The Institutionalization of the Women's Movement in Chile

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.

Comments

  1. JonJuly 19, 2009 at 2:23 AM

    "women do not constitute an homogeneus group with similar interests."

    But your initial points seem to suggest that "interclass solidarity" among women is possible; how so if they do not share similar interests?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Manuela Valle-CastroJuly 23, 2009 at 10:09 PM

    The tension about what are the grounds for any feminist solidarity is a constant that crosses almost all the feminist literature I have reviewed: is it a pre-given set of common interests determined universally? Are these interests constituted in every particular historical context? How are alliances possible between women, in the name of 'women'? History shows some concrete examples where these alliances have been possible and even effective to some degree, although it also makes evident the fractures these alliances experience, the conflictive interests among women, and the contradictory effects of identity politics. For those that see women's interest as given priori, there is always that problem of how to deal with these fractures, with the intrinsic conflicts within 'women', and with the fact that not all women develop a critical consciousness about their oppression: in Chile's history of feminism and women's movements, is exemplary how some women with relative class and racial privilege have articulated a project of emancipation that rests on the oppression or exploitation of other women's labour, what Salazar's (2002) chapter addresses. Likewise, Chilean feminists that depart from the premise of universal oppression of women by men, have long struggled with what to do about the mobilization of right-wing women, including Kirkwood (1986) and Gaviola et al. (1994).

    Lynn (2001) makes an argument for the use of identity politics in feminist and indigenous struggles and of 'strategic essentialism', projecting already made images of women in El Salvador as mothers. This is a recurrent case in many other countries, where women have resisted to state violence by invoking the already socially accepted image of the mother in their political practice. Many authors are also aware of the contradictory effects of identity politics in relation for instance, to nationalist and heteronormative narratives.

    But many of these authors also see that women can be considered also a historical and political category to be invoked. Kirkwood even establishes that women is a 'becoming subject', (sujeto que deviene) a subject that is constitued by patriarchal oppression. However, because she supposes that the oppression is universal, all women should develop a 'conciencia contestataria' or a rebellious consciousness.

    The question remains what are the grounds for interclass solidarity or any other kind of alliances between women, however we decide to define who is included in this category (an issue that unlike Lynn suggests, goes far beyond academic exercise, see the recent conflict regarding a transphobic only women pharmacy in Vancouver).

    I reserve the rest of this answer for when I complete reading my 'decolonizing feminism' section.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feminisms and women's struggles in LA

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 i...
Read more

Queer Latinidad

Image
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 ...
Read more

A house is not always a home.

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...
Read more