https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0914-1021
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ABSTRACT
This article explores the processes by which Chilean female feminist public high school students used political and historical narratives and symbols during the feminist movement of 2018. It analyzes how these particular usages were crossed by affective intensities that worked to produce students’ political subjectivities as collective and agentic. This affective work was produced with other members of the school community and sometimes was met with anger, policing practices, and desires to exclude students from particular historical narratives. The data for this article were produced within a yearlong critical ethnographic study on the processes of production of high school feminist students’ gender and political subjectivities in Chile, which included participant observation, testimonios interviews, art-based collective testimonios workshops, and analysis through affect theory. The findings show the types of historical and political narratives and symbols used by students, what affective intensities that crossed these symbols did to the students’ political subjectivities, and the conflicts these intensities produced within the school community. The article concludes by examining how these findings might open new questions within the field of social studies education research.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the feminist students in this study for their amazing political work and their willingness to share their wisdom. I also want to thank my amazing friends Katherine and Ricardo for their help in editing this article.
Notes
1. All personal names and the name of the institution are pseudonyms.
2. “Lucha” means “daughters of the struggle”. Lucha and its derivatives are used in Spanish because it is a concept not completely translatable. It means fight or struggle, but in a political sense. When a Chilean person says “seguiré luchando,” it usually refers to political struggle, and it is not the same as saying “seguiré peleando,” which could mean fight off anything. Nevertheless, in English they are both translated as the same sentence, “I will keep on fighting”. For this reason, I will maintain this word in Spanish.
3. I define a context of contentious feminist politics as a context and a time when feminism becomes so commonplace that a series of processes make topics related to feminism controversial, forcing people to take a stance concerning them.
4. Salvador Allende is the only socialist president democratically elected during the Cold War in the world. Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean general, overthrew his government with the economic support of the United States in a coup d’etat in 1973.
5. The Ramona Parra Brigade was an art collective founded by the communist party in 1968.
6. The “penguin revolution” was called this way because in Chile all public-school students have to wear uniforms. Males wear a white shirt and dark charcoal pants; females wear a white shirt and a navy-blue dress called “jumper.” When marching by the thousands, the students looked like penguins, just like in the documentary “La Marche de l’empereur” released in 2005.
7. In Chile, 3.8% of public schools are all-female or all-male high schools.
8. The 12th grade civics curriculum includes content about the institutions in Chilean democracy and how they work. The 12th grade history curriculum taught by Diego was focused on urban history. The contents of these classes were not directly connected with the historical narratives that students chose most frequently to refer to.
9. This and all other quotations are the author’s translations.
10. This is a regular activity that senior classes do in Chilean high schools to promote cohort spirit.
11. The Vergara brothers are Rafael (18) and Eduardo Vergara (20), two young men who were murdered on March 29th, 1985 by the dictatorship. Their death, as well as the death of Paulina Aguirre (20), who was also murdered that day, are commemorated every March 29th in what is called the day of the young fighter.
12. Victor Jara was a famous singer and artist who worked for the Allende socialist government and was killed by the military in September 1973.
13. “pacos” is the informal and also pejorative term used by activists and others in Chile to refer to the police.
14. The breakfast with the president is an honor for all students who earn the maximum scores on the college tests every year.
15. Compañera is used by activists both to refer to a classmate and a partner in the political struggle. Compañera and its short version Compa signal an “us” in political interactions and events. For example, I was called by the feminist students Compa, as I had disclosed that I was also a fellow feminist activist.
16. In 1988, Carmen Gloria Quintana and her partner were taking photographs of the protests against the dictatorship and a group of military men beat them, threw gasoline on them, and burned them. Their bodies were then thrown in an agricultural field later far from the city. Carmen Gloria survived, but her partner died. The courts only recently closed the case, and only some of the perpetrators were condemned to jail while others were absolved (Diario U de Chile, Citation2019).