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Showing posts from March 21, 2010

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

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"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