Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent and influential critics of the transition in Latin America, suggests too that we cannot identify a clear-cut division between the dictatorship and the transition. In consonance with Moulian, Richard sees the democratic governments as merely the new managers of the inherited political and socioeconomic order, rather than having re-found it. Moulian and Richard agree with Willy Thayer about the true "transition" that operated in the transformation from a state-centered society to a post-state economy, where the state is not the subject but the object of the economy. More broadly, Richard is embarked in the project of criticizing the pretended "transparency" and neutrality of disciplinary language because these have been the tools that have made power, bureaucracy, and technocracy converge. Her work aims then to denounce the theatrical and staged artifices that construct meaning by presenting social reality as mono-referential....

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 secto...

The static transition to the same: "radical" critics of the transition For the intellectuals and political actors of the left who are openly critical of the Concertación and their political and cultural strategies, the difference between "transition" and "post-dictatorship" is not insignificant. "Transition" denotes movement, whereas the "post-dictatorship" designates that moment where it is retrospectively possible to look at the whole process of the coup, dictatorship and transition as part of the same movement. The transition is then the continuity, the successful final phase of the dictatorship, not its overcoming. Willy Thayer makes the argument that the transition is what happened during the dictatorship, that is, the transformation from the modern state to the market economy, where the state stopped being a referent for political activity and social change, or more broadly, as the referent for the conduction of a national projec...

While Agüero argues that the Chilean transition is still an unfinished process, leftist intellectual and academic M. A. Garretón contends that the transition is long over. Indeed, he is uncomfortable with the term itself and instead prefers to talk about the consolidation of an "incomplete democracy" and of a "stalled democratization." For Garretón, also in dialogue with transitology literature, there are three types of processes of democratization, even though they cannot be seen as existing in a "pure" state: The first ones are democratic foundations (existing for the first time). The second ones are properly transitions, "the passage from a formal military or authoritarian regime to a basically democratic regime, however incomplete or imperfect the latter may be" (42). The third type are democratic reforms. Using this typology, he goes on to affirm that the Chilean transition "ended some time ago," even though the problem of the qual...

Transitions as democratization processes: the "global trend" of the 1990's? Conventional understandings and theoretical elaborations within political science and sociology around the term “transition” are part of an extensive body of work known as “transitology.” Guillermo O'Donnell is a key theoretical referent to analyze processes of authoritarianism and democratization in Latin America, and especially cited for the case of Chile are his concepts of "bureaucratic-authoritarian state" and of "pacted transitions." Conventional theories of democratization and transition also often make reference to the so-called "third wave of democratization" proposed by Samuel Huntington which groups together processes in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. According to this literature, democratization is the major trend of the twentieth-century, and it is caused/triggered both by internal factors such as pressure coming from elites and mass movem...