Women, sexual rights and citizenship

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.