Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

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-sa...

In "Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile" Miller Klubock points out that we can identify two strands of gender history writing in Chile: one that pursues the recuperation of the role of women in Chilean society, and a second one that aims to analyse history from the perspective of gender ideologies and their effects in the constitution of historically specific gendered subjectivities. In this chapter, I focus on feminist historical analyses that belong to this second category. This responds to the very reason that Miller Klublock outlines as the difference between these two approaches: while the first one assumes a certain continuity of the category of ‘women’ throughout history, the second one understands this same category as historically contingent and constructed. Thus, the need to move from the history of women to the analysis of “the historical organization of gender relations and systems that determine both femininity and masculinity” (50...