear: Women and Torture in Latin America”, pp. 297-325. In Women and Change in Latin America. Edited by June Nash and Helen Icken Safa. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1986.

Bunster looks at the gender specific forms of institutional violence under Pinochet's dictatorship, which operated as a punishment for women's involvement in political activity: in the Southern cone this kind of punishment was administered in a systematic, methodical (scientifically) and bureaucratic ways and under discourses of "security". [Pero se me cayó doña Ximena, por qué usa Kathleen Barry, una feminista anti-prostitución, como marco teórico? :(] Bunster departs from the idea of a universal patriarchal oppression, and of Machismo/Marianismo as a local expression of a global schema. Under this cultural paradigm, women are recognized and valued only as mothers, and they themselves have internalized this pattern. The torture of female political prisoners is seen by Bunster under this frame as a form of sexual slavery in the context of a military state (which is in itself the logical extension of a male patriarchal state).

The application of electricity and in general pain inflicted in genital parts is documented to have been used both in men and women, but the specific nature of female sexual torture relates to the meanings of virgin/whore associated to these practices: women are being specifically punished for transgressing the model of passive, sacrificial motherhood promoted by Marianismo and therefore categorized as whores who deserve (and were looking for) physical abuse. Other practices described such as the use of animals in sexual torture, torture of children in front of parents affected both men and women too so I do not quite see how they are part of a system of female sexual slavery. Testimonies of these practices reveal that even though sexual violence in torture practices cut across class lines, they did present differences in their nature and degree depending on the perceived class/racial extraction (and thus respectability? See Salazar: working class women as intrinsically immoral).

Marxism is not enough

2009-07-27T23:36:00.000-07:00

Nash, June and Helen Icken Safa. "A Decade of Research on Women in Latin America". Pp. 3-21. Women and Change in Latin America. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1986.

The authors indicate the lack of interest, and therefore data about women's contribution to economic, political and social life (3) in Marxist predominated analyses. Buenos Aires 1974 is seen as a benchmark of the efforts to put together ehtnographic research that deals with the ways women are involved in modes of production. Some studies at this point showed the segmentation of the work force by gender and ethnicity; especially regarding the fact that women are concentrated in the non-market areas of economy, which is frequently overlooked by researchers, or even rendered invisible by assumptions of male-headed households and of paid work as equivalent of work. The authors also note that the first feminist Marxist analyses by de Beauvoir and others departed from the universality of women's oppression, but since the 70's and 80's this premise has been challenged by a growing scholarship that questions biological determinism and calls for an analysis focused on gender relations within specific historical formations. They finally reflect about the need to adopt a dialectical analysis that avoids any kind of economic determinism and explore the links between consciousness, culture and material conditions (15).

Modernizing patriarchy

2009-07-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

Vaughan, Mary Kay. “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930-1940” in Dore and Molyneux, Hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Vaughan analyzes post-revolutionary state policies that were aimed to modernize family, not to emancipate women but to accommodate the household to the interests and ideology of national development. One of the features of 20th century state policies was they sought to rationalize the domestic, private sphere; so mothers had to be disciplined and educated in order to have a healthy family that would contribute to national progress. In the same way, school was the space for children to be indoctrinated on patriotism and modernity, preparing them to be good productive workers. Throughout these policies, women were viewed as conduits for national progress, not as subjects with their own interests outside the family or the nation (for instance, women's sexuality was contained in a rhetoric of population growth so that there is no space for a notion such as reproductive rights). Just like the Agrarian Reform in Chile, postrevolutionary policies in Mexico failed to address rural female headed households, and produced mixed and contradictory effects on gender relations. On the other hand, the state cannot be viewed as a monolithic entity, but it entails a range of varied and contradictory practices.

Plotting the nation through women

2009-07-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Franco, Jean. Plotting women. Gender and Representation in Mexico. “Part II. The Nation”. Pp.79-228. New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.

Franco builds on Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities to document the emergence and development of national ideologies in Mexico, emphasizing the racial and gender hierarchies within this discourse: for instance, to see the peasants and indigenous as backwards is a necessary idea for the notion of national industrial progress; likewise, women, peasants and indigenous are seen as children —pupils— by the male intellectual elite who promise to incorporate them to national progress through education. The development of a modern subjectivity, akin with the modern nation, required instilling the ideology of the modernized family: one that did not challenge patriarchal authority but situated women as the imagined mothers of the nation, and linked them to the realms of the domestic stability and decency (81), either as sings of purity or corruption (101). Within this period of nation building women were deemed as "too religious" and in need to be re-indoctrinated, replacing religion with the modern values of patriotism, work ethic and faith in progress. The liberal notion that the natural place of women is the domestic, the private, and that the laws are made for men to "protect" women is also present in early national literature. Likewise, anxieties brought up with the progressive urbanization and expansion of industrialized work are mapped onto women's bodies and sexuality: "In Gamboa's novel Santa, the female prostitute symbolizes the inevitable corruption of the provinces under the corrosive effect of city life" (96).In contrast, Modernist literature constructs the female body as the "luxuriously clothed body-as-commodity", where commercial interaction is seen as a sign of a modern mentality and women themselves become a commodity and a fetishistic object of desire. However, other examples in literature show that women resisted both master discourses of domesticity and capitalist modernization.

The period of the Revolution (1910-1917) associated social transformation with a model of nationalist virility. Women were constructed as teachers of the nation (Gabriela Mistral is the Latin American model), and motherhood emphasized as the reason for their existence. Of course, these were contested and resisted by many women, Franco uses the example of Frida Kahlo's painting and lifestyle and Antonieta Rivas Mercado's writing. In both cases, they attempted to inscribe their art into the Messianic nationalism of postrevolutionary Mexico, but their attempts also destabilized and subverted notions of femininity. In Rivas Mercado's suicide, Franco reads —in psychoanalytic terms— her literal understanding of the lack of a female space or the possibility a female speech in a Father's order.

The role of myths in organizing social life and national identity brings Franco to consider La Malinche as an anti-Antigone legend, where as Octavio Paz suggested, male identity is constituted violently as a rejection of this shameful mother (131). Franco analyzes how Mexican women novelists who tried to incorporate women to the national narrative ended up reproducing the figure of La Malinche. Likewise, Franco considers how Mexican cinema of the 1940's and 50's articulated the new meanings that recoded everything known in a modernist rhetoric, using a oedipal narrative to incorporate the masses to the nation under a paternal state. However, both cinema, radio and mass media had an ambiguous role in nation building, promoting both some of its values while undermining others.

Banana Republic no more

2009-07-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

Putnam, Lara, “Work, Sex, and Power in a Central American Export Economy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.133-162. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Putnam uses gender to analyze the household arrangements and the informal service that sustains the whole export economy in Central America carried out by US corporations such as the United Fruit, as well as to look at the consequent gendered patterns of labor migration. Putnam suggests that when we expand our analysis to the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized in discourse, we can understand how state power itself is constituted (134). In fact, Putnam suggests that political power unfolds through completely gendered and sexualized discourses and practices. This kind of analysis also insists on the complex and multilayered nature of power that surround enclave economies or export zones.

Amelio Robles: el deseo transgénero y las feministas homofóbicas

2009-07-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Cano, Gabriela. “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles's (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution”. In Jocelyn Olcott,; Mary K. Vaughan, Gabriela Cano (Eds.). Sex In Revolution. Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Cano analiza el caso del coronel Amelio Robles, nacido Amelia Robles y quien desde su adolescencia y al descubrir la "libertad del campo de batalla", vivió casi toda su vida como hombre, luchó en la Revolución Zapatista y se ganó el respeto y legitimidad de sus pares como modelo de hombría, valor y masculinidad zapatista. Gracias a que Amelio se ganó éste reconocimiento en el campo de batalla, su sexualidad era raramente cuestionada o rebatida en público, en un acuerdo tácito entre los que lo rodeaban de que era un tema del que no se hablaba. Amelio una vez mató a dos hombres de un grupo que lo atacó para verificar en forma violenta su genitalidad para resolver el misterio que de todas maneras rodeaba a su nombre.

Amelio recibió muchos honores después de la Revolución por su valentía, y cuando el médico tuvo que examinarlo para comprobar sus heridas de guerra y darle su status de veterano tampoco se hizo ninguna mención a su sexualidad. Pero tampoco podemos ver a Amelio como una especie de héroe en una revolución queer: el modelo de masculinidad que él llevaba a un extremo era uno bastante autoritario, violento y egoísta. Sin embargo y como Cano nota (61), el éxito de Amelio en ser legitimado socialmente como hombre a la vez refuerza y mina, subvierte y confirma la masculinidad heterosexual normativa.

En los 80's, cierto feminismo institucional (representado institucionalmente por la Secretaría de la Mujer del Estado de Guerrero) intentó a recuperar la figura de la "coronela" Amelia Robles, en un esfuerzo por visibilizar la participación de las mujeres en la Revolución, y borrando la identidad transgénero masculina que Amelio Robles construyó y defendió a muerte toda su vida.

Gender and Place

2009-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Hurtig, Janise, Rosario Montoya, and Lessie Jo Frazier. "A Desalambrar: Unfencing Gender's Place in Research on Latin America.” Pp. 1-18.
Nash, June. “Postscript: Gender in Place and Culture”. Pp. 289-296.

In Gender's Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. R. Montoya, L.J. Frazier, and J. Hurtig, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Both articles emphasize the notion of place in relation to gender, as a way to address the situatedness and specificity of historic and cultural contexts; and also point at gender as a useful to category to analyze broader social problems, making connections between gender, language and other power structures. Nation for instance, as a meaning constructed and negotiated in everyday's practices. Note the contradictory and paradoxical effects that economic reconfigurations have on gender relations and local power dynamics.

The use of the metaphor of "unfencing" (desalambrar) responds to a desire to interrogate disciplinary boundaries, challenge the positivist pretentions of social sciences, for interrogating categories, and engage in practices for social change: "desalambrar as a praxis of mapping and dismantling relations of power by engaging the transformative potential of gender's place". (16)

However, Nash makes some dangerous implications in my view about Muslim and Indigenous women becoming an increasing target of violence due to a response to "globalization" (291). She also seems to see a universal oppressor in men, and to consider women as the political agents of feminism.

Modernization as violence in Latin America

2009-07-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

Franco, Jean. “Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in Latin America.” Socialism and Democracy, Volume 2, Issue 1 January 1988 , pages 5 – 17.

Franco's argument is that there is a continuity in the use of violence in Latin America to bring on economic exploitative systems and label them as "modern", but there is a qualitative change in the effectiveness of the methods that the military regimes used in the 70's. As proof of the first, the building of commercial centers (malls) after the coup to proclaim a modern country in Chile and erase the past. As a proof of the latter, the new methods involved more systematic, calculated and regular practices of terror that combined bureaucracy and high-tech techniques with savagery. However, the excess of these practices cannot be explained by the economic factors alone, but we need to look at regimes of racism and misogyny and religious metaphors that enabled the specific practice of torture. For instance, torturers were indoctrinated in the idea of the evil "other" as an effeminate enemy, in rituals that have a continuity with other practices of male bonding and construction of heterosexual masculinity. Likewise, Franco notes that the use of gendered and sexualized practices and language in torture sessions is alarming.

The erasing of identity of the victims becomes an important feature so that torture and death do not acquire any heroic dimensions. In contrast, the practices of the Madres in Argentina and Agrupación in Chile are geared to bring back the dead not as a frozen memory: "Whereas modernization buried its dead to forget them, here death is a political space not only of commemoration but of an ethics based on collective memory and continuity." (p.14)

A finger in the wound

2009-07-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

Nelson, Diane. “Introduction: Body Politics and Quincentennial Guatemala”. A Finger in the Wound. Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. . Pp. 1-40. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

In her study of race relations between Mayans and "ladinos" in Guatemala, Nelson makes some very key observations that can be used to analyze the situation of Chileans dealing with political violence at the aftermath of Pinochet's dictatorship. For instance, the fact that racial differences are portraited by the state as dangerous for national unity. Also, that individual bodies are disciplined so as to produce the "body politic", because efforts to form a national "whole" require material proof on material bodies by racial, sexual and gender marking. In the attempt to "fix" conflictive racial relations, the state circulates the metaphor of the family and of conviviality at home: we all have to live in the same house. This metaphor of the (nuclear, patriarchal) family contains both the power asymmetries and the intimacy of conviviality, where the "Indian" is coded either as female (a bad wife that leaves her husband and children) or as a "problem child". To speak of racial difference is a finger in the wound and for state representatives, it is better to forget and erase those differences under an homogeneous national identity.

The Institutionalization of the Women's Movement in Chile

2009-07-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

Matear, A. (2002) “”Desde la Protesta a la Propuesta”: The Institutionalization of the Women's Movement in Chile”. Development and Change 33(3). Pp. 439-466. Institute of Social Studies. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK and Malden, MA, USA. Oxford, 2002.

Matear supports the idea that the strong base of the Chilean women's movement of the 80's was given by interclass solidarity and alliances between women in political parties with grassroots groups, and that this was key for the creation of state-level institution like SERNAM to deal with gender specific issues once democracy was achieved. But she also adds that these alliances broke down when grassroots and working-class women were excluded during the actual moment of institutionalization, and as professional women and women from political parties took positions of power. Thus, the women's and feminist movement of the 80's was altogether ineffective in articulating feminist demands. This is in part explained by the very logics of the transition in Chile, characterized by a negotiation between mainstream political parties and the military; but also because women do not constitute an homogeneus group with similar interests.

A 15 años de La Morada...

2009-07-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Olea, Raquel (ed.) “Capítulo II: Vicisitudes del feminismo en la transición chilena”. Escrituras de la Diferencia Sexual. Pp. 43-64. Santiago: Colección Contraseña, LOM Ediciones/La Morada, 2000.

En este capítulo las presentaciones de Norbert Lechner, Tomás Moulian, Raquel Olea y María Antonieta Saa en el seminario "Políticas e imaginarios de la diferencia sexual. Feminismo a fin de siglo" (organizado por la Morada al cumplir 15 años).

Lechner le reconoce como aporte a las feministas chilenas incorporar más el mundo de los afectos al análisis de la política (!), pero les pide profundizarlo. Argumenta que la ciudadanía ha transitado desde un concepto universal y abstracto hacia una ciudadanía basada en las identidades particulares, por lo que un desafío para las feministas sería compatibilizar las diferencias que constituyen a las mujeres con un concepto más universal e inclusivo. (Pft!)

Moulian reconoce que no ha pensado mucho el tema de las mujeres. Pero hace notar que la transición como tránsito hacia una democracia —como un orden abierto al debate y a la participación— no ha comenzado en Chile. La mal llamada "transición" es un orden todavía autoritario y conservador, lo que tampoco es nuevo sino una constante en la historia del Estado en Chile, que desde su origen se constituyó en forma violenta como un orden racista y clasista. En este contexto y en el marco de la falsa reconciliación y consenso, no se han generado espacios donde exista un verdadero debate sobre sexualidad y derechos de las mujeres.

Olea plantea que la transición está marcada todavía por un imaginario autoritario que busca uniformar y homogeneizar el cuerpo social. Y la transición se ve en el impasse de conjugar la ideología de género de la dictadura con las demandas de un movimiento de mujeres, donde el debate sobre "el signo mujer" es un punto de quiebre de los consensos al interior de la misma Concertación. El impasse se resuelve en parte apelando a un discurso de la "igualdad" basado en la identidad femenina como madre, esposa y trabajadora. Las políticas de género quedan enmarcadas como políticas de la familia y el feminismo subversivo de la dictadura queda subyugado ante el feminismo institucional complaciente con el autoritarismo y las necesidades del modelo neoliberal.

Lo de Saa es una apología un poco penosa sobre las "señales" que se han dado para avanzar en temas de género desde el estado.

Las mujeres de Pinochet

2009-07-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Munizaga, Giselle and Lilian Letelier. “Mujer y Régimen Militar”. Mundo de Mujer. Continuidad y Cambio. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones CEM, 1998. pp. 523-562.

El artículo analiza los textos emanados desde las instituciones de la dictadura para examinar la "acción hegemonizante" de ésta hacia las mujeres, pero constatan que no se trata de un gran discurso coherente, sino que de una serie de retazos que se superponen y contienen fracturas y contradicciones.
"El régimen militar no inventa nada; recupera y reorganiza los espacios de poder y de no poder existentes para utilizarlos en función de sus propias estrategias." (p.536)
La dictadura sólo recupera arquetipos culturales largamente asentados sobre el rol maternal de las mujeres, su papel asistencial y como defensora de la tradición y el orden jerárquico "natural" de la familia y la nación. Capitalizando en las crisis subjetivas que experimentan las mujeres frente a las fuerzas modernizadoras que desestabilizan las relaciones sociales, la dictadura basa su discurso en la recuperación del orden y la seguridad familiar y nacional.

En sus discursos, Pinochet hablaba de "igualdad de derechos y oportunidades para los sexos", los que definía como "complementarios y no rivales" (p.538), articulando dos tipos de discurso sobre "la mujer chilena": el que las define como madres y voluntarias, y el que las interpela a través de los medios de comunicación masiva como consumidora y moderna. Dentro de ésta concepción de los sexos, a la mujer se le atribuye una naturaleza inmutable, trascendente, apolítica y a-histórica, por lo cual puede resguardar los valores esenciales de la nación de "los señores políticos" que amenazan con destruir la Patria mediante el avance de las ideologías y del cáncer marxista. Mediante su rol de madre (maternidad privada) y de voluntaria (maternidad pública), a la mujer chilena le cabe entonces la refundación y reconstrucción de la Patria, limpiando a Chile de las ideologías y promoviendo los valores fundamentales de la nación. A través de los Centros de Madres y de las voluntarias, la ideología militar sobre el papel de las mujeres se difunde. Por otra parte, mediante el consumo masivo de televisores y radios, las mujeres son interpeladas por el discurso neoliberal que las sitúa como consumidoras, principalmente de electrodomésticos importados que la transformarían en "mujer moderna".

The little nazi inside all of us: militarized women in Chile

2009-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

Bunster, Ximena. “Watch out for the little nazi man that all of us have inside: The mobilization and demobilization of women in militarized Chile”. Women’s Studies International Forum, Volume 11, Issue 5, 1988, Pp. 485-491.

The way women were involved in resisting and denouncing the military dictatorship has been a large focus of attention, but the ways that women also collaborated and lent their support to the regime has been an issue avoided by Chilean feminists. Bunster argues that it is crucial for feminists to examine gender ideologies contained in the doctrine of national security, and how femininity is mobilized to promote military values. At the core of this doctrine women are interpellated as mothers and bearers of the moral values of the Fatherland, ideas that previous governments —both right-wing and Popular Front— had used in their rhetoric as well. However, the military mobilized the image of "a patriotic, self-sacrificing mother whose “apolitical-feminine-private” social behavior develops solely within the territorial boundaries of her home" (p.488).

Through Cema Chile and Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer —the main institutions used by Pinochet for this purpose —women were politically activated under to perform volunteer work as an extension of their work at home: through this work, women become public mothers. This ideology rejects the notion of politics and political activity, which are deemed dangerous and a threat to the nation. Militarization as a process, then, requires the spread of a particular set of rigid ideas about femininity. However, this set of ideas had roots that go way before the military regime itself, in the historical antecedent of upper and middle-class culture of maternalistic charity.

The gendered nature of citizenship in Chilean politics

2009-07-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

Franceschet, Susan. "Gendered Citizenship in Chile: An Overview", pp. 19-33 and "Gendered Citizenship and the Future of Chilean Democracy", pp. 167-176. Women and politics in Chile. Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005.

Franceschet argues that women have played a significant role in Chilean political history, but have remained marginalized from formal politics due to the gendered patterns of citizenship, also pervasive in Chile's processes of democratization. This has to do with the historical construction of formal politics as masculine and with the fact that the expansion of social rights in Chile has linked citizenship with one's identity as a worker (in the formal labor market). Both left and right discourses in this sense, have articulated their political projects departing from the idea of a male-headed household with women as dependants of male workers, deeming the rest of them —defined as "abandoned women"— as objects of charity. Even after women gained the right to vote in 1949, gender ideologies still linked women to their maternal role and mobilized them around their caretaking responsibilities (as in the Centros de Madres).

Gender ideologies under the dictatorship stressed women as bearers of the Fatherland's values, drawing a constant analogy between the family and the country as a whole. In this way, women were used —in discourse and practice— to consolidate authoritarianism. Women under dictatorship were successful in organizing around the need to democratize not only the country, but to address gender relationships altogether, but because of the incomplete and negotiated nature of Chilean's transition, these demands for political citizenship have been overshadowed. The dictatorship's legacy of fear of conflict and pathological search for consensus has thus narrowed the possibilities for women to negotiate their political and social rights. On the other hand, women's movements have demanded their rights on the grounds of their identities as mothers, mobilizing existing gender ideologies to their benefit,instead of effectively challenging them.

La organización de las mujeres en Dictadura

2009-07-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Arteaga. Ana María. “Politización de lo privado y subversión de lo cotidiano”. Mundo de Mujer. Continuidad y Cambio. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones CEM, 1998. pp. 563- 592.

Este artículo busca analizar la organización de las mujeres en dictadura en parte para explicarse "en que falló" este movimiento de mujeres, "por qué no pudimos consolidar nuestra experiencia en interlocución, propuesta, movimiento o fuerza?" (p.566), así como también examinar los contenidos valóricos e ideológicos asociados a dicha participación. Las autoras reiteran la ya mentada tipología de las organizaciones de mujeres en dictadura: organizaciones territoriales de base, organizaciones de derechos humanos y organizaciones propiamente feministas, y se hacen cargo de que no es posible operar con una categoría universalizadora como "las mujeres", sino que es necesario mirar la experiencia específica de la opresión que vive cada uno de estos grupos y sus particulares prácticas de resistencia.

Respecto a las organizaciones territoriales de subsistencia, las autoras apuntan a la capacidad de estas experiencias de ampliar la conciencia de las mujeres en cuanto a las estructuras de subordinación que las afectan, y atribuyen un potencial de transformación político-social a estas experiencias al democratizar los espacios cotidianos de la familia y el hogar (pero no hacen mención a la comunidad, curiosamente). En el caso de las organizaciones de mujeres que reaccionan a la represión desde su posición de madres, esposas, hijas y hermanas, su práctica sólo asumiría una dimensión política al irrumpir en el espacio público e interpelar al estado. Respecto a las organizaciones feministas, estas serían de carácter muy heterogéneo lo que dificulta la articulación de una identidad y agenda común en el espacio público.

En los tres casos, lo privado se transformaría en político e interpelaría tanto al estado como al ámbito privado de las relaciones familiares. Sin embargo, en su conjunto, las autoras concluyen que estos tres tipos de organizaciones no tuvieron la capacidad de generar un proyecto político de transformación social que apuntara a la resolución de los conflictos tanto de clase, como de género.

Towards a more nuanced and subtle analysis of gender practices

2009-07-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Lancaster, Roger N. 1998 “Transgenderism in Latin America: Some Critical Introductory Remarks on Identities and Practices”. Sexualities 1(3): 261-274.

Lancaster's article is an introduction to a series of study cases that deal with gender power, sexual resistance, corporeal norms, and performative subversion in Latin America. To the question of how and when do transgendered performances deconstruct or re-stage normative gender identities?, Lancaster warns us about reading all transgendered and transexual practices as already subversive because this depends always on the specific context that they take place. Along with this, Lancaster makes an argument against a global agenda of international gay politics based on a unitary gay identity imported acritically from an urban, middle-class, North American context. In this sense, Lancaster reminds us that identities are always contingent and a product of specific practices.

"When we say that a practice either ratifies or subverts a normative system, we also need to ask: for whom? from whose perspective? when? and under what circumstances?" p.273

Along the same lines that Butler, Lancaster points at the ways that transsexual practices as a "sham" and a "deception" reveal also the ways that all gender practices and identities are ultimately a sham and a deception. If identities cannot be considered unitary, ready-made and never find closure, we should be looking for a kind of politics that does not take identity as their fundament, this is what queer politics could offer as long as we do not use queer as a replacement for a unitary and universalizing gay identity.

Joan W. Scott: Sexual difference as a signifier of difference itself

2009-06-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”. The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5. (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Scott's is a crucial reading to understand gender not only as the social organization of sexual difference, but as a primary way to articulate power relationships. Meanings around sexual difference, are always in flux and contested. Scott reviews the main ways that gender has been employed, and introduces a more complex reading of the category, beyond equating gender to women, and beyond both mere description or applying universal abstractions that leave no room for historical specificity and change. We must constantly ask how is sexual difference being invoked in every context, and what meanings and power relationships are at stake:

"Established as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life. To the extent that these references establish distributions of power (differential control over or access to material and symbolic resources), gender becomes implicated in the conception and construction of power itself." p. 1069

Sexual difference becomes a ground of legitimation of power relations through the use of sets of binary oppositions. But moreover, sexual difference becomes the primary signifier of difference itself. Gendered and sexualized metaphors are used constantly to construct and critizice power relationships, being the ones of the nation as a heterosexual family just one —however, important— of them.

Scott laments that "[t]he connection between authoritarian regimes and the control of women has been noted but not thoroughly studied". p.1072

Los estudios de la mujer y de género en LA

2009-06-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Navarro, Marysa. “Research on Latin American Women”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(1): 111-120. 1979

Navarro revisa el origen y desarrollo de los estudios de la mujer y de género en LA, mirando los contextos institucionales (agencias que financian) e intercambios con el Norte (encuentros promovidos por N.U.), que permiten el surgimiento de estos. Mira la relación compleja y contradictoria que han tenido l@s cientistas sociales interesad@s en las mujeres y género y LA con el feminismo, especialmente cuando este último se entiende como una teoría de liberación propia de los países desarrollados, no aplicable en LA. Al mismo tiempo cuestiona como la influencia del marxismo y de las teorías de la dependencia, dominantes en los 70's, ha limitado los estudios de las mujeres y de género al declarar en forma doctrinaria que las inequidades de género se derivan en forma casi mecánica de las dinámicas del capitalismo.

Gender as a category for historical analysis

2009-06-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

French, William E. and Katherine Elaine Bliss “Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.1-30. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

The authors take on the usefulness of the category of gender for historical analysis as inaugurated by Scott in her paradigmatic article from 1986. This entails understanding gender as a discursive site where power/knowledge is articulated; for instance, the language of citizenship and national identity is gendered, thus it is relevant for historians to explore both 'popular' and state-promoted meanings around gender and sexuality. The authors also discuss the potential risks —many described by Scott herself— that the shift from women to gender imply, like taking the masculine/feminine binary for granted instead of looking at the specific ways that this binary is constructed and used. They also signal the contributions of Foucault and Queer Theories in pointing at the regulatory power of discourses, and to the ways that our understanding of bodies as sexualized (and racialized) is mediated by historically situated discourses. Furthermore, the body also is used as a metaphor for society or the nation. Finally, they emphasize the intersectionality and the relevance of destabilizing fixed categories of identity, not for the sake of an academic exercise, but as a way to develop politics that can address the complexities of processes of identification and subjectivity production.

Strategic essentialism and the politics of identity

2009-06-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

En la foto: Comandanta Ramona

Stephen, Lynn. “Gender, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity” in Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 28, No. 6, Power, Policy, and Neoliberalism (Nov., 2001), pp. 54-69. Sage Publications.

Stephen discute la tensión entre las críticas a las políticas de la identidad —afán des-esencializador que atribuye a los estudios culturales— y las políticas concretas de las organizaciones de base. Usando como ejemplo el movimiento de madres (CO-MADRES) en El Salvador y la organización de las mujeres indígenas en México, Stephen demuestra que estas mujeres reconocen y negocian permanentemente sus diferencias y la variedad de significados asociados a su identidad, pero que deliberadamente proyectan una identidad homogénea y esencializada (que dice que tiene un componente performativo en el espacio público en el caso de las organizaciones de madres, pero yo creo que en los dos casos, porque las zapatistas se enmascaran y eso tb es performativo) en un proceso activo de identificación que tiene efectos paradojales y contradictorios. Por ejemplo, al apelar al lenguaje de la ciudadanía y de los derechos, y al mismo tiempo reclamar su autonomía, las mujeres indígenas al mismo tiempo minan y refuerzan el discurso nacionalista Mexicano del Estado. Y al invocar la identidad de madres, recurren a la identidad más tradicional de asignada a las mujeres en LA, pero al mismo tiempo esto fue clave para denunciar y resistir el proceso de violencia política en El Salvador y muchas otras partes de LA.

Esta idea de invocar discursivamente la identidad de las "mujeres" como una identidad histórica, contingente y estratégica me parece clave. Lo único que no me parece es como Stephen termina arguyendo que el esencialismo está en crisis sólo en la academia y no en el "mundo real" de la arena política en LA, y citando a Stuart Hall que dice que el esencialismo no ha sido desplazado políticamente. Si bien ha sido necesario y relevante construir y desarrollar políticas de la identidad para las mujeres en LA, es también en el terreno de la política de base donde el esencialismo ha entrado en crisis, al generar identidades normativas y generando jerarquías y exclusiones entre las mujeres.

Mujeres en Chile 1973-1990

2009-06-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

Imágenes: http://www.elciudadano.cl/imagenes/pinx.jpg y página 156 de este libro.

Gaviola, Edda; Eliana Largo y Sandra Palestro. Una Historia Necesaria. Mujeres en Chile: 1973-1990. Santiago de Chile: Akí & Aora Ltda., 1994.

Las autoras intentan hacer una historiografía de las mujeres en Chile que recoja su proceso y devenir como sujeto social y político, pero al igual que Kirkwood, toman como punto de partida la opresión universal de género de las mujeres. A pesar de que en ambos casos las autoras enfatizan el carácter histórico de esta opresión, suponen una cierta comunidad de intereses y transversalidad en el proyecto de emancipación femenina, lo que resulta problemático al desconocer las fracturas de clase, raza y orientación sexual, entre otros, como relaciones que generan intereses en conflicto entre las mujeres —desconocer estas relaciones de poder sólo refuerza el predominio de las voces de algunas mujeres que "hablan por" los intereses de todas las mujeres— desde esta perspectiva es que todas estas autoras tienden a explicar la movilización de las mujeres de derecha no como un reflejo propio de sus intereses de género y de clase, sino como un fracaso del feminismo y de los sectores de izquierda en articular demandas femeninas en su proyecto de transformación global.

Algunos de los relatos recogidos ponen de manifiesto temas que las autoras no analizan suficientemente, especialmente cómo se desplegaron complejas relaciones de género y de clase en los espacios cotidianos de terror de la dictadura: por ejemplo el trato diferencial que las mujeres recibieron en algunos centros de detención, cuando los guardias "notaban" (por su apariencia y sus nombres) el origen social de las mujeres. Como sistematización de relatos de mujeres en dictadura tiene su valor propio, sin embargo, se echa de menos un análisis de género y sexualidad que vaya más allá de la pregunta "hay o no hay movimiento?" (194).

La trayectoria histórica de la subjetividad femenina en Chile

2009-06-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

Salazar, Gabriel and Julio Pinto. Historia contemporánea de Chile IV. Hombría y feminidad (Construcción Cultural de Actores Emergentes). Capítulo II: Historia y Feminidad en Chile Siglos XIX y XX, pp. 109-275. Santiago: Lom Ediciones, 2002.

Salazar desarrolla su análisis mirando las condiciones materiales históricamente específicas de producción de subjetividad femenina y masculina. Su análisis es en este sentido marxista, pero también tiene un ojo Foucaultiano: en lugar de asumir a priori la opresión universal y unidireccional de las mujeres, se fija en los matices, los acomodamientos, las negociaciones cotidianas y los espacios para ejercer resistencia dentro de las relaciones de opresión de género.

Así, examina la trayectoria de las mujeres populares en contraste con las mujeres de la oligarquía a principios de siglo, rastreando el desarrollo incipiente del feminismo popular en oposición al feminismo de las "madres inmensas" de la elite. Desde un principio, la diferencia entre ellos consiste en que para el feminismo de elite el objetivo consiste en equipararse -formalmente, a nivel de los derechos- con los hombres de su clase, mientras que para las mujeres populares el feminismo siempre estuvo inscrito no como un proceso de emancipación personal, sino como un proceso de transformación global. Salazar se fija luego en detalle cómo los incipientes procesos de industrialización y el ingreso masivo de las mujeres como obreras, costureras, empleadas domésticas, determinan las condiciones de posibilidad para el despliegue de la subjetividad de las mujeres populares. Paralelamente, Salazar pone énfasis en la relación con el Estado, su formación, sus intereses y prácticas regulatorias/disciplinarias. Es interesante también como rastrea la constitución de algunos aspectos subjetivos de la clase media/alta, como el desarrollo de la 'actitud patronal' y como esta mina la relación entre mujeres populares y de la elite. Asimismo, la compleja y ambivalente relación que se desarrolla entre las 'nanas' y sus 'patrones' está cargada de elementos afectivos e identitarios que rebasan lo meramente laboral y que no se pueden explicar sólo en términos de explotación o emancipación.

En relación a la construcción de significados en torno a la sexualidad, Salazar sostiene a las mujeres del bajo pueblo siempre se les miró como mujeres indecentes y licenciosas por su asociación con la figura rebelde de la 'chinganera', las mujeres que desarrollaban un cierto éxito e independencia económica mediante la administración de fondas donde ebullía la cultura popular de fines del SXIX. Así, "se asumió que la mujer popular era instrínsecamente inmoral" (146). Por su parte, las mujeres de la elite no solo enmarcaron su feminismo dentro del pensamiento ilustrado y liberal, sino que además fundaron su proyecto en la extensión de la maternidad oligarca o lo que Salazar denomina la doctrina de la 'maternidad social'; que eleva a cualidades de superioridad el carácter sacrificial de la maternidad, el gobierno de la familia y el espacio privado.

Durante el SXX las mujeres de clase media articularon su discurso emancipador en torno al voto, apelando al mismo discurso abstracto y universalista que las feministas europeas. Este discurso, se vio constantemente en crisis debido a las fracturas de clase que se imponían y evidenciaban por sobre un proyecto global de emancipación femenina. De esta forma, el proyecto de emancipación individual de las mujeres de clase media se presenta como un problema personal y subjetivo, cargado de contradicciones, que tiene como sustento material la dependencia al trabajo doméstico de las mujeres populares.

El proyecto de instalación de una economía neoliberal impuesto en la dictadura descansó en gran parte en el trabajo precario y asalariado de las mujeres: las temporeras, las empleadas del sector comercial, el invisibilizado trabajo doméstico de las 'nanas'; las empleadas estatales y municipales; y el trabajo sexual. Los efectos subjetivos que han generado estas nuevas condiciones son múltiples y contradictorios. La transición negociada que se impuso por sobre la posibilidad de una transición democrática, no sólo excluyó a los pobladores en general, sino que instaló un concepto abstracto de pobreza que diluyó la experiencia histórica de los pobladores como sujeto político. A pesar de que el movimiento de mujeres de resistencia a la dictadura logró articular en el discurso y en su práctica política un proyecto total de emancipación femenina que partía de las condiciones particulares de opresión en dictadura; al momento de la transición las fracturas de clase se volvieron a imponer por sobre las alianzas luego de la dictadura: las mujeres profesionales se aliaron con un Estado clasista y patriarcal, las mujeres pobladoras continuaron desarrollando un feminismo popular anti-Estado.

A specter is haunting Chile - the specter of feminism

2009-06-10T11:40:00.000-07:00

Olea, Raquel; Olga Grau y Francisca Pérez. El género en apuros. Discursos públicos: Cuarta Conferencia Mundial de la Mujer. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2000.

Olea et al. examine the tensions in Chile when democratic government representatives were to attend the IV World Women Conference at Beijing in 1995, identifying the main actors that participated and the discourses circulated. The analysis of these public debates makes visible some of the cultural logics of the “transition”, and how these logics shape the dynamics between actors. The debates revolve around the Plan de Igualdad de Oportunidades para las Mujeres, the official document that stated the government's position towards women's and gender issues published in 1994. Many of the criticisms to this document had to do with the ambiguity of some terms it contained, such as “gender” and “different types of families”, which —it was argued— could potentially be used as disguises to undermine monogamy and heterosexuality.

According to Grau's discourse analysis of media texts, the arguments of the conservative right in Chile explicitly suggest the state as a totalitarian entity imposing an ideological agenda of “radical feminism” and “renovated socialism”, which would go against a “democratic, pluralist, Christian country as Chile” (32), where individual freedom cannot be alienated. The government early declared that just as in the previous conference in Cairo, they had no intention of legislating for abortion.
Within the conservative-religious groups, there were female conservative leaders who made a point of speaking on behalf of the Chilean woman to defend their “natural” role. They accused the state of intervening in women's individual right to choose for herself her own path. Regarding the document of the government's position, they denounced its feminist content, pointing out that this ideology is characteristic of the Northern Hemisphere (North America and Europe). In this way, they argued that the state's document would express “a desire of imposing by means of the law, a noticeably liberal lifestyle, linked to a model of womanhood that does not agree with the values characteristic of our culture” (40). These actors also articulated a distinction between “good” (moderate, Christian) feminism and “bad” feminism (radical, based on “gender theory").

Female representatives from the Unión Demócrata Independiente (“Independent Democratic Union”, populist right-wing party linked to the extremely conservative Opus Dei Catholic faction) and Renovación Nacional (“National Renovation”) argued that through the concept of “gender”, what was trying to be legitimated is the subversion and elimination of natural differences between men and women, to introduce the idea that people, regardless of their sex, can live as feminine, masculine, androgynous and in-differentiated beings, terminology which is defined as monstrous and “malefic”.
The demonization of feminism, represented as a totalitarian ideology against family, femininity, and motherhood, does not find a counterposition that can respond effectively to this misrepresentation in the public space where the debates take place, they conclude.

Discurso, Género y Poder

2009-06-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

Grau, Olga; Riet Delsing, Eugenia Brito; Alejandra Farías. Discurso, Género y Poder. Discursos públicos: Chile 1978-1993 Santiago de Chile: LOM-Arcis, 1997.

Este parece ser uno de los libros claves que se han escrito sobre género y la transición en Chile: uno, por ser uno de los primeros en usar un marco feminista y de análisis de discurso; dos, por mirar críticamente no sólo a los sectores conservadores y de derecha sino también a los discursos de la Concertación a sus 8 años de gobierno. Las autoras recojen una serie de debates públicos que rodearon eventos como la creación del SERNAM y la posibilidad de la reinstalación de debates sobre el aborto, el divorcio, la educación sexual, etc. Las autoras muestran como un conjunto de sectores conservadores construyen la idea de la inminente crisis moral, de la familia como lugar de salvación de la sociedad chilena y la analogía de dictadura es a orden como democracia es a caos y libertinaje. También analizan en estos discursos la significación de la sexualidad (especialmente de los jóvenes) como "peligrosa"; la asociación de los valores tradicionales de la familia con la identidad nacional y la retórica de las mujeres como actores claves de la modernización. Por ejemplo, la idea de que la "mujer moderna" es la que logra exitosamente combinar su rol productivo en el mercado laboral con su rol reproductivo en el "hogar".

El peso de la doctrina católica en estos debates se hace evidente en estos análsis, pero también las retóricas nacionalistas, de colonialismo interno y de modernización neoliberal. Los gobiernos de la Concertación a su vez, parecen no sólo no hacerle frente a estos discursos sino reafirmarlos mediante el uso de la familia —nuclear, heterosexual, monogámica— como metáfora de recomposición nacional y elemento unificador de la vida social postdictatorial frente a las ansiedades e incertidumbres que genera la vida urbana en un escenario de neoliberalismo y "globalización". Esto no significa que no haya heterogeneidad en las posiciones al interior de la Concertación, sino más bien que la lógica y la forma de hacer política en la postdictadura favorece la prevalencia de las posiciones tradicionales y conservadores al interior de esta coalición; y que en conjunto, la Concertación no tiene peso para hacerle frente al poder que ejercen los sectores de derecha y religiosos. Asimismo, parte de la Izquierda pareciera sufrir de una forma de culpa y sentido de deuda con la Iglesia Católica por el rol en la defensa de los derechos humanos que algunas instituciones como la Vicaría tuvieron en dictadura. Así, las posiciones feministas dentro de la Concertación, como las articuladas por los socialistas Ricardo Nuñez (a veces), Fanny Pollarolo y Antonieta Saa, son rápidamente subsumidas por las posiciones demócrata-cristianas. El discurso que se impone dentro de la Concertación es que hay que preocuparse de los temas estructurales (pobreza) versus de los culturales y que meterse en esos temas es contrario a la voluntad de consenso de la postdictadura. Otra estrategia discursiva es declarar que la sexualidad, la familia y la maternidad son temas naturales o propios de la moral, sobre los que no cabe debate (Sergio Micco: "la moral no se somete a votación" 189). O el argumento uber neoliberal de que el espacio privado es un espacio en que el Estado no le compete intervenir (aunque por supuesto que igual lo hace).

Anatomía Actual de Moulian (je)

2009-06-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

Moulian, Tomás. Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito. Santiago de Chile: LOM-Arcis, 1997.

Moulian intenta comprender el proceso histórico de la dictadura y la transición pero parte reconociendo la imposibilidad del lenguaje de las ciencias sociales para simbolizar experiencias límites que rebasan los sentidos de las palabras, por lo que recurre a una serie de metáforas que denomina lenguaje poético. Busca producir una genealogía del Chile Actual que no se reduzca a establecer causalidades entre el Chile Dictatorial —caracterizado por una revolución capitalista y por una dictadura terrorista que deviene dictadura constitucional— y el presente.

Una característica fundamental del Chile Actual es la compulsión al olvido, como mecanismo de defensa y síntoma del trauma de la violencia política, del terror anclado en los cuerpos. Otros síntomas del Chile Actual son: la depresión, la deseperanza, el fatalismo y la sensación de a-historicidad; contracaras del exitismo, euforia, competitividad y mercantilismo. La transición constituyó un sistema de trueques donde el silencio y el "blanqueo" se presentaron como condiciones para la estabilidad de un nuevo orden democráctico, y donde la figura de Pinochet trasmuta de Dictador a Patriarca, figura necesaria para el éxito del modelo neoliberal del Chile Actual. El iceberg que Chile envió para su representación en la Expo Sevilla 1992 expresa este deseo tanto de distanciarse de las referencias tropicalizantes de América Latina sino también y más que nada para marketear a Chile Actual como transparente, "limpiado, sanitizado, purificado" (35). A su vez, el consenso es el eje simbólico del Chile Actual, en tanto etapa superior del olvido. El contenido del consenso es la legitimidad del modelo económico neoliberal, la desaparición de los antagonismos: "se usó la estrategia de fomentar el temor regresivo, de condenar como irracional cualquier divergencia. De estigmatizarla como un pecado contra lo real, por tanto contra la sobrevivencia de una transición precaria" (39).

Uno de los argumentos más atractivos del libro de Moulian es para mi su insistente uso de la metáfora del transformismo sexual para ilustrar la transición en tanto se logra la continuidad de las estructuras de la dictadura pero bajo los "ropajes" de la democracia...

Las Choras del Puerto

2009-06-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

The collective Las Choras del Puerto (“The Port Mussels”) from the coast city of Valparaíso defines itself as a “feminist guerilla” and has specialized in carrying out unexpected performances in public spaces. Here they play with the double meaning of the word “chora” (literally “mussel” in Spanish): while it is used to refer to female genitalia colloquially in Chile, “choro” and “chora” are also used to denote someone with “an attitude”, with “street knowledge”, and/or from working-class extraction.

The protagonists of the performances are four characters (the four choras) of different colours —who wear masks and wigs in their public performances — The description of the characters emphasize precisely the marginality of the female subjects that have been denied by the official discourse in the post-dictatorship: the poor, the domestic workers, the bisexual and the indigenous; the sexually and politically active women, unruly subjects of an heterosexist, racist, exploitative model, who resist what state policies of democratic governments are willing to offer: microcredits.

Their first public performance, called “A trail of roses with thorns or shove your roses up your asses” on International Women's Day, consisted on returning the red roses that the government was distributing to women. Gathered in front of the offices of the Woman's National Service, they spread the red roses that they collected, and extended a series of slogans like “on international women's day, we don't want roses, nor breakfasts with the military, nor packages of numbers”. In this way, they denounce the government's official discourse on gender equality not only as complicit with an essentialist definition of women, that is (hetero) normative and functional to a neoliberal project, but the logic itself of the transition of compromising women's demands for the sake of not upsetting the conservative sectors.

In a discoursive system that does not recognize the existence and value of the female body outside systems of economic production and sexual reproduction, and where particularly women's bodies have been deemed as a vehicle of production and reproduction, these performances seem like an effectively subversive counter-narrative through the affirmation of women as active sexual subjects of pleasure and politics. However, I am always suspicious of feminist tactics of organizing around the vagina (Choras= vagina). The Choras do imply that we are talking about "vaginas in resistance", to put it somehow. But in their second performance they called for a massive vasectomy if women were not to access free emergency contraception bringing back the vagina as the fundament for feminist politics and exluding the chance of meaningful alliances with men.

Hija de Perra

2009-06-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

The character of Chilean performer Hija de Perra (“Daughter of Bitch”) is precisely based on the mimicking of the normative roles of sacrificed mother, wife, and worker that define the respectability of a female subject, recipient of public policies in the Chilean transition. By fusing these roles with the aesthetic of the evil/femme fatale character of Latin American soap opera, Hija de Perra makes the whore/madonna binary explode on stage. In addition, while the character of Hija de Perra is performed by a biological (gay) man performing as a drag queen, performances regularly includes also a number of biological women who perform as drag queens with nicknames such as Perdida (“Lost”) and Zorras Rameras (“Whore Foxes”).

The mingling of bio-female and male bodies performing normative female roles, carried to a grotesque extreme, has the effect of exposing these roles that are naturally ascribed to women as social performances as well. Performances regularly include dancing and singing to lyrics of songs that talk explicitly about the pleasures derived from sharing fluids such as blood, feces, and urine with a sexual partner, and even the pleasures of sharing and transmitting STDs. The performances often also include the manipulation of fake bodily fluids alternatively to the queens carrying out domestic work —for instance, Hija de Perra might spread in the audience fake menstrual blood or pretend to discharge feces in Perdida's face—

If the transition in Chile is all about erasing the blood (representing the dead and the tortured) and the dirt (representing poverty), then these performances also succeed in bringing back was is trying to be repressed by the official discourse. Many times they will begin by Hija de Perra and the other drag queens performing domestic work in very submissive ways while complaining out loud about abusive husbands, and then slowly move into the characters engaging in suggestive S/M activities like whipping and riding each other or members of the audience, playing with the signifiers of passivity/activity. In this way, these performances ultimately point at the subversive sexual power that could potentially be articulated in the female domestic space.

Volver a Kirkwood

2009-06-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

Kirkwood, Julieta “Ser Política en Chile. Los nudos de la sabiduría feminista” Editorial Cuarto Propio, Serie Teoría. Santiago: 1986.

Kirkwood explora el surgimiento de una “conciencia contestataria”, una historia que hasta ahora no ha sido narrada sino invisibilizada, en la medida que el eje de teorización ha sido casi exclusivamente el del “conflicto de clase”. Se pregunta sobre el sujeto del feminismo, qué categoría de grupo son las mujeres, y establece que su análisis no supone una escencia o una identidad para las mujeres, “sino que debe partir desde sujetos que aun no son tales sujetos”, en la medida que toman conciencia de su opresión devienen sujetos. Se hace cargo de la tensión y desafío de plantear un patriarcado como opresión sistémica sino universal, y la contingencia histórica de las categorías de género.

Desde este perspectiva, Kirkwood revisa la historia de las mujeres en Chile suponiendo la opresión universal de las mujeres,debido al "conjunto de condiciones objetivas y subjetivas de discriminacion genérica que se transluce en lo político, económico, social y cultural”, pero buscando señales específicas de su conciencia contestataria. También critica cómo los partidos de izquierda ni derecha han propuesto algo distinto que relevar a la mujer a defensora de los valores de la familia y la patria. Más aun, el que la izquierda no haya planteado un análisis de la especificidad de la opresión femenina ha tenido consecuencias desastrosas, cuando “la opresión femenina deviene en reacción”.(55)

Kirkwood se pregunta por qué, incluso en momentos de ampliación democrática en Chile, las mujeres no se expresan en relación a demandas específicas. Este conflicto -entre expresar una propuesta especifica, versus una propuesta global- es una tensión permanente para el feminismo chileno de izquierda o progresista. Para Kirkwood, luego del golpe las mujeres se vuelven a constituir como sujetos de reivindicación específica en contra del 'autoritarismo', donde se reformulan los metodos y las formas de alcanzar un proyecto liberador, ademas de incorporar temáticas propiamente feministas.

La práctica politica feminista debe basarse en la negación de: la dicotomía privado/público; la improductividad atribuida a las mujeres; la situación de dependencia economica, política, cívica, sexual, de las mujeres; la condición de objeto, de alteridad y de secundariedad del género femenino. También la negación de la atemporalidad atribuida a la reivindicación feminista, pues precisamente lo que impide esta apropiación de las reivindicaciones feministas es el ocultamiento histórico de la dominación patriarcal y de las resistencias de las mujeres a esta.

“...a partir de la experiencia sufrida bajo el sistema autoritario dictatorial hoy se ha hecho más evidente para muchos sectores que el autoritarismo es algo más que un problema económico o político; que tiene raíces y cauces profundos en toda la estructura social; que hay que cuestionar y rechazar muchos elementos y contenidos antes no considerados políticos, porque atribuidos a la vida cotidiana-privada.
Se ha comenzado a decir que la familia es autoritaria; que la socialización de los niños es autoritaria y rígida en la asignación de los roles sexuales; que la educación, las fábricas, las organizaciones intermedias, los partidos políticos, se hayan constituidos autoritariamente.” (203)

Género, sexualidad y Reforma Agraria en Chile.

2009-06-07T23:47:00.000-07:00

Tinsman, Heidi. “Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964-73.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4 2001, Duke University Press. pp. 587- 619

La Reforma Agraria como proceso histórico promovió un discurso de equidad o mutualismo de género, mientras que por otro lado, todos los procesos de repartición de tierras y capacitación estuvieron dirigidos a los campesinos hombres como “jefes de hogar”. Las mujeres a su vez, se apropiaron de la retórica de las responsabilidades conyugales de los hombres para ejercer cierta agencia en el plano de la sexualidad. Bajo la retórica de la modernización, la Reforma Agraria promovió ideales de masculinidad ligados al rol productivo del hombre, su militancia y la responsabilidad familiar; mientras que al mismo tiempo promovió una feminidad subordinada, dependiente y de respetabilidad. De esta manera, la RA no solo reprodujo las jerarquías entre el trabajo productivo y no productivo, sino que al tratar el trabajo feminino como doméstico, privado, y meramente reproductivo, invisibilizó el trabajo productivo que formaba parte de la vida de la mujer del campo.

Género, derechos y las políticas sociales de principio de siglo en Chile.

2009-06-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

Imagen: Cartel ganador del concurso "Afiches Profilácticos" de la Caja del Seguro Obligatorio en la región de Tarapacá, 1937. Obtenida de http://www.memoriachilena.cl

Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra
“Charity, Rights and Entitlement: Gender, Labor, and Welfare in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile”
HAHR, 81-3-4 2001, Duke University Press. pp. 555- 585

Rosemblatt analiza el caso de la Caja de Seguro Obrero para ilustrar como los gobiernos del Frente Popular, al ampliar los beneficios y derechos de los trabajadores, lo hizo profundizando la noción de que las mujeres, su trabajo y su capacidad de mobilización son secundarios, y de que los trabajadores asalariados hombres son la espina dorsal del desarrollo y modernización del país. Así, se van estableciendo una serie de jerarquías entre el trabajador-hombre —glorificado y construido como merecedor de derechos— y los sujetos no-productivos, dependientes del trabajador; incluyendo los trabajadores no asalariados, las mujeres y los indigentes, que deben ser sujetos de caridad y no de derechos. Los derechos aparecen entonces ligados a la contribución económica al país y el trabajo femenino doméstico se percibe como no-productivo, campo de responsabilidad individual y no del Estado. Asociación entre masculinidad, capitalismo (trabajo industrial/asalariado) y progreso; por su parte, las mujeres y los campesinos son vistos como lo tradicional, lo retrógrado. Implícita y explícitamente, el discurso moral del Frente Popular es de que el lugar de las mujeres es el ámbito privado/doméstico, y que gana su valor social como madre y esposa del trabajador. El desarrollo económico del país se asocia también a la higiene social, educación y disciplinamiento moral de las masas.

Los anarquistas de principio de siglo y "la cuestión de la mujer".

2009-06-07T23:37:00.000-07:00

Hutchison, Elizabeth Q. (Elizabeth Quay) “From “La Mujer Esclava” to “La Mujer Limón”: Anarchism and the Politics of Sexuality in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile”. Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 – 4. Duke University Press, 2001.

Desarrolla un análisis de publicaciones anarquistas de principio de siglo y de las dos decadas siguientes, evidenciando el tránsito desde una idealización de la mujer oprimida (“mujer esclava”) a un desprecio hacia las mujeres por su supuesta apatía y falta de colaboración con un proyecto revolucionario. La autora ve una relación con la frustración de parte de los anarquistas en atraer a la masa de trabajadoras obreras industriales a las organizaciones sindicales anarquistas, ya que en su mayoría estas estaban afiliadas con la FOCh, de corte marxista. Ambas construcciones de las mujeres, tanto la versión mitificada de superioridad moral, como la versión sobre su falta de nobleza y profundidad, esencializan a las mujeres al suponerles un carácter propio o innato que las haría más propensas ya sea a un proyecto revolucionario o conservador. En ambos casos también, el interés de los anarquistas en 'la cuestión de la mujer' pasaba por su articulación con un proyecto más amplio de transformación social.

Historiografías de LA y género

2009-06-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

Caulfield S. “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America”. Hispanic American Historical Review, 2001 - Duke Univ Press. Pp. 449-490

Caulfield hace una suerte de intento de revisar los estudios que se han escrito sobre Latino America usando género como categoría central de análisis. Para ella, a partir de los mid-80s comienzan una serie de estudios inagurados por Asunción Lavrin, pero nota la falta de diálogo entre lo que se produce en el Norte y en el Sur sobre LA. Los estudios de género en LA han alcanzado su peak en el contexto de las postdictaduras, cuando hay recursos institucionales y respaldo internacional para una agenda global “de género”. Estos estudios han sido influenciados por el post-estructuralismo, con el énfasis en las nociones de discursos y representación, mentalidades, y la influencia de pensamiento marxista, en tanto hablar de género siempre como categoría ligada a clase (o etcnicidad). Historiografías ponen mucha atención en la relevancia de la familia y su relación con estructuras políticas y económicas. Estos estudios han ido de a poco reconociendo la agencia de las mujeres en estos procesos mas alla de verlas como meros instrumentos o víctimas de ellos. Atención también en procesos de hegemonía y de contrahegemonía, y en como la construcción de masculinidades y feminidades normativas se cruza con discursos estatales, populares, contraculturales.

Women's practical vs. strategic interests

2009-06-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

Molyneux, Maxine. Women's movements in international perspective : Latin America and beyond New York : Palgrave, 2001. pp. 140-202

Focuses on the impact of feminism in development literature and definitions of women's and gender interests. Women's movements show a great diversity in the definition of what constitutes rights and citizenship. Moreover, “there is no necessary relationship between forms of organisation and interest articulation” and “women's gender interests are not always transparent, or even primary for women, any more than their gender identity is their sole identity.” (151) Women's interests then have to be understood not in an essential way but as historically and culturally constituted, as well as politically and discursively constructed.

Practical vs. Strategic interests: needs that derive from women's position versus claims that involve a further transformation of such gender relations. There is a problem with understanding practical interests as 'objectives' though, as there is an “impossibility of deriving women's interests from a generalised account of women's subordination” (153). Molyneux claims that the formulation of interests is always dependent on discursive elements specific to the historical, cultural and political context. Moreover, Molyneux asks about the politics and uses of women's and gender interests, pointing that “women's gender interests can be instrumentalised by political forces which claim to be promoting women's interest in general —as if they were self-evident, unproblematic and uncontested.” (157) For instance, how “governments and development agencies haved mobilised women into voluntary welfare work on the basis of their practical interests; such appeals have also been deployed to solicit women's support for neo-conservative campaigns around 'responsibilising the family'.” (157) This is notably the case in Chile where the effects of neoliberal policies has been accompanied of an exaltation of the role of the family.

In Latin America, feminist struggles for citizenship have been shaped by the colonial experience, which privileges Catholic definitions of gender: “Spanish rule left its imprint in its legal codes and in a cultural configuration which gave Catholicism a particular influence over women's lives.” (167) Women many times have drawn —directly and indirectly— on these Catholic definitions of gender and sexuality to negotiate their political and social participation in processes of nation-building.But women sometimes also stretched the meaning of these terms, for instance, making “home” and the domestic space to include the neighbourhood and community issues. Early in the century, feminisms both in the USA and in Latin America “allied itself with civic maternalism in the pursuit of social reform and protection for women.”

There has been a tension within the feminist movements regarding whether to emphasize equality vs difference (and particularly motherhood). Molyneux seem to suggest that this strategy of gaining power invoking domesticity and children has been ambivalent to women's individual rights, and that one of the effects of this strategy.

Two other significant features of Latin American women's movements have been the stress on social, collective rights over individual citizenship (as a way to take distance from the individualistic stress of North American feminism), and participatory politics. Thus, while in the 80s the feminist reflection in the Western liberal democracies was centered on the state, in LA the political and theoretical debate revolved around social movements (both about the participation of women in them and the development of a gendered analysis of them). Along with other theorists from the left, LA feminists made a critique of a liberal utilitarian version of citizenship and called for a more participatory and socially responsible version of it (en la linea de Lechner y O'Donnell).

Participation and activism however, did not necessarily result in personal empowerment as evidence showed. Likewise, women's activism or 'active citizenship' do not necessarily lead to progressive or more democratic politics. History shows that frequently women have been mobilized under conservative, patriarchal, nationalist discourses/projects. Since in LA women's mobilizations were often role-based (as mothers and community providers), frequently it was read under an essentialist discourse of 'feminine virtues'. But the discourse of difference was used many times in LA history as a call for women's superior virtuosity to re-moralise the nation and preserve authoritarian institutions like the traditional family. Under a curious convergence of new communitarianism and neo-liberalist discourse, women were called to become active citizens so to alleviate the effects of the reduced role of the state: thus, through voluntary work and activism, women's unpaid labor was seen as an extension of their natural role. Furthermore, communitarian visions are filled with problematic assumptions about the family.

Authoritarism, Democratization and Gender

2009-06-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

Waylen G . Gender in Third World politics. Boulder, Colorado, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996. xi, 163 p. (Issues in Third World Politics) pp. 92-134

Waylen is set to tackle the gendered nature of authoritarianism, especially looking at the direct and indirect engagement of women both in military rule governments in Latin America in the 70's and 80's, and processes of democratization. Waylen argues that a gendered analysis of the military needs to go beyond the public/private sphere divide and include both, and their shifting boundaries. While the military is the actual institution, militarism is an ideology and a social process that penetrates a society as a whole. As Kirkwood noted, an authoritarian regime not only refers to a political or economic system, but to a patriarchal structure in the private sphere, particularly in the family. Militarism is gendered in many ways, for instance, by a gendered division of society between 'protectors' and 'protected'. Under the doctrine of 'national security', women in LA experienced gendered specific and sexualized repression. Thus, the relevance of challenging gender inequality to combat authoritarian regimes.

Pinochet spoke several times about the important role of mothers defending the 'spiritual values of the nation', and the junta altogether frequently relevated women's self-sacrificing and charitable role, such that “women were positioned as having a special role as defenders of the moral order.” (103) Women's participation in the right-women's organizations was reintegrated under dictatorship through two institutions (the Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer and the Centros de Madres or Cemas) and as a resullt of this process many women became militarized and lent material and ideological support to the military dictatorship.

Neoliberal policies and political repression had contradictory and paradoxical effects on women: in contradiction with the very discourse of the military regime that stressed women's role at home, women's participation in the labor market increased in the newly expanded financial and retailing sectors— the aggro-export industry also employed large numbers of women, who entered the job market underpaid and with reduced labor rights. Under severe hardship, many poor women became household heads and were pushed into informal work, such as street selling and domestic work. In tandem with wage reductions and state welfare decrease, the pressure on poor women was huge. In fact, the neoliberal economic policies relied on the unpaid and underpaid work of women, and was conveniently in agreement with the junta's discourse on self-sacrificing motherhood. Women experienced two effects of economic pressure: the reproduction of female poverty as daughters are often removed from school and put in charge of domestic work, and the increase of illegal abortion. As a response, many women started organizing to collectively face the hardships and help each other.

A gendered analysis of democratization in Chile shows that most cases women's social movements experienced tensions when transitioning into a democratic institutional representation, by the polarization of 'autonomous' versus 'institutional' feminists. Even though all major parties in Chile have adopted a 'gender equality' rhetoric in their discourse, they frequently place women's role only within the family and as bearers of moral (national) values. The creation of SERNAM was initially opposed by the right-wing and the Church. But SERNAM has also seen many of their initiatives boycotted from inside the Concertación: gender and sexuality issues divide the more conservative Christian Democrats from Socialists. Because of its dynamics, during times of transition, middle-class based feminist organizations have had a more meaningful influence (although limited) on politics than popular movements, that tend to become marginalized as the conventional political arena is reconfigured.

Women, sexual rights and citizenship

2009-06-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

Willmott, Ceri. “Constructing Citizenship in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile: the Role of Reproductive and Sexual Rights”. Gender and the politics of rights and democracy in Latin America edited by Nikki Craske and Maxine Molyneux. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. ; New York : Palgrave, 2002.

Ceri argues that international women's rights are applicable across cultural contexts, as a discourse that women appropriate in different ways to pursue their interests. Concepts of rights and citizenship are then strategic tools that allow women to negotiate their position and challenge gender ideologies at the level of the family, the community and the state. Chilean discourses of economic success and the creation of SERNAM create the idea that issues around women are dealt with in the post-dictatorship. Yet “in terms of women's rights, Chile is one of the more conservative countries in Latin America and culturally, certain pervasive ideas about women's proper role continue significantly to limit women's ability to exercise their citizenship.” (124) This is explained by specific features of Chilean society: legalistic tradition, and dominant cultural position of Catholic church - and their doctrine of self-sacrificing motherhood.

Chilean legalistic tradition, is then both a limit (the Constitution Pinochet wrote in 1980 protects life from the moment of conception) and an opportunity, given the rights-based discourse and the different international conventions treaties that the country has signed on issues of human rights. However, if yet the notion of “citizenship” has been useful to promote a feminist and women's rights agenda, much often it remains a narrow definition, unless we understand it as a multi-tiered notion that includes the relationship of an individual with the state and the rest of society. Under the state endorsed ideology of motherhood, women are responsible for the nation's reproduction but with no control over their bodies, particularly when it comes to sexual and reproductive rights.

But participation in women's organizations informs the construction of ideas of citizenship and women's rights and can eventually change the way women talk about issues like abortion. It opens ways for discussion, debate, and further reflection beyond ready-made normative discourses based on Catholic discourse that poses sexuality as inseparable from reproduction (Montecino 1991) and distinctions between 'decent/indecent' women. Despite cultural specific features, internationally endorsed rights in respect to reproduction are necessary and applicable as there are “areas of commonality” at the base of these rights, such as “domination by men, childbearing, sexual degradation of violence” (145) My concern with this analysis is that bases women's rights and citizenship on the ownership of the individual body, which is also a liberal idea that needs to be examined critically by feminism.

Los estudios de género y de la mujer en Chile

2009-06-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

Miller Klubock, Thomas. , “Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile”. Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4. Duke University Press. Pp 493- 518.

Klublock analiza los factores que han influenciado el desarrollo de estudios históricos sobre género y la mujer en Chile, tales como la cercanía de las historiadoras feministas con la Izquierda, la influencia de la experiencia de la UP y la resistencia a la dictadura; asi como la influencia del Marxismo y los estudios subalternos como marcos de análisis. Más tarde, la influencia de Foucault en el análisis de las prácticas de resistencia, el foco en agencia (aunque no en forma necesariamente celebratoria). Tránsito desde considerar la historia de la mujer, a la historia de las relaciones género porque no hay una experiencia única y homogénea para todas las mujeres, en tanto el sujeto “mujer” es históricamente contingente y construido (502). Tensión entre un foco “desde arriba” —el Estado, discursos y prácticas normativas/disciplinarias— y “desde abajo” —historias de la cotidianeidad, las resistencias, negociaciones y acomodamientos de las ideologías de género. Examina los límites de los conceptos de patriarcado, género, e ideologías de género como categorías de análisis: si bien las ideologías de género aparecen como centrales para el proyecto moderno del estado, al mismo tiempo este análisis tiende a obscurecer las resistencias. El concepto de patriarcado aparece como problemático en cuanto totalizante y ahistórico, pero útil cuando se le entiende como un sistema múltiple, lleno de tensiones y contradicciones que dejan espacios para las resistencias y acomodamientos. Mirar entonces la historia del patriarcado en cuanto a la organización de la sexualidad y del trabajo, requiere la articulación de la historia de las ideologías de genero con la historia cotidiana de los actores sociales. Pero Miller nota que el análisis del género y la sexualidad no parecen poder agotarse en el análisis de las ideologías de género y del patriarcado, pues también hay prácticas relacionadas con el amor, la intimidad y el placer que siguen marginalizadas en estos estudios. Otro aspecto que necesitaría mayor desarrollo es el análisis de las relaciones homosociales; y el uso de la categoría “homosexual” como significante de desorden social y desviación moral.

Dictadura, heavy metal y sexualidad.

2008-10-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Como mis papás eran hippies y alternativos nunca fui a ver películas Disney ni tuve Barbies. Nunca tuve vestiditos rosados tampoco. Esto tuvo repercusiones en mi identidad, desde que yo me daba cuenta de que habían niñas que eran femeninas y delicadas, mientras que yo disfrutaba de una cierta androginia; hasta que en la plaza, me preguntaban si era niño o niña antes de invitarme a jugar. Como a los 11 años tuve una etapa en la que me dio rabia ser niña, y fantaseaba con la libertad que significaba ser niño.

El heavy metal fue muy importante en términos de mi identidad en los años de la dictadura. Las imágenes de Motley Crue, Twisted Sister y Poison ofrecían un modelo de identificación sexual ambiguo y atractivo: imágenes poderosas de hombres vestidos y maquillados en forma excesiva y dramática, que desplegaban una sexualidad explosiva y transgresora. Esto me resultaba bastante más atractivo que los modelos de feminidad y masculinidad presentes tanto en la cultura oficial como en la cultura alternativa de la izquierda chilena en los '80. Sin embargo, mi afición por el heavy metal no era muy bienvenida por mis padres, quienes la miraban con bastante reprobación y perplejidad. Después de todo, eran bandas que provenían del imperio y que promovían una "rebeldía" despolitizada y de consumo.

Sin embargo, en mi adolescencia pasé de la androginia a la hiperfeminidad, y de identificarme con los rockeros, a identificarme con las groupies de los rockeros. Desde mi punto de vista, esto me reportaba cierto poder y placer en algunas situaciones, mientras que en otras me hacía sentir vulnerable y expuesta. A través de mi vida mi performance de género llegó a variar mucho, dependiendo de cómo enfrentara esta tensión.

La Dictadura, la Transición y Yo

2008-10-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

Que yo haya elegido como tema central de mi tesis las representaciones de género y sexualidad durante la transición en Chile no es ninguna casualidad. Nací en Chile en Mayo del 74, por lo tanto, a mis 34 años viví exactamente la mitad de mi vida, hasta los 16 años, en dictadura y los siguientes 16 en "transición" (y los últimos 3 en Canadá, reflexionando sobre todo esto). Mi familia, por otra parte, y su trayectoria durante la dictadura y la transición son casos ejemplares para analizar los giros discursivos, los actos y prácticas de supervivencia frente a la memoria imposible de conciliar con el presente. etc. Por otra parte, los feminismos y la sexualidad han sido ejes en mi vida de distintas formas y en variados momentos.

Mi papá y mi mamá se conocieron chicos, en el MIR, los dos estudiando en la universidad y militando. Mis papás se auto exiliaron en Colombia junto a mi hermana y yo entre el 75 y el 80. Estando allá dejaron de militar y se separaron. Mi mamá se emparejó el 83 con un dirigente de los pobladores comunista (con el que todavía vive, y que todavía es activo comunista!) y ella también militó unos años en "el Partido", pero pronto se decepcionó y luego de andar más bien "botella" políticamente, se logró reinsertar en el mundo de las ONG's, primero en la Comisión de Derechos Humanos y más tarde en el movimiento ecologista /ciudadano. Mi papá estuvo deprimido durante la mayor parte de los 80, nunca más militó ni tampoco nunca quizo hablar mucho de sus años de militancia política, al menos con migo.

Entre el 83 y el 88, mis papás me llevaron regularmente a protestas, actos, caceroleos, marchas, concentraciones, funerales y reuniones políticas. Mi padrastro comunista fue muy activo durante toda la época de las protestas y las negociaciones que derivaron en el plesbicito, incluyendo la Asamblea de la Civilidad. Estuvo preso muchas veces, primero en la "Peni", luego en "Capuchinos", junto a otros dirigentes famosos a quienes yo conocí, como Clodomiro Almeyda, Manuel Bustos y Rodolfo Seguel. Y luego vino el plesbicito del 88. "Gana la Gente" y todo eso. En la calle y el colegio eran cada vez más intensos las divisiones y los encontrones. Cuando ganó el No mi papá hizo un asado en la casa. Yo me encontré con mi mamá en la calle, en plena Alameda y nos abrazamos. Había euforia. Cuando oficialmente se terminó la dictadura, a mi padrastro le quedaban pendientes procesos judiciales en la Justicia Militar que no pasaron a Justicia Civil. Así que "el Partido" le ofreció auto exilio en Bélgica. Se fueron, y volvieron en el '92. Comenzó otra época.