Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

"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 t

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

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