On the Chilean "transition" part 4
Towards furthering a queer feminist analysis of the transition.
There is something unsettling about the literature reviewed. Garretón dedicates a line of his two-hundred-page book to mention gender relations in relation to democracy, and blatantly ignores the women's movement as a relevant actor in the dictatorship and transition. Moulian uses the term 'travesti' to designate what he sees as a farce, a lie. Politics, for the most part, is defined by the analysts of the transition as something done by respectable masculine men and politicians in the public space. Salazar seems to be one of the few intellectuals of the left that recognizes how the neoliberal economy has been productive of new kinds of female subjectivity that remain unstudied: the legions of women who sustain the political and economic system through their work, their strategies for mobilizing traditional roles or challenge them, their domestic work, as well as precarious conditions in the formal market sector. It almost seems like the academic field re-stages the masculine epic of the leftist revolution, where women are defined by their relationships to men, and where gender relations are seen as "outside" the political, as part of the natural, domestic, unimportant world. There is, then, an urgent need to analyze the sexualized and gendered ideologies that dominate the dictatorship and post-dictatorship; to consider the role of homoerotic desire, homophobia and heteronormativity in shaping these discourses; and to recover Kirkwood's insights about the links between the authoritarian domestic order and sociopolitical order.
Many feminists have been busy for almost the last two decades debating the effects of institutionalization under transition (see Tobar, Frias, and Guerrero for a more recent discussion), and have failed to follow these cues. Many others have taken pains to document the role of women in the left in their political struggle against the dictatorship and their role in the survival of communities through their grassroots organizing (see for example the work of Claudia Serrano, Marisa Weinstein, or Teresa Valdés). Only a few researchers, like Ximena Bunster and Margaret Power, have really paid attention to militarism as a gendered ideology, looking both at the involvement of women in supporting the military regime, and at the long term cultural effects of militarization on social relations. However, these analyses continue to be too few and too marginal.
A line of feminist analysis of the transition that does go beyond the institutionalization debate is the one put forward by Grau et al, who read public debates around gender and sexuality as severely constrained by the logics of transition. They conclude that all these debates have been dominated by the image of the traditional 'family' as the suturing metaphor of the wounded social body, and by the identification of traditional gender roles as national values. In the same vein, Olea explored the discursive mechanisms through which the government's efforts to introduce debate on gender equality have been identified with a totalitarian state, and a foreign ideology linked to Marxism. Still, it looks like there is a lot more to be explored about the specific intersections of nationalist discourses, gender ideologies and heteronormativity in Chile.
Richard develops useful insights to further a feminist analysis of the transition by posing 'the feminine' as a sign of disruption of a masculine economy of representation and an oppositional political identity that can be articulated in relation to the context (as opposed to an essentalist identity based on the assumption of commonality of interests between women). In a context where difference is accepted as part of a neoliberal diversity, that is, as a mere juxtaposition of differences that do not threat each other nor the larger project of social peace and reconciliation, we seem to require more mobile and fragmentary tactics. Following Richard, it is possible to formulate a queer feminist analysis of the transition and post-dictatorship in Chile. Feminist, because it will pay attention to gender ideologies and the power relations that they legitimize, along the lines of Grau and Olea's respective analyses. Queer, because it will take feminist practice as a contingent and situated practice of interrogation of heteronormative discourses. This kind of analysis would engage in politics in the same vein that Pedro Lemebel rejects the representation of a clean, respectable and masculine global gay identity, by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS.
It is relevant from this perspective to look at some of the initiatives that are already happening in different spaces in terms of multiplying and transforming the meanings assigned to gender and sexuality. In a rather academic level (but also looking to influence public policies) the constitution of a network of studies in masculinities, red de Masculinidades y Equidad de Género (www.eme.cl), is productively making links between hegemonic masculinities and domestic violence and militarism in the region, bringing together militarist ideology and everyday patterns of gender relations anchored in many countries in Latin America. More of a cultural manifestation, there was recently a political performance called the "Contra-Parada Militar" organized by teenagers of anarchist inspiration, hundreds of whom marched as military clowns in parallel to the official military parade, questioning the link between hegemonic masculinity, nationalism, homophobia, domestic and war violence (see the convocatory for last year in electronic newspaper "El Ciudadano".
There is something unsettling about the literature reviewed. Garretón dedicates a line of his two-hundred-page book to mention gender relations in relation to democracy, and blatantly ignores the women's movement as a relevant actor in the dictatorship and transition. Moulian uses the term 'travesti' to designate what he sees as a farce, a lie. Politics, for the most part, is defined by the analysts of the transition as something done by respectable masculine men and politicians in the public space. Salazar seems to be one of the few intellectuals of the left that recognizes how the neoliberal economy has been productive of new kinds of female subjectivity that remain unstudied: the legions of women who sustain the political and economic system through their work, their strategies for mobilizing traditional roles or challenge them, their domestic work, as well as precarious conditions in the formal market sector. It almost seems like the academic field re-stages the masculine epic of the leftist revolution, where women are defined by their relationships to men, and where gender relations are seen as "outside" the political, as part of the natural, domestic, unimportant world. There is, then, an urgent need to analyze the sexualized and gendered ideologies that dominate the dictatorship and post-dictatorship; to consider the role of homoerotic desire, homophobia and heteronormativity in shaping these discourses; and to recover Kirkwood's insights about the links between the authoritarian domestic order and sociopolitical order.
Many feminists have been busy for almost the last two decades debating the effects of institutionalization under transition (see Tobar, Frias, and Guerrero for a more recent discussion), and have failed to follow these cues. Many others have taken pains to document the role of women in the left in their political struggle against the dictatorship and their role in the survival of communities through their grassroots organizing (see for example the work of Claudia Serrano, Marisa Weinstein, or Teresa Valdés). Only a few researchers, like Ximena Bunster and Margaret Power, have really paid attention to militarism as a gendered ideology, looking both at the involvement of women in supporting the military regime, and at the long term cultural effects of militarization on social relations. However, these analyses continue to be too few and too marginal.
A line of feminist analysis of the transition that does go beyond the institutionalization debate is the one put forward by Grau et al, who read public debates around gender and sexuality as severely constrained by the logics of transition. They conclude that all these debates have been dominated by the image of the traditional 'family' as the suturing metaphor of the wounded social body, and by the identification of traditional gender roles as national values. In the same vein, Olea explored the discursive mechanisms through which the government's efforts to introduce debate on gender equality have been identified with a totalitarian state, and a foreign ideology linked to Marxism. Still, it looks like there is a lot more to be explored about the specific intersections of nationalist discourses, gender ideologies and heteronormativity in Chile.
Richard develops useful insights to further a feminist analysis of the transition by posing 'the feminine' as a sign of disruption of a masculine economy of representation and an oppositional political identity that can be articulated in relation to the context (as opposed to an essentalist identity based on the assumption of commonality of interests between women). In a context where difference is accepted as part of a neoliberal diversity, that is, as a mere juxtaposition of differences that do not threat each other nor the larger project of social peace and reconciliation, we seem to require more mobile and fragmentary tactics. Following Richard, it is possible to formulate a queer feminist analysis of the transition and post-dictatorship in Chile. Feminist, because it will pay attention to gender ideologies and the power relations that they legitimize, along the lines of Grau and Olea's respective analyses. Queer, because it will take feminist practice as a contingent and situated practice of interrogation of heteronormative discourses. This kind of analysis would engage in politics in the same vein that Pedro Lemebel rejects the representation of a clean, respectable and masculine global gay identity, by showing the multiplicity of particular lived experiences of "locas" and other queers marked not only by their sexuality but also by poverty, ethnicity, and AIDS.
It is relevant from this perspective to look at some of the initiatives that are already happening in different spaces in terms of multiplying and transforming the meanings assigned to gender and sexuality. In a rather academic level (but also looking to influence public policies) the constitution of a network of studies in masculinities, red de Masculinidades y Equidad de Género (www.eme.cl), is productively making links between hegemonic masculinities and domestic violence and militarism in the region, bringing together militarist ideology and everyday patterns of gender relations anchored in many countries in Latin America. More of a cultural manifestation, there was recently a political performance called the "Contra-Parada Militar" organized by teenagers of anarchist inspiration, hundreds of whom marched as military clowns in parallel to the official military parade, questioning the link between hegemonic masculinity, nationalism, homophobia, domestic and war violence (see the convocatory for last year in electronic newspaper "El Ciudadano".
It'll be interesting to see how all these elements will play out in the new political context provided by the victory of extremely conservative right-wing forces in the recent presidential elections -clearly not just the end of the transition from dictatorship to democracy (a very 'guarded' democracy,as Portales put it), but a serious setback in whatever progress may have taken place in the areas of gender and sexuality in the past 20 years-
ReplyDeleteIn my view, what we are most likely to see is the strengthening of the family as the supreme national value, where women's first and ultimate concern should be children and homemaking, but alongside this image of abnegation and virtue, women are "sold" in the mass media as sexual objects from a very early age...