Women, torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

ABSTRACT

In the years since the fall of the civil–military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, considerable attention has been paid to first-person testimonies of human rights victims. A great number of these have been by women who narrated sexual political violence. However, while there has been work done on the relation between terror, trauma, and spectacle in postdictatorial television shows, rarely has this also included a gendered perspective. In this article we seek to open this area of discussion by evaluating the manner in which women’s televised testimonies of political sexual violence have been constructed on late night talk shows in Chile, using recent history and memory theory, as well as feminist theory on the representation of sexual violence in mass media.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt de Inicio11130088).

Notes

¹ Figures come from Rettig, CNRR, Valech, and Valech II commissions.

² All quotes and photos in this section are taken from the following YouTube sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61ImTrXFb0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB9hRMKhjHc, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVNLThnnM64. We have obtained due authorization for use of screenshot images through the TV channel La Red.

³ In Santiago, there are four major “network channels”—TVN, Canal 13, Chilevisión, and Mega—and two smaller open channels: UCVTV and La Red. MV airs on La Red, which was founded in 1991 and has been typified by a continual changing of owners due to low earnings and economic crises. It is currently owned by the Mexican telecommunications group Albavisión. As one anonymous review rightly pointed out, however, La Red has in recent years also been associated with more “serious,” niche primetime news programming. We would agree with this analysis, and add that this development of a “niche” market has largely been built precisely around the MV program, which began airing in 2011.

⁴ This article does not pretend to be a definitive or thorough study of media reception. We analyze Twitter response through the hashtags that MV formulated for each episode only to give a very general idea of what opinion the public had regarding the episodes and the topics covered. Twitter comments were chosen intentionally (the sample is not exhaustive nor random).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt de Inicio 11130088).