In 1995, Chile became the only country in the world to ban the use of the word “gender” in Parliament, a decision reached by a consensus of the right and the center of both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The mere use of the word had triggered an archaic fundamentalism so extreme that a member of the Chamber, citing a conservative historian, asked, “Why use such an uncommon word to refer to the sexes? Is it to introduce the notion that there are not only two distinct sexes, but various, of diffuse and uncertain boundaries?”[1]
The anti-gender bloc united all of the senators from the country’s two leading right-wing parties, the National Renewal (RN) and the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), with nine of the 13 Christian Democratic senators and one from the leftist Party for Democracy (PPD). For Christian Democratic Senator Gabriel Valdés, what was at stake was the duty to “preserve the essential values of the national tradition.”[2] By censoring the word “gender,” neoliberal modernization revealed itself to be at odds with plurality and criticism. Chile’s famous free market did not imply “free interpretation.”
The politicians feared that the concept of gender would act as a front to “smuggle” into Chile “aberrations” such as the recognition of homosexual couples as families and the legalization of abortion. They linked the defense of the traditional nuclear family to an essentialist notion of national identity. Abortion, sex for pleasure, or the simple acknowledgement of a failed marriage through the legalization of divorce now constituted anti-Chilean acts. During the parliamentary debate over the word “gender,” UDI Deputy Carlos Bombal sent a public letter to Women’s Rights Minister Josefina Bilbao, urging her to be “a faithful representative of the normal people of our country.”[3] In essence, the desires of one group passed as good judgment, while the desires of others were viewed as abnormal or crazy.
These parliamentary debates were taking place at the same time that “Gender and Culture” was being inaugurated as a field of study at the University of Chile. The new field arose from the inescapable reality of modern Chile. Despite the conservative rhetoric of the parliamentarians, nearly one quarter of Chilean households are headed by women, one in three pregnancies ends in abortion, and botched abortions are responsible for a third of maternal deaths. A 1999 survey also revealed the chasm between the majority of Chilean women and the suppositions and prejudices of the establishment. Eighty percent of the women polled said they believed that women have the right to work as a fundamental source of personal fulfillment. Sixty percent approved of sex before marriage and 89% said that everyone has the right to use contraception, whether inside or outside of marriage. A majority declared themselves in favor of a law legalizing divorce. Almost eight in ten women said that therapeutic abortion ought to be permitted.[4]
The effort to institutionalize gender studies programs must be viewed within the broader context of the struggle to democratize education and other social institutions that are still heavily marked by the 17 years of authoritarian rule under the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Gender studies is a field of study that grew out of the struggles against the dictatorship, not in academia but in the heart of the women’s movement of the 1980s. During the 1990s, government policies on higher education did not clearly express the need to establish women’s or gender studies programs, and public officials were silent on the question of providing greater access for women to the university.
Nonetheless, scattered gender studies programs were established throughout the country in the early 1990s. The University of Chile has two gender studies centers, one in the Department of Philosophy and the other in the Department of Social Sciences. These programs were created through the independent initiative of a handful of academics who have since been stymied in their efforts to consolidate this fledgling field of study in the university. Professors have had to confront patriarchal suspicions and resistance from within academia itself. Making their work even more difficult, those advocating the concept of gender have had to battle the country’s conservative, Victorian culture. They have also had to confront the postdictatorship imperative to achieve consensus without confronting the real differences that divide Chilean society.
These gender studies programs have tried to take off despite the shackles of a restricted democracy whose legal framework was largely put in place during the military regime. While some programs did not clearly define the need to maintain distance from the Concertación governments that have ruled the country since 1990, others insisted from the beginning on maintaining critical autonomy from the government. By 1995, however, it was evident that only a broad-based reform movement, in which gender programs were present, could produce the necessary institutional changes that would clear the way for these programs to assume a real and permanent place within the university.
In general, all of the gender studies programs have recognized the Equal Opportunities Program of the Women’s Rights Ministry (SERNAM), created in 1992 by President Patricio Aylwin, as an important point of reference and a minimal programmatic platform. SERNAM paved the way for new laws dealing with social issues such as domestic violence and the lack of rights of children born out of wedlock. The ministry also launched massive public information campaigns on teenage pregnancy and women’s rights.
But the gap continues to widen between the broad women’s rights agenda promoted by SERNAM and what is happening on the ground. The feminization of poverty has not been radically altered, which is not surprising given that Chile has not significantly modified the Labor Code that was established during the dictatorship. The code, which has been criticized by the International Labor Organization (ILO), does not allow workers full collective bargaining rights, nor does it provide for basic labor rights. Working women in rural and urban areas are among the most affected by these policies, especially those working in agribusiness and in the textile industry. Abortion and divorce remain illegal.
There has been in addition, wide public discussion of such urgent concerns as impunity, the need to revise the dictatorship’s 1980 Constitution, electoral laws, and the role of the state in education, health and housing. Legislators have likewise not wrestled with affirmative action or discrimination. Such issues have an impact not only on the feminization of poverty, but on the democratization of the workplace, school, church and media, which function as intermediary spaces between “the democracy of the home” and “the democracy of the country.”[5]
In the political sphere, there has not been an increase in the real participation of women in decision making. Despite the fact that more women than men voted in the December 1997 parliamentary elections, casting 53% of the ballots, only two of the country’s 18 cabinet ministers and two of its 38 senators are women. In a positive development, two of the six 1999 presidential candidates were women, the first time in history that women have run for top office: Gladys Marín, who headed the Communist Party, and Sara Larraín, who was representing an environmental coalition. Neither of the two major candidates (Joaquin Lavín, for the right, and Ricardo Lagos, for the center-left), however, supported the decriminalization of abortion.
Given these realities, gender studies programs—even as they grapple with the process of their own institutionalization—must rebuild the ties with civil society that were shredded during the dictatorship years. In particular, they need to coordinate their work with the networks of women’s and gay rights organizations. Otherwise, gender studies programs run the risk of becoming academic ghettos.
Throughout the initial years of the postdictatorship period, many social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) found themselves confronting a crisis of institutionalization. This crisis was particularly intense for women’s organizations, which debated how to resist being co-opted by the establishment.
Some argued that autonomy had to be collectively achieved both “inside” and “outside” of institutions, including within the traditional academic disciplines of the university. They argued that it was necessary to be critical of a policy of decentralization that had its roots in the downsizing of the state—a policy which was enshrined during the dictatorship and which has not been fundamentally challenged by the Concertación governments.[6] Proponents of this perspective warned that it was dangerous to glorify self-marginalization and stressed the need to forge links with civil society.
The opposing line in favor of the privatization of education and culture was led by well-known sociologist José Joaquín Brunner, who has participated in numerous commissions on educational reform. During the dictatorship, he had argued that privatization of education was not only necessary, but brought qualitative improvements.[7] He urged academic freedom at all costs from the “old” machinery of the state and political parties. For Brunner, the neoliberal model, which encourages intellectual production that is ever more global and privatized, creates greater opportunities to disseminate information through a variety of media. To illustrate his argument, he points to the proliferation of independent think tanks and research centers during the dictatorship, including The Latin American Faculty for the Social Sciences (FLACSO), The Center for Education and Communication (CENECA), and Galería Sur.
But Brunner did not discuss with equal zeal the problem of academic autonomy with respect to the market. As public universities are compelled to rely on self-financing schemes to survive as institutions, the market can hardly function as the “patron” of critical disciplines. Without the traditional support of the state, intellectuals find themselves forced to harness their creative potential to try to generate adequate funding in a highly competitive, arbitrary and exclusionary environment.
In this debate over autonomy, it is also important to underscore the distinction between academic freedom (the freedom to express controversial and dissenting views without fear of censure or retaliation) and territorial autonomy (the recognition of the university campus as an inviolate physical space, governed from within). The winning of territorial autonomy has long been a jealously guarded achievement of Latin American universities.
Paradoxically, the decrease in state financing of higher education in Chile has been accompanied by an increase in violations of the university’s territorial autonomy.[8] During the March 1996 student protests against the sale of the campus radio station, as students and staff looked on in consternation, police forces entered the Gómez Millas Campus of the University of Chile, without the consent of the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Lucía Invernizzi, who was then the dean and a leading reformer, was pushed by police officers as she walked down the stairs. When she demanded that the police respect the territorial integrity of the campus, police officials retorted that they did not require any authorization to intervene in the defense of public order if university officials failed to impose order on their own.
A year later, while the official culture was stigmatizing Chilean youth as politically apathetic and indifferent, students at the University of Chile, led by the Chilean Federation of Students (FECH), organized a two-month strike that cleared the way for more participatory forms of university governance. [See “Student Activism,” in this issue, by Margot Olavarría]
The new reform process was widely supported by academics, students and staff, who for the first time since the 1973 military coup came together as a community through a series of forums, assemblies, faculty meetings and festivals. The enthusiasm was contagious. There were marches of more than 20,000 students, who announced their presence in the streets of Santiago with chants and banners, linking themselves to the students who had mobilized during the darkest years of the dictatorship. In a packed Chile Stadium, where singer Víctor Jara was assassinated in 1973, young people listened to the folk music of 1970s along with rap and hip-hop songs popular among today’s youth. Delegates came from all over the country to participate in the event.
In the best tradition of the Córdoba Student Movement of 1918 and the Student Reform of 1968, the students declared that their mobilization was not simply a response to a civic crisis within the universities, but to the failures of the democratic project in the country as a whole.[9] They began by laying out typical student demands, including differential tuition fees, teaching reforms, student evaluation of professors, and regular participation in decision making. But their protests had repercussions beyond the university itself, helping to fracture the postdictatorship culture of timid consensus and returning dignity to the act of protest. “The movement was transforming what was a local issue, pertaining to the University of Chile, into an idea of the country,” said Marisol Prado, president of FECH in 1998 and the first woman to occupy that position in the federation’s history. “We recovered the meaning of political action.”[10]
The students were not trying to return to the 1960s. They recognized that the present-day neoliberal university was not the university of the 1960s governed by the faculty. The student testimonials are revealing. According to Miguel Caro, then president of the Federation of the Metropolitan University of Education Sciences, the new student movement was part of the “social debt of the transition, a debt of such magnitude that it would probably have to be paid by breaking the current process of transition to democracy.” That was because, he said, “many young people believed in the process of transition from the dictatorship, which generated high expectations in all spheres, but did not fulfill them.”[11] For student leader Marisol Prado, young people’s civic mindedness was being restored: “We young people have recovered our ability to dream. In this neoliberal society, where we buy everything, including ready-made objects and ideas, we now feel capable of being builders of something.”[12] Rodrigo Roco, who was president of the FECH during the 1997 protests, linked the current student movement to the long trajectory of resistance developed by the Chilean people both before and after the Pinochet dictatorship.[13]
The students denounced the lack of participatory policies in the public universities, the elitist and often spurious procedures for allocating research money, the mediocrity of the teaching faculty, low wages, crumbling building facilities, the stagnation of the academic career, inadequate infrastructure and science labs, aging equipment and libraries, and the lack of academic training policies. These problems had the greatest impact on young people—both students and faculty—and on women, which led to a gradual dovetailing of the demands of gender and generation. “A special situation developed here in the Faculty, since the student delegates were women and so was the dean,” says Tania Medalla, a student in the Faculty of Humanities. “We found ourselves united in the struggle. When we had problems, our male friends talked among themselves, thinking that women weren’t very political. When they landed in prison, the women took charge of getting the word out and investigating their arrests.”
The reform movement of 1997 debunked the neoliberal argument that mass access to higher education always comes at the expense of the quality of teaching, that the supposed excellence of the elite would only be compatible with select groups of the population, and that the university community would have to be divided into first- and second-class academic citizens. In that conception, the quality of the products of learning is divorced from the quality of life in the university community.
The university community, led by the student movement, brought about three significant events. First was a university meeting held in 1998 in which representatives were selected in free elections. Second was a plebiscite in which the entire community could voice its opinion regarding the direction and content of the future Institutional Project. Finally, a quarterly election was established to choose delegates for the new Teaching Advisory Council. That council has the mandate to create the new university governing statutes that will replace those that have been in force since the dictatorship. This process, which began at the University of Chile, is expanding to other public universities, such as the Univesity of Santiago (USACH).
The Center for the Study of Gender and Culture in the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities created a University and Gender Policy Program that has organized leadership and citizenship workshops for students and staff. Recently, the center also organized a Seminar of Academics on university management and politics in which the differences among the various projects and the importance of gender equality in the process of democratization were freely debated. In the 1996 election, five of the seven faculty delegates were members of the Gender Program, including the former dean, Lucía Invernizzi, who was the only authority to submit her candidacy to a collective vote. Today, several staff and student leaders have passed through the leadership school of the Gender Program.
There is a generational divide on the question of respect for a more pluralistic culture. Young people are more inclined to push for changes in the country’s sexual and political culture. It was not surprising to see a reluctance to deal explicitly with gender themes at the University Meeting of 1996, whose delegates were mostly older. The lesson of this most recent reform movement is that the issue of gender must be integrated into the broader democratic changes in the university and in the country. What still remains to be seen is if Chile’s progressive and democratic sectors will be similarly disposed to take up the broader cause of gender equality in the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kemy Oyarzún is director of the Center for Gender and Culture Studies at the University of Chile. She has written extensively on gender issues and the women’s movement in Chile. Translated from the Spanish by Deidre McFadyen.
NOTES
1. Gonzalo Vial Correa, as cited by María Angélica Cristi before the Chamber of Deputies (Santiago), June 1995.
2. El Mercurio, Santiago, May 3, 1995.
3. Women’s Group Initiative, Encuesta nacional: opiníon y actitudes de las mujeres chilenas sobre la condición de género (Santiago: Womens Group Initiative, January 1999).
4. This was the motto of the Chilean women’s movement in the 1980s.
5. Since 1981, the eight public universities have been split into 17 different campuses, which has deeply fragmented the universities and forced them to compete for meager state resources. In addition, there are now more than 200 Centers of Technical Training, 60% of which are in Santiago, and which are primarily business oriented. The accrediting process for these centers has not yet been resolved.
6. Presidential Advisory Committee, José Joaquín Brunner, Chairman, Los desafíos de la educación chilena frente al siglo XXI (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria).
7. The decline of public funding of higher education has been dramatic: in 1970 it was equivalent to 1.7% of the gross national product (GNP) but in 1990 it had decreased to 0.5% of GNP. It increased slightly to 0.6% in 1992.
8. See “Manifesto de Córdoba, Argentina, 1918,” in Dardo de Cuneo, La Reforma Universitaria (1918-1930) (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978), pp. 3-9; and Luis Torres Acuña, “68: El impossible que fue realidad,” Encuentro XXI, Izquierda y Universidad, Vol. 3, No. 9 (Spring 1997), pp. 54-61.
9. Torres Acuña, “68: El imposible que fue realidad.”
10. Torres Acuña, “68: El imposible que fue realidad.”
11. Torres Acuña, “68: El imposible que fue realidad.”
12. Center for the Studies of Gender and Culture, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, “Entrevista a estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile,” Revista Nomadías, Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 1997), pp. 135-140.
13. Unpublished presentation by Teresa Valdés at the Forum on Sexuality and Cultural Change, Center for the Studies of Gender and Culture, University of Chile, July 1999.
