Reclaiming the strength of Chile’s feminist uprising

Illustration for Ojalá © Zinzi Sánchez.

Opinion • Andrea Sato • February 23, 2024 • Leer en castellano

The feminist-led occupations of Chilean universities that began in May 2018 sparked a movement that continues to this day. It grew stronger during street protests that began in 2019, when feminist demonstrations became a crucial and powerful element of a months long popular uprising.

 These social ties fractured during the pandemic, and health needs shifted to the center of the discussion. This, as well as the election of President Gabriel Boric and the failure of constitutional reform, led to more disorganization. Challenges to the patriarchal order were shut down from above.

Today we are asking how we can keep the cycle of feminist politicization alive. To answer that question, we have to return to 2018.

The 2018 mobilizations spread from the capital to all of Chile, creating spaces for debate about the construction of a non-sexist educational model and the gendered division of labor and its links to the processes of socialization that occur during childhood. Assemblies, which had always been led by guys with long beards, glasses, and shirts with tropical motifs, began to blossom under new leadership. 

Since the 1990s, there have been constant discussions in these spaces about the failure of market-based educational systems and why education should be free and universal. In 2018, they dealt with other urgent matters that personally affected those who participated in these spaces of deliberation, in particular, the growing number of complaints about sexual harassment and assault committed by professors and colleagues in academic settings. 

Diverse women, lesbians, transgendered, and non-binary people began to push the discussion in a new way, making speeches in classrooms, which were filled with shades of colored hair, hoop earrings, and glittery notebooks. 

It’s not that harassment in the academic space was new. Information had always circulated through university hallways about professors to avoid, so that students knew not to go to a particular professor’s office or to close the door during one of his classes. New students were warned about the guy who, after having had too many drinks at a party, wouldn’t stop coming on to women. And there were professors who had reputations for dating their students, assistantships were won without competitions, and female academics were never promoted. 

Students and teachers throughout Chile began to organize to keep themselves safe, to ensure that they would be recognized for their academic achievements, and for the punishment of assault and harassment. The decisions made in self-managed assemblies mandated direct action: the universities and streets should be taken, and aggressors in institutions denounced. These were the strategies employed by the increasingly powerful Chilean feminist movement. 

A personal and political struggle 

The mobilizations that began in 2018 in Santiago at the University of Santiago de Chile and the University of Chile spread quickly to regional capitals like Valparaíso and Concepción. These demonstrations not only demanded non-sexist practices in the classroom, but also much more than that: the radical transformation of the students’ lives and conditions as a whole. 

More than 20 universities were occupied between May and October 2018, becoming laboratories for experiments in organization, self-management and training. 

Workshops were held in everything from embroidery to feminist economics. The walls were covered with propaganda and murals expressing the rage and hope of a generation that no longer lived in fear of a civilian-military dictatorship. It was a generation ready to consider new ways of doing politics, to embrace pleasure activism and to go beyond the leftist androcentrism that had reigned in previous decades. 

Space was created within institutions in which these imaginations, these visions of possible worlds and desires could take root. Participants drafted protocols against violence, modified curricula, and forced prestigious universities to expel professors who harassed their students. The mobilizations were deeply educational for the many who shared a deep concern about extant forms of political organization. 

It was a year of reflection, confrontation, rage, pleasure and a lot of political imagination. The strength of Chile’s feminist tidal wave was nourished by its ties across the Andes with feminists in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Bolivia, who shared a horizon of total transformation of social relations. All of that, and the ability to set an agenda, are fundamental elements of feminist power in Chile and throughout Abya Yala. 

When the social uprising in Chile began in 2019, militants were mindful of lessons from the previous year. A lot of new comrades and collectives got to work building practices of sharing reflections and experiences. 

This was when feminist power connected with the fire of the mobilizations and the popular revolt of October 2019 all across Chile. In the lead up to the November 25 march against violence against women, an anthem against patriarchy was written and rehearsed over and over again: “You are the rapist.” The song crossed borders and gave voice to and united feelings of rage at the role of the patriarchy. 

The march that took place on March 8, 2020 was the largest demonstration on record in Chile. More than two million people protested throughout Chile. Their message: that the popular revolt was alive and well and that patriarchy continues to be the enemy.

The pandemic and promises of constitutional change quelled the popular revolt that began in 2019. The waters parted between those who hoped to influence a constitutional assembly that suited the political parties and those who have always distrusted the democratic myth and wanted to keep the pressure on and to continue mobilizing in the streets. 

Disorganization from above

The constitutional process disorganized popular forces in Chile. Part of the feminist movement put all of its energy into a truncated undertaking that didn’t guarantee an improvement in the material and structural conditions of life in Chile. The rupture in feminist groups and local collectives following the constitutional process is irreparable.

Chileans also elected a new president, Boric, in December 2021, with the lowest vote turnout in history. A former student leader who represented the Frente Amplio coalition, Boric and those around him promised to change Chilean politics with a feminist and environmentalist government. He defeated José Antonio Kast, who represented the conservative, far-right Republican Party. 

Since his inauguration in March 2022, Boric has proclaimed himself a feminist. His administration includes trade unionists, activists and intellectuals from the feminist movement in its ranks. 

These new faces in government further demobilized the already hard-hit social movement spaces. The government that claimed to be in favor of women remained silent when a reactionary constitutional amendment jeopardized abortion laws and when there was a discussion of raising the retirement age for women. Boric’s government has promoted laws against the working class, sold Chile’s lithium to a company belonging to Pinochet's son-in-law and continued militarizing Wallmapu [unceded Mapuche territory]. 

Dressed up in social, environmentalist and feminist movement trappings, Chile’s government has pushed an agenda worthy of the reactionary right, using the "security crisis” as an excuse.

The road ahead

The key dates for feminist mobilization in Chile are November 25, the day against violence against women, and March 8, working women's day. Since 2020, huge numbers have turned out on these dates. Many of those who fill the streets have felt a renewed commitment to mobilize and conquer new horizons. 

The massive mobilizations in recent years give hope that while feminist power has faded, it can be recovered with patience and organization. 

The power of Chile’s feminist movement, which is heir to the strength of the autonomous lesbians who founded the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter (EFLAC) in Cartagena in 1996, is in a straitjacket, bound by government institutions, NGOs and its own weakness. The inability to promote a feminist agenda has meant that anti-patriarchal perspectives have again been relegated to the margins, undermining the movement’s capacity to launch structural challenges.  

Rupturing the glass ceiling and fighting for parity seem to be the only things that women can accomplish through institutional politics. But these are symbolic victories that fail to dismantle systems of oppression and, in fact, create pathways for a select few women who—individually—yearn to inhabit those spaces of power. 

Over the last few years, reforms for working class women have been hotly debated, including the reduction of the working week from 45 to 40 hours, as well as pensions and the minimum wage. But none of these debates have included a critical and anti-patriarchal perspective, which indicates the weakness of today’s feminist movement when it comes to setting agendas or the terms of the debate in a broad public discussion. 

There has been a lot of talk about the cooptation of radical and anti-systemic discourse. However, just because shopping malls sell T-shirts with feminist slogans, that doesn’t mean that we stop disputing spaces and sharing reflections. 

We know that there is no shortcut to building a new world. The siren songs of feminist governments and welfare states are part of an ongoing process of hollowing out radical proposals for emancipation. Subversion is in the street, in connection and in the ongoing creation of the strategies necessary to confront the widespread crisis of capital.