‘a revolt within a revolt’: feminist political ideas in Chile’s social uprising

Abstract

This article analyses the role of feminist activists and feminist political ideas in Chile during the 2019 popular revolt. In the last months of 2019, a popular anti-neoliberal revolt was marked by social protests, violent and nonviolent civil disobedience and political upheaval. Feminists, specifically from the collective Coordinadora Feminista 8 de Marzo (C8M), became central during this period. They not only participated in the organisation of protests and artistic interventions but also helped to install and advance feminist ideas in mainstream public debate. Based on qualitative interviews with feminist activists, conducted between February and April 2021, this article identifies three strands of feminist political ideas that were predominant during and after the popular revolt: 1) autonomism as anti-neoliberal organising; 2) the resurgence of the idea of political-sexual violence; and 3) the link between neoliberalism and the precariousness of life. Following these three strands, this article argues that what occurred in Chile was a feminist revolt, understood as the potencia to transit from concept-building to demand-making in order to push forward feminist horizons as a central political idea.

Introduction

Recent discussions concerning the role of feminism in capitalist societies have been highly critical. Particularly, feminists from the second wave have reflected on how contemporary Western feminism has been co-opted into neoliberalism (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; Fraser, 2020). The transformative role of feminism as a revolutionary force has been overlooked by scholars who have lost faith in how feminism can—and should—radically transform capitalism (Prügl, 2015). In conversation with this critique, scholars such as Catherine Eschle, Bice Maiguashca and Cinzia Arruzza have reopened discussion about the radical roots of feminism, especially Black feminism in North America and Europe, in the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019). Also, scholars have extensively examined transnational feminism as a resurgence of the radical and anti-capitalist significance of feminism (Maiguashca, 2016; Sabsay, 2020). The re-emergence of a discussion around reproductive rights in places such as Poland, the United States and Argentina (Heinen and Portet, 2010; Lopreite, 2014), as well the return of demands regarding reproductive labour for groups such as migrant workers (Cruz, 2018), represents the reconnection of contemporary feminist movements to their radical tradition. This has been particularly important in Latin America. The explosion of the movement Ni Una Menos has extended to every corner of the region, presenting new challenges and ideas for the feminist movement in the continent (Belotti, Comunello and Corradi, 2021; Chandra and Erlingsdóttir, 2021). The movement has radicalised the ideas of violence against women, the role of the state and justice, as well as the internal dynamics and forms of organising of the movement itself.

This article analyses qualitative interviews with Chilean feminist activists who reflect on their participation in the popular revolt of 2019, identifying the interconnections between the development of feminist political ideas (concept-building) and the expansion of radical anti-neoliberal demands (demand-building). The article works with the reflections of ten feminist activists interviewed between February and April 2021, who were current and former members of the network Coordinadora Feminista 8 de Marzo (C8M), an autonomous feminist organisation founded in 2018, as well as activists without organisational affiliation.

The 2019 revolt was a popular uprising against neoliberal policies and the political establishment that lasted several months until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country in 2020 (Tijoux, 2020). Feminist organisations, particularly C8M, became protagonists in the coordination and sustaining of protests. However, it is also during this period that feminist ideas were consolidating and growing into national political narratives, changing the ways in which not only feminists but other social movements see and imagine society. This article looks at three feminist-political ideas that emerged from the interviews with activists, in order to argue that the resurgence of feminism came to reshape the anti-neoliberal agenda in the country, making a unique contribution to the radical feminist tradition. In the words of one of the participants of this project, the feminist activist Javiera Manzi, the role of feminism during the social uprising was a ‘revolt within a revolt’, or the ability of feminist organisations, such as (though not exclusively) C8M, to influence and reshape the outcomes of the social uprising.

This article begins by conceptualising the framework of a feminist revolt as a form of activism that could reform, transform and redirect political upheaval (or another revolt, in the case of Chile) by engaging in concept-building and demand-making as a way of investment into an imagined feminist future. Differently from prefigurative politics, this form of revolt is not preconditioned but is open to a tactical-strategic engagement that takes different shapes and follows diverse paths of activism. The article later moves into explaining the methodology used for this project, in which ten Chilean feminist activists were interviewed in semi-structured qualitative interviews. The third part of this article briefly describes the contextual conditions of the popular revolt of 2019 and the recent history of the feminist movement in Chile. Finally, the article analyses three political ideas collected from the interviews, contained in two frames of reference: 1) the widening of feminist organisation through analyses of autonomism as a form of anti-neoliberal organising, and 2) intersecting feminist demands that explore the connections between political-sexual violence and the notion of the precariousness of life. The article concludes by highlighting the conceptual contribution of a feminist revolt for other contexts of feminist organising and activism.

A framework of feminist revolt

Theories of revolt have predominantly concentrated on historical and psychological perspectives (Rudè, 1959; Le Bon, 2010). Many researchers of revolts go back to the European revolts of the twentieth century, emphasising the politics and behaviour of crowds engaged in this kind of action. The meaning of revolt is also used interchangeably with ‘revolutions’, ‘riots’ and ‘protests’ (Clover, 2016) as a means to conceptualise collective, often crowded, actions that radically challenge the sociopolitical order. The meaning of ‘revolt’ implies the movement for radical transformation, though not always politically motivated or tightly organised. There is something organic and disorderly in the meaning of revolt. There is also something disjointed and messy about any conception of a revolt. However, I wish to take a different point of departure and not define a feminist revolt as a particular practice (e.g., protest or riot), but to take revolt as a conceptual framework for what this article establishes as a starting point for the argument of ‘a revolt within a revolt’ (Saéz, 2021, p. 80). I argue that a feminist revolt implies the ability of being part of a revolt (i.e. a larger political movement or political turmoil) whilst also revolting against the ideas and practices that mobilise and conduct such revolt. A feminist revolt is framed here as a form of activism that engages in working towards, building up—as stepping stones–the total transformation of capitalist and patriarchal relations.

Following Katrina Forrester’s article ‘Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework’ (2022), I work with her conceptualisation of ‘perspective of investment’ to theorise the idea of feminist revolt in this article. Through the analysis of the Wages for Housework campaign, Forrester (ibid.) proposes an understanding of demand-making as a way of disclosing social material conditions, as well as setting horizons for transformation. In her argument, demands do not always have to work towards reformism and can instead engage in the long term as what she calls a ‘perspective of investment’, defined as to ‘whether a demand represents an investment in a future world that demand-makers seek to build’ (ibid., p. 9). A movement based on demand-making can not only push for reform and immediate change (e.g., wages for houseworkers) but can also set direction for further—even revolutionary—transformation. Contrary to accounts of prefigurative politics that focus on building communities and movements that reflect the politics they want to see in the future, as a way shaping their means (Lin et al., 2016; Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra, 2019; Monticelli, 2021), Forrester (2022, p. 12) argues that ‘what the perspective of investment offers is a way of identifying which demands—or which dissenting practices broadly understood—yield dividends and direct change toward the desired future world’. This approach to understanding social movements demands engagement with an idea of system-changing reform that can unravel the system itself and its internal hierarchies.

Forrester’s notion of demand-making complements, in my account, the importance of understanding concept-building in the framework of feminist revolt. I understand it in connection to Veronica Gago’s (2020) concept of potencia feminista. Gago (ibid.) discusses the ability of the feminist movement to reshape and expand political horizons. Differently from its direct English translation as ‘power’, potencia ‘reflect[s] this sort of movement by gesturing toward an alternative theory of power’, in which a collective reflection of ‘what we can do’ is linked to ‘acknowledge[ing] that we do not know what we are capable of until we experience the displacement of the limits that we’ve been made to believe and obey’ (ibid., p. 2). In this way, potencia does not exist as an abstract construct, but as a ‘force that drives what is perceived as possible, collectively and in each body’ (ibid., p. 3). In Gago’s definition, potencia feminista is also a construct of situated thinking, which allows potencia feminista to reconnect the history of feminist struggles and to recognise the collective body of those struggles and memories.

Concept-building also relates, in this article, to Maria Lugones’ (2003, p. 161) notion of resistance, which ‘intermingles in the spatiality of the street’. This callejera (streetwalker) theorising ‘seeks out, puts out, entrusts, invokes, rehearses, performs, considers, and enacts tactical-strategic practices of resistant/emancipatory sense-making. Performing a rejection of theorizing the social from above, streetwalker theorizing understands and moves resistance to intermeshed oppressions’ (ibid.). For Lugones (ibid., p. 171), street-theorising occurs in the concrete; it is a tactical-strategic engagement that aims to make sense ‘against/in spite of/in the midst of domination’. This opens space for a wider social sense of resistance, ¹ ‘a sense with a history’, as Lugones (ibid.) says, that ‘sustains an open, in-the-making sociality at the street level’.

The conjunction of demand-making (Forrester, 2022) and concept-building for a framing of feminist revolt implies a temporality of the practice of transformation (or reform) that revolutionary feminists have discussed before. For example, Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie in Abolition, Feminism, Now (2022) establish a genealogy of abolitionist feminism. They conceptualise it as a ‘dialectic, a relationality, a form of interruption’ (ibid., p. 2). It is political praxis that requires responses to, and movements against, the ‘violence of systemic oppression’, arguing that the idea and the practice ‘can and must do multiple things at the same time’ (ibid., p. 4). In this definition, they look to make space for what we have ‘not yet been able to imagine’, whilst amplifying practices that are already in existence and movement (ibid., p. 15). In other words, ‘the radicalness of the imaginary as a space for what is yet unthinkable, at the edge of the possible’ (ibid., p. 16).

In this sense and imagination of temporality for transformation and liberation, Marxist feminist Sheila Rowbotham (2015) wrote about the historical and daily experiences of women in consciousness-raising groups and the contradictions of being a feminist and revolutionary in a time when revolutions were dictated and imagined from a male perspective. She argues that revolutionary ‘consciousness […] can only become coherent and self-critical when its version of the world becomes clear not simply within itself but when it knows itself in relation to what it has created apart from itself’ (ibid., p. 28). This dialectical reasoning combines both the pain and the joy of consciousness-raising (Cruz, 2023). ‘We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility’, Rowbotham (2014, p. 98) says, ‘but we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment’. The now in Rowbotham, as with the ‘now’ in Davis et al. (2022), is a temporal imperative that I consider in the framing of feminist revolt, as it is contained in the thinking and making of concepts and demands for such transformation. Similarly, Chilean feminist and intellectual Julieta Kirkwood (2010 [1986], p. 56) argued that revolutionary feminism is about a world that is in the making but cannot be built without destroying the world that is prevailing. Feminist revolt is then the doing of what is yet to exist, in which a feminist future becomes more real than the current reality (ibid., p. 59). Kirkwood calls this a form of overcoming the practice, ideas and consciousness that are limited by patriarchy and capitalism. Whilst these examples relate more closely to notions of prefigurative politics (Lin et al., 2016) than the perspective of investment in demand-making in Forrester’s sense, I still take the temporal imperative of the practice of today (now) as the basis for an imagination of the future. However, such a practice is not only one of prefiguration, but one based on the concrete conditions that define, create and determine what is now and can therefore be seen, in Lugones’ (2003) terms, as a tactical-strategic engagement.

In sum, a feminist revolt framework allows us to understand a form of activism that engages in concept-building and demand-making as revolt, and which seeks to transform—and even reform—the practices and ideas of larger political movements and situations of political turmoil. The possibility of revolting in a feminist sense not only allows transforming the current conditions and practice of the wider political movement but also sets the paths, through ideas and practices, of a future of impossibilities, namely a feminist future (Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019). This is a revolt because it allows the imagination of the impossible, not as a utopia but as something rooted in the practicality and actuality of the now.

Methodology

This article is based on the use of semi-structured qualitative interviews which collected the narratives of ten activists in the Chilean feminist movement. ² The selection criteria were focused on the participation of interviewees within the organisation of protests during the social uprising of 2019, meaning the organisation of marches, artistic interventions, assemblies, etc. It was also considered that all participants identified as feminists—broadly speaking—and that their feminism was an important part of their activism. The contacting of participants was done through snowballing, using personal contacts I have within the feminist movement in Chile. However, I did not know any of the participants in advance. Snowballing allowed me to increase the number of participants from within the network of activists, which was one of the purposes of the project. This intentionally permitted me to understand the network of feminist activists in the country. In addition, the criteria for the selection of participants were open to gender identification, age, location, race and class. However, I acknowledge that by using this method, the voice of current and former members of C8M became predominant in this study, which is only one perspective—that of the so-called autonomous and non-partisan sections—within the diverse feminist movement.

All the interviewees identified as women, aged between 25 and 55 years old, from primarily urban areas. The majority of participants lived in Santiago, the capital of Chile, whilst two lived in other regions of the country. I interviewed six current and former members of C8M, including two of their public spokespersons at the time. The four other participants were involved in union, partisan and artistic activism. It is important to highlight that most activist members of C8M were also involved in other social movements and activism, such as prison abolition. The class and educational background of the participants was not recorded in the interviews; however, most of them linked their reflections to their socioeconomic background, as being ‘working class’ or ‘living in working class areas’. Also, many participants acknowledged their educational background as ‘university level’ or ‘educated’ to reflect about their experience with feminism. Although these are not markers to generalise the demographic composition of the feminist movement in Chile, which is not the purpose of this research, it is possible to indicate that interviewees were from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, though most of them had completed higher education.

Revolting against neoliberalism in Chile

The October 2019 popular revolt

On 18 October 2019, a popular revolt exploded into existence in the city of Santiago, Chile. A group of school students jumped over the metro barriers in protest of the increase in transport fares (Garcés, 2019). The ubiquitous image of adolescents disobeying the law was not a surprise for either the Chilean state or civil society. However, it was surprising when larger crowds of people joined the students later that day, rapidly forming a series of violent protests across the city, and later the country. The demand against the increase of metro fares expanded as the days passed, seeing the beginning of a full social and political upheaval (Ferretti and Dragnic, 2020a, 2020b). Demands were unclear at first, but within days it became evident that the popular revolt was demanding a full transformation of the neoliberal system.

Neoliberalism in Chile was imposed through a right-wing dictatorship in the 1970s, founding its principles through constitutional norms in the 1980 Constitution. In this context, Chile’s neoliberalism has been rooted in authoritarianism, expanding its problems throughout the 1990s, when the country transitioned to democracy. For this reason, scholars have called the events of 2019 an anti-neoliberal revolt (Garcés, 2019; Tijoux, 2020; Vargas Muñoz, 2020). The demands from the crowds were structural in nature and impossible for the government to meet via traditional legislative reforms. For example, the demand for a new pension system, free education and overall addressing of the crisis of the cost of living were some of the narratives that emerged from protestors (Cuello and Velasco, 2021). Although the demands became about structural transformations, the making of those demands was disjointed, disorderly and not organised by any particular group of society. Nevertheless, that did not stop the government from using extreme police and military force against citizens. ‘We are at war with a powerful enemy’, President Sebastian Piñera said in the midst of the uprising (Landaeta and Herrero, 2021, p. 72). This statement was accompanied by numerous recorded violations of human rights by the Chilean authorities that left more than 300 people with severe ocular injuries (Valenzuela, 2021).

As with the demands, the expansion of the protests was also uneven and disjointed, with no clear, singular articulator. Political parties, left-wing organisations, etc., which traditionally would be at the forefront of these protests, were not the leading figures in the revolt (Cuello and Velasco, 2021). In particular, left-wing parties were caught off guard by the ability of people to self-organise and protest quickly and constantly over the three months. Social organisations and social movements became more present as the protagonists of the revolt. As a result, a coalition of left-wing political parties, social organisations and communities negotiated with the government to call for a referendum on the proposal to write a new Constitution for the country (Cruz, 2020). Feminist organisations became an essential part of the revolt, both in the organisation of protests and in the development of ideas around social demands (Castillo, 2019). In what follows, I provide a brief overview of the current feminist movement in Chile.

The recent feminist movement in Chile

The recent feminist movement in Chile took on a protagonist role in the streets during 2018. It was called by the media and activists ‘El Mayo Feminista’ (‘The Feminist May’) to parallel May 1968 (Richard, 2018). Feminists from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), both public and private, protested for the end of ‘sexist education’ and to the secrecy around sexual harassment and abuse in institutions, after a series of incidences of sexual abuse were reported against male professors (Castillo, 2018; Grau, 2018; Cifuentes Tapia, 2019). The protests of Mayo Feminista were the beginning of mass protests organised by feminist organisations, which came to change the composition and aesthetic of traditional social movements (Cruz, 2023). It was followed by the organisation of the Women’s Strikes, which have been attended by large numbers of women since 2018, with the one in 2019 marking the largest protest since the return to democracy in 1990 (Saéz, 2021, p. 31). The organisation of marches and protests was accompanied by a growing base of—especially young—women identifying as feminists and creating networks across the country. However, the Chilean feminist movement has a longer historical trajectory that does not begin in 2018 (Gálvez Comandini, 2021).

As recognition of this history, the contemporary feminist movement makes direct reference to early feminist activists such as Elena Caffarena (1903–2003), one of the founders of the Chilean suffragette movement and an influential intellectual who advocated for ‘autonomous feminist institutions’ outside of the ‘partisan logics’ in order to achieve political power (Alfaro, Inostroza and Hiner, 2021, p. 60). Also, it recognises the role of the Movimiento Pro-Emancipacion de las Mujeres de Chile (MEMCh), founded by Caffarena and other feminist activists in 1935, which aimed for the ‘economic, political, biological and juridical emancipation of women’ (Cerda, Galvéz Comandi and Toro, 2021, p. 50), and which in 1983 expanded to become a women’s organisation to fight for restoring democracy to Chile during the dictatorship. Women during this period played a central role in combatting the violation of human rights through the Agrupación de Familiares Detenidos Desaparecidios, and through establishing several feminist and women’s organisations linked to left-wing political parties (Alfaro, Inostroza and Hiner, 2021, pp. 85–86). The role played by women and feminist movements during the dictatorship is important for understanding the current rise of feminist mobilisations in Chile, not only because it represents an example of resistance and a contribution to a feminist critique of authoritarianism and patriarchy but also because it reunites activists from different generations around new and old political issues. For example, the slogan born in the dictatorship, ‘democracy in the country and in the house’ (Hiner and Lopéz Dietz, 2021, p. 91), has been seen again in protests from 2018 onwards, as a way of conveying the failures of the transition to democracy in the 1990s.

Feminist movement participation since 2018 in terms of organisation and growth has been unprecedented, rendering it the social movement with the most influence over the outcomes of this popular revolt. Feminists, from the collective C8M as well as, for example, Feministas MODATIMA, were elected as members of the Constitutional Convention during the Referendum of 2020, and secured gender parity in the election process (Musante Muller, 2021, p. 156). They were also at the forefront of the election of local representatives and of the new government in 2021 (Cruz, 2021), particularly from left-wing parties such as Convergencia Social, Partido Comunista and others. Feminists are present in all political spheres: the streets, social movements, political institutions and the government. Further, the demands of the movement have been connected with transnational feminist demands, such as ending violence against women and girls, the fight against feminicide and demands for safe and legal abortion (Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019). Following these principles, the Chilean feminist movement has also deepened its radical roots, bringing to the fore a feminist critique of neoliberalism, which was at the heart of the social uprising of 2019. I pay particular attention to the feminist voices that identify with autonomous politics, those forms of organising outside traditional politics (e.g., political parties). However, I want to highlight that this is not without tension. Although most of the participants in this study commit to this autonomous tendency, not all of them disregard the importance of institutional politics, which is something I do not develop in this article, but which others, such as Susan Franceschet (2003), Débora de Fina Gonzalez and Francisca Figueroa Vidal (2019) and Linda Stevenson (2021), have explored in recent years.

According to Olga Grau (2018), a Chilean feminist philosopher, feminists in Chile are mostly urban, university-educated, young women who live in Santiago. Whilst the class composition of the movement tends to be diverse, with many feminists becoming active in the trade union movement as community leaders, etc. (Saéz, 2021), feminism is still commonly associated with those who are from the middle class (Gálvez Comandini, 2021). As mentioned, feminists interviewed in this project consistently referred to the diversity of the movement, including class backgrounds, choosing to discuss the plural feminismos, so as to convey the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and indigenous communities. Recent scholars have characterised the movement by its horizontalidad, something that I later argue is an important part of its autonomous narrative. Horizontalidad means a type of organising where no strict hierarchical structures are recognised within the movement, with a tendency to bring feminism into other political spaces (e.g. political parties, unions, etc.) rather than creating new ones. I argue that horizontalidad is a predominant political position in C8M but not in other forms of feminist organisations or feminist wings of political parties in Chile, and that it becomes particularly important during Mayo Feminista and later during the social uprising. In other words, while horizontalidad is referred to by many feminists outside C8M, it cannot be the sole means of describing the feminist movement in the country.

C8M was created in 2018 out of the transnational call for International Women’s Day (Carrillo, 2021, p. 22). It is a connected set of networks convened by committees focused on different issues, such as gender violence, environmental crises and housing. In the words of one of its founders and former members: ‘C8M used to meet in February every year, or during summertime, to organise marches that were to happen during the 8 of March [International Women’s Day]. After the march was over, there was a balance meeting to review how the march had gone, etcetera, and the Coordinadora was dismantled until next year’ (Interview 3). Proper to its autonomous composition and militancy, there was not a permanent structure until 2018 when, in the words of the same interviewee, ‘the first time, three spokeswomen were chosen to represent three different subjects that we wanted to show: a migrant, a trans woman and a cleaning worker’ (ibid.). This gave continuity to the organisation as a network that operated through several committees and which developed their organisational intentions, something I explore next in this article.

Feminists in the revolt

For feminists witnessing and participating in the popular uprising, the events passed as a whirlwind. In their voices were joyful words for the rapid self-organisation of the people, as well as suffering and lament for the state repression endured throughout those months of political turmoil. Whilst I found several narrative strands within the interviews I conducted that gesture towards the emergence of new feminist political ideas, I focus on three of them to highlight the relevance of concept-building and demand-making in the making of a feminist revolt. I present these reflections under two interconnected dimensions: 1) the widening of feminist organisation; and 2) the intersectionality of feminist demands.

Widening feminist organisation

Autonomy and horizontalidad became recurrent narratives to describe the ways in which feminism managed to take a protagonist turn during the social uprising. Both ideas were narrated and imagined differently by the participants, but always with the purpose of presenting feminist organising as an expansive and all-inclusive practice. Those current and former members of C8M define the autonomy of the network as ‘a space that constantly mutates its organisational structure according to the needs and tasks that arise’ (Interview 1). Another participant (Interview 6) explains it as ‘completely different from the militancy of a political party, for example, where everything is competence and submission. There are people who submit to power and obey the orders of the party. At the same time, they are competing with their comrades in who is right, who is more intelligent, etc. However, we are sisters’.

The autonomous internal dynamics of C8M necessitates a horizontal type of organisation, in which there is no top-down decision-making directed by a leader or a group of leaders. On the contrary, collective decisions are made, as indicated above, via assemblies (see Cruz, 2023). As part of its internal dynamics, C8M works with a system of ‘spokespersons’. As one participant explains:

Early on [in the origin of the organisation], we conceived the need for a spokesperson role, with a mandate to embody the collective voice: a voice and a task democratically elected. In terms of the assemblies that we hold, all the voices that have been elected in the Coordinadora have been elected in open assemblies and, therefore, are also rotating positions or roles. We think that this is very important. (Interview 1)

Another participant (Interview 6), who acted as one of these spokespersons, indicates: ‘this replacement and rotation method has to do with taking care of the autonomy of the organisation. The spokesperson system works as a team which currently is constituted by three people. The team also includes a group of four journalists that help the spokesperson to connect with the media and to write public statements’. Complementing this, a participant (Interview 1) adds: ‘it also serves as a voice during mobilisations or protests. This is a task like so many others that exist, a little more visible, more exposed, but that always answers to that mandate, in a permanent context of possible discussion about what we have been doing’.

Although these reflections uncritically posit autonomy and horizontalidad as ways of organising, the participants do not see these as fixed and immovable ideas, but more as a practice of concept-building that allowed space for the many feminismos that were emerging before and during the uprising, in a variety of non-feminist organisations and political parties. Another participant, themselves a member of C8M as well active in a defence-of-water organisation, expands on their recollection:

I always liked a lot that the [C8M] understood the existence of these variations of feminism that are built from a territorial reality and perspective, of the dynamics themselves. So, this call not to adhere, but to build, that was immediately interesting to me. I mean, their perspective of wanting to listen to us, to listen to all these different types of feminism. Wanting to understand each struggle, including the socio-environmental one, unionism and the one related to history and human rights, to build a joint narrative born of all of the above. (Interview 4)

Similarly, and in reference to her activism in the Red Chilena contra la violencia hacia las Mujeres and her militancy in a left-wing libertarian political party, a participant (Interview 9) explains: ‘We always had the diagnosis that we were interested in introducing feminism to the left, but not with that militant/autonomous duality, but by forming feminist spaces within the left, and we did that in the different feminist fronts of the parties that ended up forming the Frente Amplio [the current coalition of left-wing political parties]’.

It is in these spaces, and through these forms of autonomy, that feminists have been drafting their anti-neoliberal positions, through intellectual discussions and practical steps. Militancy and autonomy do not appear to be contradictory, but are formations of concepts and political ideas, detached from formal dogmatisms, that allow for demand-making and the opening of avenues of feminist intervention. This is a feminist revolt dynamic in construction, through concept-building and demand-making, which made it possible for these activists to foresee the social revolt of 2019 as an historical outcome:

To us, in some way, the experience of the strike [Women’s Strike 2019] as well as the previous experience that arose in response to the murder of Camilo Catrillanca: these are two very direct and concrete antecedents of what this revolt has become, which of course is steeped in history, it is not just a spontaneous process or alien to the whole itinerary of previous struggles or strikes. ³ (Interview 1)

There was an organic tendency for feminists to respond quickly to the necessities of the moment, whether assisting injured protestors, taking people out of detention centres, coordinating demands at the local level or organising marches that made visible specifically feminist demands (Messina, 2020; Carrillo, 2021). For these feminists, therefore, autonomy is not a simple strategy for organising; it is a practice of concept-building for the movement, an ability to respond to what are considered traditional ways of political organising, such as political parties or institutions, but with the purpose of expanding the ways in which neoliberalism can be tackled and confronted:

Through C8M, we have been able to get together, we have been able to sit down and talk […] with groups of women organised at the level of unions, and with groups of women organised at the level of the fight for housing […] There we have been able to combine the dialogues of women who are totally precarious, women who are impoverished by neoliberal policies, and who are fighting in different spaces but paradoxically are being affected by the same problems. (Interview 8)

As another participant puts it:

There is a construction process here that goes beyond the intellectual, that are the bonds of feelings that neoliberalism leaves aside. Because everything is ridiculed; it is seen as stupid. If you cry, if you get emotional, if you scream with rage, all that is stupid. [Thus] we [feminists] are going to overflow the movement with happiness, it is the anger transformed into the happiness of meeting [with others in the protests]. (Interview 6)

The organisation against neoliberalism during the social uprising was not about the immediacy of winning, but about transforming anger and survival into potencia feminista (Gago, 2020)—happiness in the voice described above—to defy and build power against the principle of individualism at the heart of neoliberalism. As the same participant continues:

so, since we started shouting in the first days of October, people gathering in the streets, we all sang together—with that voice of football fans [laugh]—‘oh, Chile woke up’. No one [individually] invented that chant, we all did. [The chant] questioned us, interpreted us profoundly, without knowing, without mentally pondering what it meant that Chile has woken up. (Interview 6)

In this sense, the feminist revolt was an essential element in allowing a broader movement to feel part of a social revolt. The ability of organisations such as C8M in previous years to propose and promote the possibility of expanding one’s imagination for organising against neoliberalism—through concept-building such as autonomy and horizontalidad—permitted feminism to be more than a marginal group within the popular revolt; rather it became a force that could reshape the ways in which the overall social uprising developed. In regard to Forrester’s (2022) theorisation of demand-making, feminist ways of organising became a perspective on investment which the wider body of protestors during the uprising used to advance the demand of ending neoliberalism in Chile.

Intersecting feminist demands

As the protests and mass demonstrations spread throughout the country in October 2019, repression from police and the military intensified. ⁴ Sexual violence and associated violences, such as mockery, verbal and psychological abuse and threats (Arensburg-Castelli et al., 2021, p. 597), were widely reported, mainly by women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The use of sexual violence in conflictive contexts is not a new phenomenon, and not at all a novel issue for feminism to confront (Bufacchi and Gilson, 2016; Kirby, 2013). However, I want to demonstrate in this section how the narrative of political-sexual violence and the precariousness of life permitted the feminist movement—particularly the autonomous sector—to expand what violence against women and girls (VAWG) signifies in the context of wider political repression and ingrained neoliberalism. The intersection of these reflections, violence and the precariousness of life, works as a perspective of investment to build a wider critique of neoliberalism and also to reenergise the broader social movement that was active during the uprising of 2019.

Political-sexual violence is a narrative and political idea that re-emerged from the conversations between the new generation of feminists and the women who endured state repression during the dictatorship (1973–1990). ‘The attack on women, I believe, is a practice inherited from years before. In particular, the special use of sexual violence as a form of repression of women that mobilise and participate in politics re-emerged because it was never extirpated’, one participant (Interview 9) reflects. Another participant elaborated:

It is important to us given that since the beginning of C8M, one of its founders was Beatriz Bataszew, a survivor of political-sexual violence during the dictatorship. She was like a mentor to us, bestowing on us her knowledge and experiences. With them [‘them’ in Spanish with a clear feminine gender inflection] we learnt a lot about the fight against impunity, and of course this particular and recurring idea about women being ‘spoils of war’ in contexts such as this. (Interview 1)

The memory discussed here not only works as a narrative exercise for feminist activists but permits concept-building to understand the continuity of what state repression means for women in Chile. It revolts against the idea of what police brutality and state repression represents for a group within society, how those already oppressed by structures of violence are more affected during moments of violent protest. The interviewee continues:

The sexual political violence against the bodies of women and dissidents—particularly experienced during the uprising, mobilisations and protests—cannot be understood if we do not recognise that this was a concrete, very direct and profound omission in the way in which these very limited processes of justice and reparation were carried out in Chile’s post-dictatorship. (Interview 1)

The targeting of women and LGBTQ+ people by police agents was experienced as a ‘much clearer exercise of control over women’, a form of ‘state terrorism that is systematic’ (Interview 8). These reflections are then linked through the past into the now, a present delineated by neoliberalism, which produces and reproduces structural violence against women. This political and historical reconnection of political-sexual violence permitted the feminist movement to turn concept-building into demand-making that not only addressed the now of sexual repression but looked back to the unresolved past of repression during the dictatorship.

The campaign for recognition of this violence during the popular revolt was central for feminist organisations, such as C8M, with a major expression of this being the artistic dance performance of the feminist collective Las Tesis, ‘A rapist in your path’ (Serafini, 2020), which formed the cornerstone (Cruz, 2023) that consolidated this form of feminist revolt within a revolt. The performance describes and links state repression, sexual violence and structural violence (e.g., access to justice) and became a practice that combined political-sexual violence as concept-building and demand-making. As one of the participants (Interview 7) put it, it was a ‘visible change where we could see a group of different generations, from the youngest to the oldest, with the same purpose, the same feeling, the same action’. Another participant reiterates:

the song by Las Tesis appeared and it was wonderful, like a milestone within the revolt. And we watched as everything—which was beginning to feel static—gained new life with this song. It was very shocking to see this sort of duality […] I see it as wonderful that this message gets exposure and is out in the world, but it is also sad that there is a necessity for it to be exposed and that it makes sense to people from such different countries and cultures: the fact that we all share these terrible feelings of police mistreating us, raping us … in short, the fact of us being raped and abused by the state and police. So, I feel that Las Tesis were very important in raising morale in the revolt. (Interview 3)

The demand of ending police repression in this context through the use of this performance acted as a tactical-strategic engagement that redefined sexual violence as a political issue, and also served to reignite the social protest that at the time was in decline (DUChile, 2019). In this sense, the performance as mass protest illustrated the notion of a feminist revolt, one that helps to reconceptualise the notion of violence and repression (concept-building) and invest in the making of demands in the context of a wider social revolt.

This links to the core of the social uprising. The anti-neoliberal popular revolt aimed to convene a collective demand for equal distribution of resources and access to social security and benefits. As mentioned before, the social demands during these months of protests were disjointed, messy, disorganised. However, there was one slogan that put together the messiness of what protestors were demanding: ‘It is not about 30 pesos[; it] is about 30 years’ (see Ferretti and Dragnic, 2020a). The slogan was also promoted by feminist organisations, such as C8M, who sought to provide greater substance to this disjointed movement. Since 2018, feminists in Chile had been working towards building an anti-neoliberal agenda where the conditions of life could be profoundly linked to Ni Una Menos and the campaigns fighting violence against women. Feminists have more broadly called this the campaign against the precariousness of life.

One of the participants (Interview 1) describes the slogan as ‘a founding milestone from a feminist perspective, and a way of reading why today we have had thirty years of neoliberalism, and the way in which feminism had a political reading of the very close and direct link between the precariousness of our lives and the worsening of the violence against our bodies’. The concept-building was part of the work done through assemblies. As another activist puts it:

I remember that the word ‘precariousness’ was already a bit complex and had a bit of rejection during the territorial assemblies. They would say to us ‘but … people are not going to understand what precariousness means: you come up with these words that are so difficult’. And yet, with the more reflexive descent into how our lives were precarious—which has to do with both the violence experienced inside our homes, and a labour system that is incredibly unjust—we managed to break down and understand this ‘precariousness’ during the assemblies, along with the issue of extractivism. And like that, the slogan, chant, whatever you want to call it, installed itself with great force on a massive scale. (Interview 2)

The concept-building of the precariousness of life permits feminists to build a concrete framework to criticise neoliberalism as a model that is highly interrelated with the violence experienced by women and LGBTQ+ people in the country. This framework or narrative emerged from the assemblies and feminist organising, and expanded and grew as demand-making during the popular revolt. There is an intersection but more importantly a particular direction that feminists, as a movement, helped to pave during those months of protests. As one participant puts it:

Feminism has its own guidelines and in Chile, at least, it has permeated a lot with this whole subject against the precariousness of life, which is the main struggle within the revolt. I think it was important for the revolt to happen after all this escalation of society being educated on what is and how does feminism work. So, we reached the revolt and were like ‘yeah, this is feminism and here we are: you can count on us, and if things do not get done, we will do them ourselves’. (Interview 3)

Another activist also comments:

Dead people, mutilated people, arrests taking place, people who disappeared … terrible things were happening [during the popular revolt]. So, at the beginning there was like a wonderful awakening, people were manifesting, getting empowered. We had no idea that there were so many of us and we were not going to let this go. We have a strength in numbers that cannot be destroyed nor disunited, but against us there is this repressive government who literally declared war against us. (Interview 3)

It is not possible to ignore the growing critique of neoliberalism in Chile—that saw its explosion in a social revolt—as a result of the influence that movements, like those of the feminists, created in the years prior. The intersection between violence and the precariousness of life is a concept built in the street—streetwalking theorising in Lugones’ (2003) sense—which opened the possibility of thinking of demands as a perspective of investment or as potencia, in Gago’s (2020) sense, to build stepping stones to a different future. As one participant (Interview 1) says, ‘the only way to eradicate this violence is with a necessary transformation of everything, of how life is organised’. She continues:

So, in that sense, it was very important to be able to somehow broaden the notion of how these paths and centralities are conceived, and at the same time, to closely understand and connect how we can link and think things that also speak to the very notion of what violence and experiences of violence, in plural, are. (ibid.)

As another participant indicates as part of her participation in the popular revolt:

these expressions of precariousness that we experience are a response to this relationship, the one between capitalism and patriarchy. And perhaps, not show them [other protestors] but rather invite them to talk about their lives. To me, that has been very important. I think that when we talk about what we have been through, a memory of it is born. And what is left, this story or memory, is a way of resistance … This is what I lived through … my comrade went through the same. (Interview 2)

They are lived collectively, but only made visible when a feminist revolt triggers the process of concept-building and demand-making that allows a movement to imagine a future without precariousness, a future that is post-neoliberal and feminist in principle. As one of the participants (Interview 1) indicates, ‘the feminist voice and its struggle appear carrying not only a transformative force, but also a broad and diverse process of politicisation, which traverse the most personal experiences, as well as the possibility of permanently collectivising this’. She continues:

I believe that this is one of the main keys to the feminist struggle: the possibility of how we can permanently transform these ideas and bring them out of the closet—which is always present in conversations—that debts, violence, poverty and unemployment are individual problems, for all the years in which it has always been constituted as a neoliberal subjectivity. (ibid.)

In this sense, imagining the future is not only a prefiguration of principles inside a movement (or organisation) but a tactical-strategic engagement, as Lugones (2003) suggests, that can take different paths, make different decisions, retract and rethink, rework the ways in which concepts and demands work in order to achieve a feminist horizon.

Conclusion

This article contributes to an empirical understanding of the rise of feminist political ideas in Chile during the uprising of 2019, presenting significant and novel reflections from activists themselves. The article presented three strands of political ideas, namely, autonomy, political-sexual violence and the precariousness of life, using the framework of feminist revolt to explain the political engagement of Chilean feminist activists. Feminist revolt acts as a framework to analyse the political ability of feminists to build concepts in order to advance demands as a perspective of investment in the future, broadening organisational mechanisms to feminist futures. The case of Chile contributes towards rethinking new forms of feminist political movements, as well as reconceptualising the ways in which anti-neoliberal feminists, within the radical tradition, engage in politics and contribute to wider political ideas.

The feminist movement in Chile post uprising continued to make advances in the political sphere. Their intervention allowed gender parity in the formation of the Constitutional Assembly in 2021 and was key to the election in 2022 of the current progressive President Gabriel Boric, who has declared his government to be an explicitly feminist one. With the rejection of the New Constitutional Draft in the referendum of 2022, the feminist movement has taken some defeats. However, it continues to be present in challenging authority and demanding transformations that will move the country beyond neoliberalism and patriarchal relations.