Gender struggles in the Chilean Agrarian Reform.

Tinsman, Heidi. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. (2002)

Tinsman explores the ways that two decades of Agrarian Reform (1950-1973) shaped meanings about gender and sexuality in rural Chile, and more broadly reflects on the ways that gender and sexuality are mobilized to enable or oppose political projects. The Agrarian Reform was a contested negotiation between state discourses (which were in turn also contested within the state) and the actors that exercised their agency, accommodating and stretching these meanings for themselves. In their everyday lives, campesinos negotiated meanings over respectability and equality with their bosses, partners, and children. Patriarchy operates then as a series of multiple, local arrangements that make it heterogeneous and contradictory rather than a universal monolithic system of domination.

Even though the Agrarian Reform operated directly on men as heads of households for land distribution and technical training, the Reform also promoted a rhetoric of gender mutualism, solidarity, and equality that women used to negotiate and attain their own goals. For instance, ideals of masculinity circulated under the reform expected responsibility from men, and women used this to have more power within domestic relationships. From the perspective of the state, the national project required a male subject dominated by rationality, a provider, responsible worker. From the perspective of rural women, these arguments were useful to demand from their husbands the fulfilling of their needs and protection. Marriage was then perceived as an exchange where male and female actors had to play their part adequately. In this context, it became central to the project of Chilean modernization to discipline unruly sexualities, such as husbands infidelity and young women's promiscuity. Despite the evidence that women had agency, they could not do away or subvert meanings over respectable femininity, and altogether, the Agrarian Reform not only left male authority over women in the household unchallenged, but rather relied on the patriarchal family for the creation of the new rural social order. However, the legacy that the Agrarian Reform left was key to shape the rural activism under Pinochet's dictatorship.

Three other aspects of Tinsman's analysis are of my interest:

First, for Tinsman it is through sexuality that gender meanings are assigned. Men's control over women's sexuality, was key to assert masculinity and define women's proper gender identity.

Second, she shows how racialized notions are used as markers of class difference. While the governments of the popular front promoted a discourse about "la raza chilena" as a myth of mestizaje, in their daily interactions, campesinos and patrones relied on notions like indios, rotos, chinitas y gringos to establish racial hierarchies. Tinsman argues that these racialized notions that coded relationships of service were a legacy of colonial times. Racialized women (chinitas or indias) were in turn coded as sexually available, so sexuality, gender and race were deployed in these notions in ways that made them inseparable. At the same, time, modernization as a process operated over the opposition of barbaric pasts to civilized futures, so that campesinos represented a group that needed to be educated to be incorporated in the national project.

Finally, Tinsman timely challenges the ideas that a) all women opposed Allende and b) that the Unidad Popular altogether ignored women and/or the issue of gender. Tinsman shows how this was a much more complex and nuanced process, in which both feminist men and women struggled to incorporate a more radical transformation of gender relationships to the socialist project, while at the same time, many actors within the UP, including Allende exalted women only as sacrificial mothers, wives and companions, or even daughters. The socialist project had to defend its program to change gender relations and empower women while at the same time demonstrate that it was not "anti-family".