“La Lucha”: Chilean students struggling against patriarchy in digital sites

• In Event: Gender Inequality and Education: Case Studies from Chile and Colombia

Proposal

This presentations focuses on the convergence between the Chilean feminist and the student movement, and their use of digital social media such as public Facebook webpages. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the way in which female and/or LGBTQI Chilean high school students produce and reproduce their gender/political subjectivities while participating and interacting with others in their own feminist digital webpages. Using digital ethnographic data, and discourse analysis, I propose to understand this processes of subjectification by first; exploring the ways in which these students participated and interacted in the feminist digital spaces, and second; analyzing how these actions construct them as gender/political subjects.

I will argue that the students take two different types of actions in the feminist digital spaces: identifying the main problem that affects them, and promoting and taking physical/digital political actions. The students establish and characterize gender and sexual orientation based violence as the main social problem affecting their communities, and produce themselves as oppressed bodies in a patriarchal system. The narratives in the sites present a social structure that produces a social problem; patriarchy, and gender and sexual orientation based violence. This violence is mostly done by particular types of bodies –cisgender heterosexual adult males – in certain spaces –schools and streets – and affects them as an oppressed group. The narratives in the sites also positions the feminist struggle within the larger student movement, and minimizes any possible disturbances between the feminist students and their comrades. The students that participate in these sites are producing and reproducing their gender/political subjectivities as bodies subjected to gender and sexual orientation based violence, but also as the ones that are aware of the structural system of oppression and resiliently denounce and reject it in spaces less controlled by institutional authorities. The recognition that they are oppressed bodies, does not mean that they configure themselves as victims in need of rescue, but as active and aware women and/or LGBTQI students that are changing and expanding the meaning of justice in their contexts.

Promoting and taking political action is renamed as “La Lucha”. The narratives produced by the students and the visitors of the sites, establish la Lucha as a powerful concept. It represents both historical continuity and change, and also means particular actions in the digital and physical world such as protest and “non-sexist” education. The representations of these modes of political struggle position the students at the center of present and future change, and also as the heirs of their past comrades in the fight against oppression, as well as the avengers of those who were not able to speak up. They not only refute the idea of youth as inactive citizens, but sometimes even claim that the responsibility to produce the change needed in their educative system is “in our hands” and “depends on us” . The students never refer to this responsibility as an individual task but a collective one, and continuously recognize that change needs to be systematically addressed. They reject the idea that students, women, and/or LGBTQI individuals are passive victims civically disengaged in the present. This configuration is resisted by some adults visiting the sites, whom position female minors as incapable vulnerable girls.

These findings align with the literature on political engagement of youth and social movements, but still enlighten new intersections. The feminist student activists in Chile both use digital social media to amplify traditional protest methods, but also to expand the meanings and methods of justice making and their own subjectivities as female and/or LGBTQI students. The findings also illuminate the ways in which these student use history and social movement narratives to be recognized as politically engaged and effective subjects. Two different narratives can be appropriated and coexist without major conflict, creating gender/political subjectivities that are both continuing political work and breaking off with an oppressed past.

Finally, these findings have three important implications for social studies education, and for youth that wishes to foster collective political action. First, the developmentalist discourse of citizens of the future, and the perspective of youth and women as politically disengaged is not useful to foster political participation, second, recent history of social movements is very relevant for political participation, and third, the teaching and learning of social movement history and its narratives has to be mindful of the processes by which the “us” and “them” is constructed, because extreme binary positions can perpetuate silence and the erasure of dissent between political actors.

Author

• Valentina Errazuriz Besa, Teachers College, Columbia University