Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

By Lessie Jo Frazier

Desired States challenges the notion that in some cultures, sex and sexuality have become privatized and located in individual subjectivity rather than in public political practices and institutions. Instead, the book contends that desire is a central aspect of political culture. Based on fieldwork and archival research, Frazier explores the gendered and sexualized dynamics of political culture in Chile, an imperialist context, asking how people connect with and become mobilized in political projects in some cases or, in others, become disaffected or are excluded to varying degrees. The book situates the state in a rich and changing context of transnational and localized movements, imperialist interests, geo-political conflicts, and market forces to explore the broader struggles of desiring subjects, especially in those dimensions of life that are explicitly sexual and amorous: free love movements, marriage, the sixties’ sexual revolution in Cold War contexts, prostitution policies, ideas about men’s gratification, the charisma of leaders, and sexual/domestic violence against women.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813597232

Book preview

DESIRED STATES

DESIRED STATES

Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

LESSIE JO FRAZIER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Frazier, Lessie Jo, 1966– author.

Title: Desired states: sex, gender, and political culture in Chile / Lessie Jo Frazier.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019037921 | ISBN 9780813597218 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813597225 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813597232 (epub) | ISBN 9780813597249 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813597256 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex customs—Chile—History. | Sex—Political aspects—Chile—History. | Sex roles—Political aspects—Chile—History. | Chile—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ18.C5 F73 2020 | DDC 305.30983—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037921

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Lessie Jo Frazier

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory: Fernando Coronil, Angélica Gimpel-Smith,

Pat & Piner Stevens, and always Mandy

In gratitude: Phil, Lynn, Richard, Demaris, and Deborah

In friendship: Pati, Gabriel, Marisol, and Chila

Contents

Introduction

1    Desiring the Working Class: A Spanish Feminist, a Bishop, an Oligarchic State, and Worker Sexuality, circa 1913

2    Desiring the Patriarchal State through Military Discipline in Cold War Prison Camps, 1947 and 1973

3    Sex and the New Man in Socialist Revolution: Ideologies and Practices, circa 1970

4    Gendered Erotics in the Space of Death: From Military Dictatorship to Civilian Market-State, circa 2000

Conclusion and Epilogue: The Desire to Govern and the Governing of Desire

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

DESIRED STATES

Introduction

Regard the cover of this book (figure 1). Heart, fruit, vulva. Densely, delicately embroidered in red, purple, green, blue, and peach thread on white cloth. The stem evokes connectedness, the leaves transformative energy, the concentric curves of open fruit … wounds and ripe passion. Food, sex, emotion, vital nutrients. Sensuous work.

The artist, Patricia Ruiz Delgado, worked dozens of such hearts. Each embroidered heart of the sixteen in her traveling exhibit Corazones corresponds to the amateur photograph of a smiling woman whose life was ended by murder, a fact noted succinctly at the end of the poetic passage posted just below each photograph along with a poem, curated or written by the artist.¹ Together they form a triptych—heart, portrait, and poem, mounted on burlap—that decries the crime and demands the right to a passion-filled life. Ni una menos, y nada menos.² On exhibit for many weeks in the Chilean National Archives (2017; figure 2), sponsored there by the women’s history archival department, the hearts called, from within and without, for the state to be held accountable: "Not one [woman] less, their replete design suggesting nothing less will do."³

In that moment, in that space, this artist called out the state not only for its more or less accepted mandate to ensure the basic conditions of life but also for the conditions of possibility for multivalently desiring subjects. An apt instance, for me, showing political desire as a robustly expansive category: the method, aesthetic, and substance of feminist emancipatory projects.

There is more. This desire is embedded in dense social relations that give it valence. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the national capital, Santiago, during a military dictatorship that lasted nearly two decades, Ruiz Delgado’s inquisitiveness led her to seek out the flourishing feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) offering workshops (talleres) on everything from political theory and the arts to practical and hopefully remunerative skills.⁴

It is perhaps fitting that the publication of this book coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of my first wintry visit to Chile. It was then that I met Patricia—Pati—in the downtown artisans’ fair where she shared a tented stall, selling leather goods with a smooth, soft camel finish onto which she’d painted tiny folk images and scenes.⁵ Bending under the wood counter, I welcomed the warmth of the stall, where we sat on low stools drinking Brazilian yerba mate (quite cosmopolitan and bohemian in the Chile of that era) and talking anti-imperialism (in the wake of the first Gulf War), feminism, poetry, and human rights. These were heady topics in those first months after the return to civilian governance. Pati supported her brother’s activism in Movilh, a prominent Chilean gay rights organization of the era.⁶ Later, she enrolled in a feminist project to train women to enter the fisheries industry, a field in which she did successfully work for a while, until her political commitments drew her into the grassroots work of transnational women’s NGOs. Over time, she came to embrace the category lesbian, as it emerged in that context, as one that affirms her creativity and commitments. In recent years she has deepened her creative labors, culminating in the Corazones project.

Figure 1   Entrelazadas (Entwined), digital photograph of cotton thread and fabric textile, embroidered by hand. From the exhibition Corazones Ni Una Menos, Patricia Ruiz Delgado. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2   Patricia Ruiz Delgado’s Corazones Ni Una Menos exhibition, Chilean National Archives, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

As much as her artwork, Pati’s biographical trajectory—as an organic intellectual—parallels the concerns of this book: a questioning of boundaries between the intimate and the political, between needs and desires.

---

Sex and politics. Both common sense and the media tell us they are linked, but do we understand how and why? Could it be that political projects themselves—not to mention political actors—are erotically charged in ways that intersect with and at times shape the desires, sexual practices, and very parameters of their constituencies?

Modernist ideals of political culture have directed these political projects and their incumbent desires toward the polis. This orientation, which in my time frame has largely been toward the state, including the military, comes with a significant cost, however, and with challenges from subordinate sectors. In Desired States, I contrast the tensions around state-centered political desires at particular moments and consider issues of exclusion and excess in terms of how and for whom the orientation of desire works at given conjunctures. How do people connect with and become mobilized in political projects, and how do they become disaffected or excluded? How do spaces for alternative orientations emerge?

This book looks to Chile to examine these questions. You might ask, why Chile? For me, these theoretical questions can be answered best in relation to the particular struggles of people encompassed under the nation-state (as an arbitrary political unit). However, in Euro-U.S. scholarship, places like Chile are often mobilized as cases or examples of purportedly generalizable models. Indeed, Chile is a place long on the world stage as a laboratory and example for political ideologies and economic models. In recent times, the country has been seen as the neoliberal darling, the Chilean Miracle, the Jaguar of Latin America.⁷ It is also the first country in the Americas to elect a woman president in her own right, then reelect her for a (nonconsecutive) second term. It has a rich history of workers’ organizations as well as cross-class projects successfully attaining state power and governance. Chile’s vibrant political culture offers a useful window onto the production of desire, especially given the country’s curious status as simultaneously geopolitically exemplary and marginal.

Moreover, Latin America is an interesting context in which to consider political cultures and projects, since scholarship on state formation in this region has been particularly strong, as have efforts to engage with postcolonial theories of political subjectivity.⁸ Chile specifically has been cited for the early and continuous centrality of the state in its political projects, starting in the early nineteenth century. It is also known for its multiparty political system, the importance of gender within that system, the prominence of religion in political life, a widespread and longstanding love of poetry and theater, and its ongoing struggles around fascist tendencies that manifest in alliances between military states and imperialist-oligarchic capital, which have butted up against strong populist/leftist social movements.

In this book, I argue that desire structures the necessary affective linkages of political culture—the formations, interpellations, constellations, and practices of desiring subjects oriented in relation to political projects—for political actors, major and marginalized, dominating and dissenting.⁹ I use the ethnographer’s tool kit to explore political passion, charismatic appeal, collective euphoria, and even apathy, relying on context and close analysis to convey a sense of what it might have been like to live it.

The dimensions of desire I prioritize here are relative and relational orientations to the nation-state as the paradigmatic political formation since the early nineteenth century, understood as intrinsically gendered and racially marked. Anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga posits the state as a screen for political desires and identifications as well as fears and urges scholars to find out how the state becomes a social subject in everyday life, [by] examining the subjective experience of state power and tracing its effects on territories, populations, and bodies to consider the ways violence, sexuality, and desire work in the intimate spaces of state power.¹⁰ Far from assuming that the nation-state constitutes the only possible orientation of desire, I situate the state in relation to other sociocultural and political phenomena, such as transnational and more localized movements, workers’ collectivities, imperialist interests, geopolitical conflicts, and the market. I situate political culture in relation to broader practices of desiring subjects, especially those explicitly sexual and amorous dimensions of life.

It has (perhaps) become axiomatic that in dominant cultures, sex and sexuality have been privatized and located in individual subjectivity, rather than in public, political practices and collectivities.¹¹ In this book I embark upon a critical rethinking of that axiom by looking at desire—still foregrounding subjectivity and sexuality—as a core part of political culture. In oblique relation to the state, desire is enacted in multiple modalities, spaces, encounters, and struggles.

My first book, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present, drew on historical and anthropological methodologies to consider the importance of affect in political culture—especially with respect to nation-state formation—vis-à-vis issues of memory. Memory, I found, was one element in the dynamics of affective politics: particular kinds of political projects require particular affective modalities to mobilize support and participation; these, in turn, produce sensibilities that structure political projects particular to that time and place. In other words, political projects discipline actors as they form constituencies of members and exclude others in that same definitional process.

Extending this exploration of affect and ideology in political cultures, here I posit these modalities as forms and practices that are always gendered and sexualized. My use of the term affect follows Sara Ahmed’s critique of that line of theory that reserves the term for pre- or supra-discursive modes (as with Foucault’s use of pleasure), distinguished from emotion as fully discursive (as is desire for Foucault). Ahmed charges that this bifurcation reinscribes mind/body dualism.¹² Instead, Ahmed asserts affect as an ample category spanning emotions, articulated as such, and other embodied dispositions. Because the ways that affect and ideology cross spaces and bodies often seem disparate, foregrounding gender and sexuality allows us to see how political projects necessarily entail the shaping and living of affective modes.

The framework I offer here explores structures and practices of desire, understood in relation to and constituting fields of power. Desire moves across ideology, culture, representation, and practices.¹³ Need, gratification, and demand direct affect at the intersections of both explicit ideologies and unarticulated spaces and practices in the formation of political subjectivity. This formation delimits what should be desired, what is open for contestation, and what it means to be ethically and materially committed to a project.

Using this broad understanding of desire, I build on the scholarship on gendered affective politics, capitalist nation-state formation (particularly neocolonial ones), and political ideology, especially as interpreted through cultural studies, transnational feminist and queer theory. Thinking about desire in relation to fields of power puts current theorists in dialogue with a set of key interlocutors of prior eras. I look at theoretical works such as those of Herbert Marcuse (1960s) and Chilean feminist theorist Julieta Kirkwood (1980s) as both emergent and transcendent: both in terms of how such theorists can elucidate the historical moments from which they sprung and what they offer contemporary thinking on the problem of desire and political culture. Moreover, I heed anthropologist Yael Navaro’s call to reinvigorate affect studies through concepts emergent from fieldwork.¹⁴ My fieldwork in Chile has compelled me to think about desire via a framework that refuses to separate discourses from material practices, affect from ideology, pleasure from power.

My ethnographic and archival research in Chile has spanned three decades. I have drawn sources from Chilean state documents; collections in Mexico, the United States, and the Netherlands; newspapers; protagonists’ personal papers; archives of human rights and women’s organizations; works of literature; and oral histories and participant observation conducted with human rights groups, women’s organizations, and other civic associations. Each of the book’s chapters depicts sets of contending actors, both individuals and groups, to explore the changing shape of political conflict and activism. Although these events, groups, and individuals largely are known—and some are even legendary—in Chilean history and political culture they suffer from a lack of specific cultural and historical analysis. Each chapter analyzes cultural texts (film, literature, memoir) and juxtaposes them against ethnographic and archival sources in relation to key theoretical texts. Cultural artifacts such as poetry, short stories, and film are exceedingly fruitful sources for analyzing the terrains of affect in political cultures. My analysis of each in its context brings together economic, political, social, and cultural factors, which enables me to approximate the worldviews of the people in whom I am interested. Such an ethnographic method is uniquely suited to the historical and contemporary analysis of desire in political culture.

I hope this kind of interdisciplinary methodology enables conversation across disciplines, even while it must adapt conventional methods in ways that ultimately render the resulting work quite distinct. Different scholarly fields not only vary in what counts as evidence and how we recognize it but also diverge in their expository and interpretive modes, particularly in the ratio and relation between context and key instances of the topic at hand.¹⁵ Bertell Ollman exhorts, What are needed are concepts to ‘think’ people in all their concreteness, people as they are and become, and not as they have been carved up by competing disciplines.¹⁶ To explain, literary critics may be surprised to find a short story used as a theoretical frame in one instance, while in another it serves as both evidence and the substance of the interpersonal dynamics of political activists, constituted through performative acts of writing and forensics. Political scientists, cultural geographers, and historical sociologists may forgive the use of theory as explanatory frame rather than testable, generalizable model, while social historians may be game for entering the conceptual space between what documents say explicitly and the interpretive readings they nonetheless afford. Cultural anthropologists may detect a Boasian heartbeat in the centering of ethnographic sources as a point of departure for my engagement with other methods and sources. Latin Americanists may note a commitment to the specificities of Chile and the work of scholars based outside the United States, even as the book prioritizes conceptual questions relevant beyond the case at hand.

The experimentation that is Chile—a place often seen on the world stage as a remote laboratory for twentieth-century political ideologies, and for ostensibly post-ideological market innovation that extended into the twenty-first century—entailed reshaping the contours of an otherwise remarkably constant and stable state. This study spans the so-called heroic period of pre-1930s labor history, the populist era of the 1930s through the 1960s, and the period of dictatorship and transition to democracy from the 1970s to the first decade of civilian rule. In doing so, this book bridges the scholarship on old and new social movements, showing how potential social categories and cultural scripts for political action were shaped by the struggles of the divergent actors themselves. The country has served, in the words of political analysts, as the undisputed role model for Latin America and the Global South—as it was conceived in past decades by global bodies such as the World Bank, the UN, or the International Monetary Fund, and consequentially, in many respects, by the nation itself.¹⁷ Chile’s story is that of a political culture with dramatic expansions and contractions in forms and scales of mobilization and participation that has by turns drawn on, contained, and quashed alternative dimensions of political affinity. Former president Michelle Bachelet understood this when, in her second term, she audaciously announced policies that can change cultures.¹⁸

Changing political culture is an ambitious project to say the least. Among other challenges, Chile faces the ongoing behind-the-scenes power of the Freemasons and the radical right-wing Catholic secret society Opus Dei. These contrast astonishingly with Chile’s vibrant multiparty political culture. Political commentators anticipate that whether the nation succeeds in its attempted post-neoliberal transition or not, Chile will retain its distinctive position as one of the most enigmatic nations in the hemisphere.¹⁹

Chile can be cast as enigmatic in part because of the particularly intrinsic connection between nation and state in Chile: since independence in the early nineteenth century, this postcolonial state took on the semblance of having a stable, coherent, and enduring subjectivity of its own. The state, thusly animated, obscures the ways in which it expresses the relations of atomized individuals to society as a whole; in Ollman’s gloss on Marx, the capitalist state is alienated social power/illusory community. It follows that politics is an enactment of these social relations: Whenever people relate to one another as members of the general community, that is as citizens—no matter what they do or want—they can be said to be engaging in politics.²⁰ The particular meanings and relationships instantiated by these practices can be signaled by the term political culture. In this case, the Chilean state, as the predominant point of orientation, intensified with the expansion of the political system from the 1930s on, became the ostensible object of desire in all political and rhetorically apolitical contestations.

Feminist political scientists have regarded the interplay of gender and sexual politics in Chilean political culture as a special characteristic. One of the most Catholic countries in the world, Chile only recently legalized divorce and abortion in limited cases. Useful for scholars interested in voting behaviors was Chile’s decades-long insistence on having men and women vote in separate ballot boxes, and, as noted above, it is the first country in the Americas to elect a female head of state running on her own merit rather than kinship to a male politician, intent on achieving gender equity within the state from top to bottom.²¹ Sociologist Jyoti Puri has argued that the regulation of sexuality constitutes an ideal arena through which states enact themselves as states, hence her concept sexual states.²² If so, then the relative solidity and stability of the Chilean nation-state may directly correlate to its tenacious, severe disciplining of sexuality and enforcement of propriety across political regimes.²³

In modeling the sexual state, Puri has less to say, however, on how the politics of desire and the pleasure of doing politics are imbricated in political cultures, especially when topics of physical expressions of sexuality—who has what kind of sex and with what consequences—are not explicitly on the table of debate and dissent. Chile, as a so-called laboratory of modern ideologies, offers a quintessential location for thinking about politics and passion. My interest in writing this book, then, responds to the lure of this most enigmatic of places.

The gendered dynamics of working-class and cross-class political projects and, more generally, nation-state formation show how politics in Chile became increasingly organized around desire for the state. Talking about desire can help us think about the practices (social, cultural, and political) through which subjectivities are both generated and interpolated in structural relations of power: in other words, talking about desire brings together attention to structure and agency by looking at practices. Talking about desire means getting at the material, embodied, lived, and meaningful practices that constitute social relations—the gendered dynamics of nation-state formation and the cultural politics of political activism and the political project this activism supports.

Political actors’ desire for the state meant that control of the central state came to constitute their primary political objective; this objective was crafted and sustained by competing political parties, which attempted to subsume multiple vectors of conflict and allegiance—including race, ethnicity, class, and gender—under the rubric of nationalism.²⁴ Yet this attempted nationalist appropriation of broader sociocultural contestatory worlds was never entirely successful. Of those subordinated allegiances that exceeded the bounds of nation-state formation, I am particularly compelled by the libidinal currents swirling around working-class women’s activism.²⁵

In the early twentieth century, such activism took shape in semiautonomous working-class civic and labor organizations. These flourished but ultimately capitulated to populism and became domesticated within the central multiparty system.²⁶ That party system, and the civil society with which it had become inextricably intertwined, faced ongoing fascist assaults and was decimated by the 1973 military coup that brought General Pinochet to power. The pro-coup politicians and military officers had been goaded, infamously, by highly mobilized right-wing women, whose challenges explicitly linked the political securing of masculine virility to violent action.²⁷

The military coup that followed entailed the systematic decimation of the left leadership at every level, combined with the randomized violence of state terror. Social movements, largely led by women of the left, took up the struggle for democracy, linking antiauthoritarianism at home and in the streets.²⁸ The transition to civilian rule in the 1990s saw the rebirth of party dominance and parties’ appropriation of the vitality of social movements. The ease with which parties reasserted themselves must also be understood historically in relation to the erotics of power and the forms of that erotics.

Thus I begin this book with the period that witnessed the birth of Chile’s modern political parties, in the mining region of northern Chile known as the cradle of the Chilean labor movement and modern political parties; the region also, not incidentally, gave rise to some of the earliest and most vibrant working-class women’s organizations in Latin America. In the decades that followed, women of the left (as it came to be called in twentieth-century Chile and elsewhere) persisted in their activism in the face of the state’s successful cooptation of the domestication of labor and social movements. This cooptation was made possible as parties, inculcating desire for the state, drew ever larger swaths of the population into the political cultures, including forms of sociability, of the flourishing rivalrous parties that vied for control of that state.

Analysis of formations of parties, labor, the state, and social movements in Chile illuminates the ways in which contending protagonists and projects in each period were shaped through shifting categories of subjectivity and negotiations of viable political agency. Sexuality, like gender, is essential to modern subjectivity because it is a requirement for what philosopher Judith Butler calls cultural intelligibility.²⁹ That is, gender and sexuality constitute the grammars by which we understand cultural meanings. The affective charges animating those meanings can be explored, in part, through a focus on desire. Though each of this book’s four chapters could be read on its own, taken together they show desire and its permutations as constitutive components of political culture. Desire is, at times, mobilized explicitly by actors linking sex and politics (chapters 1 and 3) and, at other times, desire is intrinsic to the darker workings of state discipline (chapters 2 and 4). Desire, in terms of the unfettering of sexual mores, has been an intermittent theme on the left; and this makes the history of the left ideal for understanding the work of desire—via grammars of gender and sexuality—in political cultures. Contending leftist projects are propelled from the enclave fringes of nation-state politics during the oligarchic rule that extended into the 1920s (chapter 1), to a place of hegemony as national-popular, redistributive, anti-imperialist projects with the Popular Front (1940s) and, especially, the Popular Unity (1970–73) governments (chapter 3), a position from which left coalitions would be purged in escalating assaults (1947 and 1973; chapter 2), culminating in a military dictatorship that drew on a fascist lineage—simultaneously autochthonous and transnational—to attempt to eradicate the left altogether by brute force and by restructuring the political economy according to neoliberal ideologies that endured—inscribed in the military’s constitutional instantiation of the state—even after return to civilian rule in 1990 (chapter 4).

Fantasy as Feminist Historiography and Praxis

One way to look for the impact of desire in politics that challenges boundaries of the state and the social relations it obscures—in classic feminist terms, political and the personal—is to engage with socialist feminism and kindred projects for revolutionary associative life.

To do so, each chapter proceeds in relation to protagonists engaging in feminist praxis. In this book, these protagonists act as guides, ones who represent Chilean feminist history’s fantasy echoes, as historian Joan Scott calls such figures. With these fellow travelers, I breathe passion into our understanding of the tangled, tempestuous, and tormented social relations—that is, sensuous labors—by which transformative projects were forged. In this fantasy work, sociologist Julieta Kirkwood (chapter 4) can be credited, along with historians Cecilia Salinas, Edda Gaviola, Ximena Jiles, Lorella Lopresti, and Claudia Rojas,³⁰ with elid[ing] historical differences and creat[ing] apparent continuities, that is, using history to solidify identity and thereby build constituencies across the boundaries of difference.³¹ Scott sees this fantasy work as vital to political projects because power is produced in concrete and particular relationships, ones in and through which subjects are made possible such that subjects cannot transcend the specificity of their circumstances without the simplification fantasy provides. A feminist fantasy such as the female orator defiantly projects women into masculine public space, a space offering pleasures and dangers of transgressing social and sexual boundaries.³² A second key fantasy is maternal love, which indexes a desire … distinct from and potentially prior to that which is associated with heterosexuality to conjure a world of women where women find pleasure among themselves … a scene of feminine jouissance.³³

Inspired by desirous fantasies, in remarkably optimistic defiance, Chilean feminists of the 1980s linked their own struggles during the military dictatorship—including activities such as the founding of feminist nongovernmental organizations (one even named after the Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women [MEMCH]), bookstores, and presses, and moreover putting their bodies on the line in assemblies and street demonstrations resulting in state thrashings with clubs and sewage-filled water cannons—back to the Belén de Sárraga Centers and MEMCH. In these movements, both the female orator and maternal love were available in plenitude. Buoyed by their historical narrative, antidictatorship feminists tackled the ways in which perniciously rooted patriarchal relations had vexed Popular Unity projects³⁴ and then festered under military rule.³⁵

Writing in 1986 about the Chilean suffrage movement, a collective of feminist historians titled their book with the 1940s suffragette chant, We want to vote in the next election! Crucially, the 1980s feminists echoed this decades-old cry not from the vantage point of a linear, progressive history, but rather, from a moment well into the second decade of a military dictatorship, when the very possibility of elections was a principal struggle. Introducing the recuperative book, scholars Alicia Frohmann and Ximena Valdés affirmed the book as an act of rebellion and cautioned that in taking on the general struggles of society, without preserving our presence and protagonism in the revindications that are our own, we will lose once again the space we have won in conjunction with the social movements of our country.³⁶ The historians themselves summed up their narrative, spanning the 1910s through the 1950s, as one in which, over time, feminist organizations were consolidating, until they transformed themselves into a spinal column of a movement of women extraordinarily heterogeneous, from a political and social vantage. Coming together thus were workers, professionals, maids and housewives, giving the movement a national connotation and presence. Gaining the vote was not the defeat of patriarchal ideology, but rather only a new step in their process of liberation. The then-current struggle for democracy against an authoritarian state relied on women’s movements for creative and valiant force.³⁷

Historian Cecilia Salinas (1987) noted that the Centros Femeninos de Belén de Sárraga of the 1910s brought together women who were publicly militant at a moment in which workers’ movements had not yet really mobilized, especially in the wake of the 1907 massacre of those mobilized by anarchists and mutual aid societies, and worked on campaigns to create a cooperative bakery, protest the high cost of living, and promote socialist popular education and the six-day work week, all foregrounding issues of reproduction. Salinas argued that these were the first women’s organizations to become integrally involved with a political party, the Partido Obrero Socialista, and yet remain autonomous.³⁸

Indeed, it is worth taking a moment here to get to know them a bit. Centros leader Teresa Flores was the only female signatory to the party charter. The fatherless daughter of a seamstress, Flores offered women what she called political-social action as an alternative to religious readings and home-life routines: from the stove or the cooking pot to the grandstand or the stage-boards of the Socialist Theatre …³⁹ A dynamic speaker and actress in her own right, Flores was known as the Chilean Belen de Sárraga, suggesting charisma that transcended time of life, given that, at that conjuncture, Sárraga was in her forties and Flores was under twenty years of age, as were several other of the most vociferous Centros activists, including fifteen-year-old Rebecca Barnes.⁴⁰ Without the bonds of transgressive militancy, such a gap in age and class would have precluded Sárraga, Flores, and Barnes from claiming shared struggle together as women. To harken back to the vitality of 1910s associative, publicly performative militancy that defied oligarchic rule, then, was to invoke, during the 1980s context of authoritarian brutality, both fantasies of orator and mother.

Upon the return to civilian governance (1990), this feminist fantasy work was taken up by new feminist public servants from within the state’s newly formed women’s office, Servicio Nacional de la Mujer, the head of which held ministerial rank.⁴¹ This office published (1994) a chronicle of women’s suffrage written by Diamela Eltit, renowned novelist/poet/theorist of the antidictatorship left.⁴² While the first part of the book points to nineteenth-century elite women’s struggles to gain access to education and be recognized as subjects, in the second part, Eltit posits that the twentieth century saw the rise of the collective organization, la agrupación, as the key mode of political, social, and cultural contestation in general and thus a key mode for women activists.

Eltit argues that just as this collective mode made sense given the dynamic of industrial capitalism, "the woman surges up in the nascent century as a productive force necessary to the gears that moved the country’s global machinery. Women, increasingly subjectified in modernizationist terms as such, were caught in a paradox, that is, a status of legal dependency combined with high labor productivity. This paradoxical status meant having to comply with a model that perpetuates dependency, at the same time, committing to activities that certify them as socially responsible. Each effort to foment associative life, from the 1913 Centros Femeninos de Belén de Sárraga to the 1944 Federación Chilena de Instituciones Femeninas (under Radical Party member and, later, head of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women Amanda Labarca), albeit isolated and fragile and fleeting, opened space for a new constellation each time more clear and visible to public opinion by surmounting the wall of civil prohibitions. This was a thoroughly gendered arena, as tradition in those years signaled that the political [masculine and feminine] were men’s privative zones and that women lacked comprehension adequate to confronting these problems, or their insertion in this civic realm could threaten what were considered to be women’s feminine qualities" (emphasis in original).⁴³ Moreover, political parties across the spectrum prevaricated on the suffrage question, unsure they could predict women’s electoral impact. Eltit asserts that of such organizations, there is unanimous agreement that the Centros Belén de Sárraga, born in the economic boom and international climate of the nitrate regions of the North, were of the first to promote the necessity of women’s emancipation, in whose creation Teresa Flores and Luis Emilio Recabbaren played pivotal roles by using the newspaper collective to argue for women’s greater participation and the end to the obstacles that discriminated against them.⁴⁴

Eltit undergirds the dual importance of feminist associative life and astute critique in the last third of her book, compiling writings and interviews of key figures, namely attorney Amanda Labarca, poet/diplomat Gabriela Mistral, and attorney Elena Caffarena. Eltit transcribes her own 1992 interview with Caffarena. For Caffarena, the distinguishing common feature of these earlier feminist organizations was vibrant fomentation of feminist associative life in relative autonomy from political parties and, in the campaign for suffrage, their ability to overcome party sectarianism. Indeed, it was Caffarena who had done the primary source research to connect her own principle struggle, in 1930s–1940s MEMCH, with the 1910s Centros Belén de Sárraga. These are the kinds of movements critical to the form of feminism Caffarena espoused, ones working toward the transformation of the social structure and requiring changes in mentality to confront the durability of the patriarchal system.⁴⁵

For Eltit—writing under (and in this official publication, within) a newly civilian state that operated under constrained definitions of democratic participation—documenting these prior struggles included specifying the political visions of militants who understood that exercising the broad vote, guaranteed entrance to democratic process, and they thus sought their own social democratization and more egalitarian and actual amplification of the category of the feminine.⁴⁶ Feminist movements fomented spaces of cross-class encounters, producing the kind of disquiet philosopher Jacques Rancière attributes to the real and imaginary displacements authorized by a cultural space in which meeting-places or passageways between classes proliferated.⁴⁷ Whereas feminists during the dictatorship had supported a broad movement that emphasized class heterogeneity, the postdictatorship saw a move to question