Las mujeres de Pinochet


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".

Comments

  1. JonJuly 19, 2009 at 1:47 AM

    "El régimen militar no inventa nada."

    Hmmm. Do you agree with this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Manuela Valle-CastroJuly 23, 2009 at 11:19 PM

    I think it does invent something specific, but it builds on long settled images of decent and proper women to mobilize the conservative idea of 'the Chilean woman' as a model of femininity within a nationalist and neoliberal discourse. Like Tinsman (2001) and Rosemblatt (2001) indicate, both the Popular Front and right-wing discourses of national progress in the past had included rather conventional roles for women, linking them to the domestic space and to their identities as mothers and wives. Later, the Unidad Popular does not seem to have challenged radically these ideas about gender and sexuality (even though, I am not completely sure and would like to read more on this yet).

    The military’s discourse recovers these notions of glorified mothers and constructs the opposite as the degenerate loose women that are involved in politics. Also, it expands the doctrine of maternity to the public sphere: the volunteers are the public mothers, and this is the proper way for women to participate in the public space (Bunster 1988). This is the context also for the articulation of a mourning by resisting-motherhood within the practices the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos (AFDD), see the performance of the “Cueca Sola”.

    Also, the dictatorship created new conditions of possibility for the production of a kind of female subjectivity that is specific to this period, but as Salazar (2002) indicates, has been an understudied subject: the historical experience and subjectivity of a whole new class of women who were massively incorporated to the new industries of financial companies, the retail sector, and the sex industry.

    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