With not one step back, one hundred steps forward, this year's international women's day in Chile marched into the inaugural week of the new reactionary government. More than the coinciding dates, what matches, is the feminist perspective as an antithesis – and hopefully antidote – to the nation envisioned by new president Kast: conservative values, dispensable rights and authoritarian nostalgia, a restored patria. In the face of exclusionary politics, the commitment against science and humanities, and the overall defensive political climate already displayed in the first months in office, feminism could bring about alternative imaginaries and articulate a political offensive able to challenge dominant narratives. Feminist collectives, memory and human rights organizations in Chile seem to be proposing just that, starting with remembering and defending the importance of the act of protest rooted in feminist history and so appealing to memory as a key lens for resistance – challenging both the dictatorial melancholy and the deferring to a better future always yet to come.
Screenshot of television slot of the campaign of the second constitutional draft
Around the globe, reactionary governments tend to jeopardize not only women's rights and the sustainability of life, but also a more structural feminist vision: that of a pluralistic coexistence of peoples, the fight for collective freedoms,the defense of otherness and the recognition of oneself as an affected part of society as a whole and actively responsible for its shaping. Therefore, taking a moment to revisit the landscape prior to the conservative reaction can be worthwhile, since reactionary sparks don't light up in a vacuum. Besides, by revisiting it, we can reinterpret agency, impacts and the immediate outcomes transformative drives can have.
Hell: The social revolt vs. la copia feliz del Edén
What to immunize against
Since Pinochet's dictatorship, Chile has been stage for extreme neoliberalism encrusting itself for decades in the economy, politics and mindset, narrowing the experience and ideas of social rights and freedoms. However, Neoliberalism's success in distorting people's ethical compass through guilt (and a sense of unredeemable indebtedness) – making everyone feel individually responsible for the material conditions they bear as personal moral failing – has experienced interruptions by a sense of being part of an active and mutually vulnerable collective. Following the feminist May (2018) and several mass protests in previous years, during the social revolt of 2019 exuberant counter-imaginaries were displayed in public space and the dominant order was called into question.
Drawing on that recent memory, on the power of experiencing collective imagining and of alliance in difference, could be the very dike against the far right's immunizing mantra. One could regard1 the power of gathering, which Butler describes as an assembly embodying “a collaborative resistance to exclusionary politics through shared vulnerability and persistence”, expressed in translations of the collective for the collective, interwoven with performances, choired chantings, streetwalls used as public blogs, resignifying identification and the idea of a dignified life, of alternative conditions for living instead of just surviving. Manifesting it had been enough to think that – after this – everything had to and would be radically different. Stating that there is nothing left to lose because what had been experienced was not a good living — or küme mogen in Mapudungún language –, people engaged in collectively outlining new livable minimums and freedoms in public spaces and self-convoked councils. A massive daring leap of hope toward the possibility of an alternative that later on got inhibited, with a somewhat numbing effect and then narrative erasure.
The movement ebbed after the political decision to create a constitutional convention and came to a halt due to the pandemic lock down. With the masses taken from the streets and locked away, the retake by the country’s few traditional owners of power, media and normativity managed to submerge social climate under perceived insecurity and false consciousness regained dominance. Actually, managing memory through very curated newscasts has been instrumental for redirecting the “explosion” (that's the common expression for the upheaval: estallido social) of demands for social change poured out in public space, towards siloed implosions of social fear poured into people's homes, where one should lock the door and immunize from outside dangers – the protest, the coronavirus and thenafter: foreign forces and criminality in general.
When returning to public life, the follow up on the transformational process were presidential campaigns with the victory of a new left (2021), the wait for a new constitutional draft and for whether the proposal would pass its referendum (2022). The expectation of a replacement for Pinochet's constitution – besides that historical act in itself – focused on constitutional norms holding back social, educational, environmental, indigenous and women's rights that would be unlocked and rewritten by the world's most democratically designed assembly, composed of 50% women, reserved seats for indigenous representatives, and independents. The outcome was a new constitution proposal, containing guidelines for deconcentrating power structures in political, territorial and natural resource administration and distribution, posting new systems of social, environmental, indigenous and feminist justice. Feminist angles in the proposal also included sexual and reproductive rights – a biopolitical perspective on the right to decide freely over one's body–, comprehensive sexual education, formal care work recognition, the right to a life free of gender-based violence, guiding principles of parity democracy with an inclusive state model and intersectional approaches to working rights and on protection against structural violence, based on the recognition of multilayered marginalisations of rural and indigenous women and LGBTIQA+ people.
Again, all of it was outmaneuvered in public debate mediated by the media. In the name of order and patriotism (as in that what is owned by the ones of your own), but in reality property was to be kept by its keepers, changes were to be demonized and order evoked –or as General Yañez put it “sin orden no hay patria”. For example, the complex proposal that the State of Chile should be plurinational became the perfect prophecy of chaos and an imminent threat to sovereignty; it was one of the most dissected concepts to fall prey to ridicule, racism and nationalism. Maintaining the status quo of social and territorial inequities did not truly make it into public debate once the narrative was installed. By the time of the referendum “everything needing to change and having nothing to lose” had morphed significantly. Strong campaigns against the proposal had bet on making it clear people should not only be content with what little one had, but afraid to lose it if the new constitution were to pass. For instance with the shadow campaign “You could lose your home” viraling throughout social media, atavistic fears were weaponized, triggered by the crafted threat of losing one's core unit of shelter – and in its expanded version: the homeland. This constitutional process ended with the referendual rejection of its text proposal in 2022, having depressive sociocultural effects, political postures backfolded and reshuffled.
The images of 2019 have been continuously portrayed in terms of a violent riot, reinterpreting the disruption of conventional order as a threat of chaos and destruction to the nation and its peace. The thing is, narrative reduction comes not without a complexity to apply it to, leaving out the social coordination, collective deliberation instances and foremost: the causality between the demonstrations and structural inequality and injustice. As for the constitutional intent, the assembly members and the leftist government were to blame for daring and for failing. This reading has in part also been adopted by many who, having hoped for change, resent or even regret having had such high hopes, only to see them being shattered. After this lived experience, hope in structural transformations appeared more as a pointless undertaking to bring up or engage with. In turn, the ongoing broadcasting of the urgency to tackle insecurity has proven effective in taming attention and uncertainties.
Hellborn: Phantoms vs. patriotic real chileans
Who to immunize against
The interruption of order was streamlined in the public debate, social demands reduced to caricatures and violent events enlarged to criminalize the revolt altogether, while also birthing the main phantasms for the rising agenda of the far-right. So not only has the revolt been portrayed as a chaotic mistake, but also the drafting of a new - more pluralistic- constitution as a naive intent to turn the country into a circus. Instead, Chile was to be better off abiding by the old constitution – imposed during the dictatorship – whose creator by the way, has recently been revived as the idol of the now new president in the same speech where he stated “The more we talk about rights, the more freedom is restricted” along with opposing to “radical environmentalism”, “extreme feminism” and “radical indigenism”. Social movements and communities are instrumentalized in a fantastic turn on political and media platforms to build the case against these phantasms who allegedly seek to destroy the “true chileans” – and in an inverted logic need to be destroyed to safeguard the nation from the supposed evils that haunt “us”. It has even become necessary to remember what those social movements and communities are and what they stand for, or else it might seem as if their existence was solely that of being a phantom – and in depicting that, they serve to mobilize current government supporter´s fascist passions.2
Normalizing a constant state of alert, induced by morally shocking statements, rights being stripped and social programs defunded, is a numbing artillery and also seems to be playbook defense for predators. It tries to make us feel an ever present danger, that kind which suspends any reflex of building community. On the contrary, the idea is to prioritize defending “ourselves”, swapping the vessel of violence we should then immune from: the foreign invasion, the threat of difference, wherever it may come from—immigrants or Mapuche—the protests or the "wokism" and all the criminalizable "isms" of Kast. This construction of “common sense" deserves counter-narratives, collective action and for us to continue to play the offense they’re so offended by. Feminists have been well aware of cycles, backlash, perseverance, to not interpret struggle as failure. Besides, that lens, which has historically sought to see beyond the patriarchal order and to hack it, exists despite enduring being publicly reduced to a disobedient deviation or whim, even as a threat to peace. It exists, knowing that neither electoral nor media's intolerance of complexity will validate them along the way.
Not immune
Planetary challenged by the fear of pluralism, we require adopting a logic of plasticity instead of bordering, a transnational solidarity beyond the nation state’s formal framework. In gathering, insisting on transformation, envisioning its potentials beyond democratic minimums and progressive linearity, we need to go beyond univocal understandings of oppression, acknowledging complex, varied, and even dissonance trajectories of different communities. Furthermore, communities and people’s existence can be recognized without relying on authorization of central authorities. The same goes for information channels and sources. If the centralized political, cultural and communicational systems are jamming polyphony, decentralizing our attention, making nominal margins porous and activating peripheral spaces might unfold new maps to gather on.