The Popular Unity as a Crisis of Gender and Sexuality

In "La Unidad Popular y la Masculinidad" (1997) Margaret Power makes a broader argument about how gender shaped the ways people thought about about politics and experienced everyday life under Allende's government. While the Popular Unity mobilized ideas about masculinity to obtain support for their program, the right-wing used motherhood and ideas about male homosexuality to attack the Left. If we take into account Tinsman’s conclusion that the UP was perceived by campesino women as a period of sexual leniency and violence, it is evident that both gender and sexuality were shortcuts to signify a perceived crisis of the traditional values of Chilean society. Let us look at this closer. According to Power, at the time of the Popular Unity Chileans of all extractions and political beliefs shared long-held core ideas about gender roles that had remained unchallenged. These core ideas established that being a woman meant being a wife and a mother: a selfless and self-sacrificing person whose life gravitated around their children. And being a man meant being a provider, strong, sexually active, protective of women —particularly of their mother— and politically active. Of course, normatives ideas did not necessarily reflect the actual practices of men and women as there were many young voices, and particularly of the Left youth, who questioned these gender ideals. In this context, the program of the Popular Unity represented a huge transgression to the socio-economic status quo that was in part understood as a moral crisis, and particularly, as a crisis of traditional gender roles and the natural order of sex. A very explicit example is the way the right-wing often used accusations of (male) homosexuality to discredit their political opponents in the Left. Power argues that historically, the right-wing and conservative sectors in Chile were more effective in obtaining women support by calling on their roles as mothers and wives, which define many women's identities given Chile's traditional dominant gender ideologies. Conversely, the Left traditionally focused on organizing and politicizing men through their role as workers and heads of households, and has tended to dismiss women as "conservative" by nature. According to Power (1997), under the Popular Unity government working class women were only indirect beneficiaries of social programs through their husbands. Previous governments of the Popular Front designed their policies with the model of the male provider in mind, however, male workers constantly found themselves failing to be effective providers, which meant that they “failed” in the masculine role that the state assigned for them. Under the Popular Unity, policies focused mainly in improving the (male) workers both in their ability to be their family providers and to participate in politics, thus allowing male workers to “succeed” at masculinity. This idea is also reinforced by the gender imagery that the Popular Unity displayed, for example in publications and murals where the workers were visually portrayed as strong muscular men, and in the lyrics of popular leftist songs, where men are the protagonists of the social struggle and women, their supporters. Power demonstrates how during the elaboration of the "Terror Campaign" for the elections of 1964, the US and the CIA channeled generous funds for the dissemination of propaganda which targeted women as mothers, suggesting that communist were to kidnap their children from their families to be indoctrinated in socialist countries. In this way, the opposition to Allende mobilized effectively existing gender ideologies to create a movement of “mothers” across classes who would call for the slamming down of the socialist government, on the basis that the “family” was under attack —and not from an ideological program— Moreover, critics of this “mother’s movement” were questioned in their manhood and labelled as “faggots.” On their part, the Left discourse of the Popular Unity seems to have operated with the premise that socialism was to be constructed by a proletarian male heterosexual subject. The historical research of the Leftist press that supported Allende conducted by Acevedo and Elgueta (2008) reveals some of the characteristics of the dominant discourses on homosexuality: it was a topic treated both with humor and symbolic violence, linked to criminality and perversion, and homosexual subjects dehumanized. Moreover, the authors explore how notions of gender (in particular notions of masculinity and manhood) and sexuality (male homosexuality) were key for the legitimacy and credit of politicians. Interestingly enough, the narrative of the sexual/gender crisis was circulated again at the end of the military dictatorship. According to Olea, Grau et al. (1998) the conservative sectors (institutional representatives of the Catholic church and leaders of right-wing but also Christian Democrats associated to the opposition to Pinochet), all signaled the transition as a period of anxieties in relation to either "national values" or the "natural order" in relation to both gender and sexuality. This anxieties had to do on one hand with the end of the military rule and with the "opening" of the country to economic and cultural processes of globalization, which were seen as a possible threat to the order of the family and heterosexuality.