Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

Abstract

More than a year before Chile's massive social uprising (estallido social) erupted in October 2019, protests in May 2018 against sexual harassment in higher education sparked a broader national reckoning over the historical entrenchment of patriarchy, gender violence, and gender inequality. In the context of resurgent feminist movements in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America in the twenty-first century, historical anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier's Desired States makes a timely contribution to theorizing the role of desire in shaping modern Chile's political culture.As an interdisciplinary scholar, she creatively marshals an impressive array of methodologies and theoretical texts to analyze cultural texts as well as ethnographic and archival research. The book is organized around four episodic case studies spanning from 1913 to 2019. Chapters 1 and 3 trace debates about sexuality within leftist political movements, while chapters 2 and 4 consider the role of gender and desire under repressive states. For each case, she “maps constellations of desires—relationships, affects, projects, and practices” in support of her overarching argument that “by understanding how desire in and for political projects works through gendered and sexualized orientations, we unlock an indispensable dimension for the analysis of states and political cultures more broadly conceived” (p. 13). Frazier's expansive application of desire as a category of analysis includes desire by representatives of the Catholic Church and the anarchist feminist movement for divergent forms of working-class sexuality, desire by the military for different modes of gendered discipline in prison camps, desire by 1960s leftist militants for a socialist state compatible with their continued heterosexual male privilege, and desire by civilian authorities for a domesticated citizenry complacent with the neoliberal state's reconciliation process. Given the author's stated goal to “participate in ongoing imaginings of more just, yet still passionate, politics” by highlighting the “high cost” of organizing “political culture around a certain desire for the state,” a narrower focus on political desire vis-à-vis changing modes of state formation might have produced a more cohesive narrative across the four case studies (pp. 22, 119).I found that the book's expansive thinking, tantalizing theorizing, and impressive breadth at times came at the expense of a deeper engagement with the historical context. In several places, the analysis contains interpretative leaps not always convincingly substantiated by the historical evidence. For example, Augusto Pinochet's 1979 memoir, El día decisivo: 11 de septiembre de 1973, covers his experience in 1948 guarding relegated Communist families at the Pisagua prison camp, including a lunchroom protest over the poor quality of food in which he found himself surrounded: “Defenderme en forma violenta significaría ser arrollado por la multitud, que luego se ensañaría en contra mía.” By mistranslating the last phrase as “looking for blood,” as opposed to ensañarse being more akin to the intent to cause harm, Frazier makes a conceptual leap to argue that “postmenopausal” women protesters threatened military men's bodily integrity and masculinity (pp. 76–77). While thought provoking, such assertions may not be sustained by the evidence or at least require far more contextualization. Indeed, imprisoned Communist militants' respect for party hierarchies during this incident invites a deeper discussion of the centrality of the Communist family to Chile's political culture, which would have directly connected with the analysis in chapter 3 of “respectable heteronormativity” as one element in the “sexual ideologies and practices of the leftist male activists who came into power” in 1970 (p. 21). Here again, however, the analysis appears to flatten the Chilean Left into a more homogenous entity than it was. In making arguments about the “New Man's sexuality” as it pertained to “the hegemonic left,” meaning the Communist and Socialist Parties, Frazier bases her argument around Trotskyist labor historian Marcelo Segall and his archive (p. 111). Yet Segall's own biography confounds his representativeness. Born in 1920, he left the Partido Comunista de Chile in 1957, prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and remained a political independent. Thus during Chile's experiment with democratic socialism under Salvador Allende (1970–73), Segall was neither a '68 rebel youth inspired by Che Guevara nor a member of the mainstream “hegemonic left” that formed the governing Popular Unity coalition. Other prominent Communist militants, including Raquel Weitzman and Volodia Teitelboim, discussed in the epilogue, might have been more logical examples to illustrate the persistence of patriarchal attitudes, party hierarchies, and sexual practices in Chile.These concerns aside, historians of modern Latin America will do well to heed Frazier's intellectual provocation to see political desire as something beyond the passionate politics associated with charismatic populist leaders. Desired States is an open invitation to explore how these dynamics play out in Chile and elsewhere.