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Abstract

This article explores how parliamentary debates in postauthoritarian Chile discursively produced and deployed feminized images of victims and survivors of the authoritarian regime to sustain the constitution and establishment of a logic of compensational justice. In describing and delineating the gender politics of representation in these social policy debates, the article also looks at how compensatory justice is constituted along the lines of a neoliberal market mentality. In this way, the article traces how patriarchal power relations and neoliberal governmental rationality are mutually constitutive regimes that require the real and imagined bodies of women as a surface of inscription.

Keywords

critical theory economic justice feminist theories and research human rights social justice

A bit of money to eat and dress themselves even if minimally, to cover basic monthly expenses so those widows, those orphans, those women, [and] those daughters can have at least a piece of bread to put in their mouths.

Member of Parliament, Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies (1991b, p. 967) According to official records, the military regime that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990 left a legacy of approximately 3,200 deaths, about 1,100 of which constituted “disappeared people” (Government of Chile. Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 1991) and more than 37,000 victims of torture (Government of Chile, Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004). Despite the fact that about 94% of the dead and 87% of the tortured were men, parliamentary debates concerning compensation following the end of the authoritarian regime consistently relied on feminized representations of victims and survivors. Following the release in 1991 of the Report of the Rettig Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, political debates constantly conjured up gendered images of poor and dispossessed widows, daughters, and orphans to support and/or contest the creation of monetary compensation for the surviving partners and families of those who were executed or disappeared. Similarly, following the 2004 release of the Report of the Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, images of raped and tortured women dominated debates on compensation. In these debates, politicians engaged in problematic politics of representation in which poor and dispossessed widows and tortured women were discursively materialized along narratives of bodily need and dehumanizing violence to turn them into the terrain on which concepts of monetary compensation were contested and negotiated. Furthermore, these gendered representational practices worked to secure nationalist discourses in which monetary compensation to suffering women sustained claims that the nation and its citizens had achieved national reconciliation and unity.

This article builds on the work of Butler (1993, 1999) on gender discourses and performativity and Brown’s (2005) work on neoliberal governmental rationality to answer the following questions: How are gendered bodies produced and represented in social policy debates, and what kind of social policy decisions do they authorize? How does the production of gendered discourses of violence sustain the constitution of compensational justice? And how are gendered practices of representation and the compensational justice they sustain located within a neoliberal patriarchal regime? I explore these questions by situating them in the context of political debates on compensation for victims of the authoritarian regime in postauthoritarian Chile.

The data for this article came from two moments in the history of human rights policy debates in Chile: the 1991 debates concerning Law 19,123 following the release of the Rettig Report and the 2004 debates concerning Law 19,687, which, following the release of the Torture Report, extended compensation to victims of torture. I collected these data through archival research at the Library of Congress in Chile in 2005, and they consist of records of parliamentary debates in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The policies in my sample serve as examples of the extensive system of compensatory benefits that were implemented by the Chilean state for victims and survivors of the authoritarian regime. These policies instituted pensions, health care, scholarships, housing subsidies, debt forgiveness, and exceptions from compulsory conscription for victims, including children who were born in prison.

I begin the analysis by outlining how Butler’s (1993, 1999) work on gender performativity and Brown’s (2005) work on neoliberal governmental rationality provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of the parliamentary debates. I then delineate how a market mentality of calculability was imposed on discourses of justice in parliamentary debates in ways that gave way to a logic of compensational justice. This logic, I propose, not only reinforced neoliberalism, but heavily relied on gender narratives. A discussion of how parliamentary debates discursively produced victims along embodied notions of dispossession and torture to justify and legitimate monetary compensation is presented in the last part of the article. I conclude with a brief discussion of the importance of understanding the mutually sustaining character of neoliberalism and patriarchy for critical and transformative analyses of policy debates in the context of histories of injustice.

A Word of Caution

Before I start the analysis, it is necessary to highlight some critical ethical dilemmas that are associated with reporting on the politics of representation in which Chilean politicians engaged as they collectively articulated the logic of compensational justice. Reporting the representational practices that sustain compensational justice, albeit critical of their violent character, is a strategy that itself cannot escape representational violence. In reproducing verbatim what politicians said about victims and the torture and violence to which they were subjected to justify compensation policy, I have engaged in what Grosz (2003, p. 134) referred to as the less obvious and rarely called by this name violence of representation evident in the “domain of knowledge, reflection, thinking and writing.” I made this decision fully aware that in the process of challenging and rendering visible the representation of violence in political discourse, I faced the ethical dilemma associated with reproducing violence and its inherent dangers. This dilemma has no easy solution and needs to be taken up within the context of what Feitlowitz (1998, p. x) identified as the relationship between violence—what she called the disaster—and language.

On one hand, violence materially imprints itself on the bodies of victims in ways that are detailed, explicit, destructive, and productive (see, e.g., Lazreg, 2007; Macias, 2013; Razack, 2009; Taussig, 2004). Authoritarian violence and torture rob their victims of subjectivity, rendering them, as Scarry (1985) observed, voiceless bodies that can speak only what the torturer and the torturing state demand. In rendering victims speechless, torture also becomes unspeakable: something that either resists representation or should not be represented (see, e.g., Agosin, 2003; Rojas Baeza, 2004). Considering that authoritarian violence relies heavily on secrecy—through the relegation of violence to physical and symbolic spaces which existence is systemically denied—the refusal to speak of violence perpetuates the violence by reinforcing the secret. As a result, many survivors and scholars consider the act of publicly speaking and rendering explicit the violence a precondition not only for healing and social recognition but also for the reassertion of subjectivity and belonging (see, e.g., Avelar, 2001).

On the other hand, the relationship between violence and its representation—between unspeakable torture and the act of speaking about it—begs critical consideration. As Feitlowitz (1998, p. 20) observed, politicians in authoritarian and postauthoritarian settings generally speak about torture in euphemisms: words and concepts, such as excesses, procedures, and even violence that constitute what Feitlowitz called the lexicon of terror. Euphemisms render torture and its victims nondescript, unthreatening, and removed from social reality while hiding torture in plain sight. This euphemistic representation of torture can render torture anything or nothing because, in the absence of the experience of torture, we can imagine it to be anything we want. At the same time, the detailed description of torture inevitably reinflicts violence by trapping victims in never-ending moments of violence and materializing victims solely in their conditions as violated bodies (Macias, 2013). Yet, in refusing to describe torture to avoid this revictimization, even through the use of euphemisms (putting aside for a moment the dilemma they produce), although the intention is to save victims the pain of representation, we can reproduce and perpetuate the secrecy of torture, rendering it unspeakable. The dilemma is so complex that I suggest that in the relationship between violence and representation, it is impossible to find a place of innocence in which we can disentangle ourselves from violence. Practices of representation—even those that refuse the representation of violence—always risk victimization either through the imposition of representational practices that reinflict violence or through the denial of representation that renders violence hidden, secret, and unspeakable. This dilemma is not resolved by suggesting that only victims or survivors should be allowed to speak and represent torture because representation also implicates the reader and listener who, in reading and hearing about torture, represent it by making sense of it (for a discussion of the ethics of reading and the relationship between the reader and the text, see Macias, 2012).

In the context of this article, the ethical dilemma is further complicated by the fact that the goal of the analysis is precisely to describe the politics of representation as power devices. My decision to reproduce what politicians said was guided by my political commitment to render violence explicit while recognizing the problematic nature of representation. Therefore, I ask the reader to keep in mind the purpose of this analysis and to avoid turning the descriptions I include into what Lazreg (2007, p. 2) called orgiastic intellectual entertainment.

Conceptual Framework

Building on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge and Althusser’s notion of interpellation, Butler (1999) argued that gender is imprinted on the body through the act of naming it as gendered. In her discussion of Simone de Beauvoir’s proposition that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Butler (1999, p. 12) argued that the act of becoming a woman always takes place within the constraints of discourse and power. Discourse and power determine choice and the kind of woman one becomes. In fact, “it is discourse that does the metaphorical calling” that allows women to become (Butler & Salih, 2004, p. 139). Two central conditions are intrinsic to Butler’s argument: Gender is not a biological condition that vests the body with ontological certainty but, rather, a discursively produced social category, and gender discourses actively produce the subject they name in ways that make gender performative within heterosexist matrixes. As Butler (1993, p. 7) wrote, “in the naming the girl is ‘girled,’ brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.” Since the interpellation of discourse is continuous and relentless, it becomes naturalized through “the setting of a boundary and … the repeated inculcation of a norm” (p. 8). To be sure, the acts of naming gender in discourse constitute “performative utterances” that actively and continuously produce that which they are in charge of naming (Butler & Salih, 2004, p. 140).

In addition to naming, gender performativity is achieved through the regulative discourses and disciplinary techniques that determine how one does gender. That is, to become gendered means to engage in the “repeated stylization of the body” achieved, Butler (1999, p. 44) argued, through “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” In this sense, to become gendered means “the gradual acquisition of skills,” the “purposive and appropriate set of acts,” and the “words, acts, gestures and desire” that while producing the effect of a gender core, inform the way in which gender is performed (p. 173).

Also building on Foucault, Brown (2005) proposed that neoliberalism is more than simply a bundle of economic policies that are destined to radically free the market from state control. Rather, neoliberalism is a governmental rationality that not only organizes the relationship between the market and the state, but reaches beyond politics to the realm of individual subjectivity (p. 38). Neoliberalism, according to Brown, “carries a social analysis that when deployed … reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire” (p. 39). In the political sphere, neoliberalism subjects all policy and state action to a “market rationality” in which “considerations of profitability” determine both the work of the state and the conduct of its officials (p. 40). Economic rationality extends to “individual conduct, or, more precisely, prescribes the [neoliberal] citizen subject” by discursively producing the ideal citizen and determining the kinds of conduct that will constitute acceptable action (p. 42). In a manner highly reminiscent of Butler’s argument about gender, Brown argued that the neoliberal subject citizen is constituted principally as a “homo economicous” who is called into being through highly prescribed discourses of rationality, calculability, and individual freedom that “equate moral responsibility with rational action” (p. 42). Within this context, social policy, such as the compensation policy of interest in this article, is required not only to meet “profitability tests,” but to reduce all human action to an economic language of calculability, profitability, and marketability.

Although Brown did not explicitly address gender relations and Butler did not look at neoliberalism, separately and in conjunction, these authors provided important direction and context for the analysis I present in this article. Butler’s concept of gender as discursive and performative allowed me to trace how debates on compensation constitute the terrain on which experiences of authoritarian violence are discursively produced along feminized and highly embodied notions of victimhood. This argument informs an exploration of the discursive strategies and “performative utterances” that were used to feminize discourses of victimhood in the Chilean context through both the explicit naming of victims as feminine and the constitution of experiences of victimhood along stereotypical patriarchal conceptions of gender difference. Finally, Butler informed an exploration of how in parliamentary debates, political subjects enact their own patriarchal superiority by taking up the position of subjects who, through the naming of victims as feminized, claim the patriarchal privilege of becoming their saviors. Furthermore, Brown allowed me to outline how a neoliberal rationality determines a logic of compensational justice as the most effective device to deal with the legacies of authoritarianism, how compensation policy is subjected to the calculability of a market mentality, and how debates on compensation become the site in which neoliberal subjectivity is enacted in ways that allow political subjects to become neoliberal. Together, Butler and Brown informed an examination of how neoliberalism and patriarchy come into effect in and through one another in ways that do not only depend on gender discourses of victimhood, but locate those discourses concretely within neoliberal governmentality.

Studies of the interconnection of neoliberalism, political economy, and gender have a long history in feminist scholarship. Noteworthy is work that has a gender analysis of economic structures and institutions and that proposed that a feminist political economy is not simply about the inclusion of women’s issues but about the reorientation of the study of economics (see, e.g., Bergeron, 2001; Waylen, 1997). Other scholarly work has looked specifically at the impact of neoliberal globalization on women, especially women in the Global South (see, e.g., Benería & Floro, 2006; Elson, 1989; Klein, 2007; Moghadam, 2011). The role of authoritarianism and imperialism in the imposition and consolidation of neoliberalism in Latin America has also been the focus of research; yet, only a small part of this scholarship has looked at how the neoliberal project required patriarchal power relations (see, e.g., Benería & Floro, 2006; Gomez-Barris, 2007; Klein, 2007; Moulian, 1997; Richards, 1997). Some feminist scholarship has looked at the patriarchal character of authoritarian violence and how it targets the bodies of women and men in ways that reinscribe traditional gender discourses (see, e.g., Agosin & Bruno, 1993; Bunster, 1991). However, there have been few, if any, studies on how postauthoritarian regimes reinscribe patriarchy through social policies of recognition and compensation.

Literature more in tune with the analysis I present in this article has looked at the connection between political economy and cultural studies, bridging the divide between structural economic analyses and poststructural conceptions of culture, discourse, and power relations (see, e.g., Hindess, 2004; McLaughlin, 1999; Richard, 1998, 2000). Some of this scholarship has delineated how neoliberalism constitutes a governmental rationality that cannot fully be accounted for solely through a study of the economy. This literature has proposed a careful analysis of how capitalist and neoliberal economic discourses infiltrate all aspects of social life, submitting all subjects, most notably women, to the regulation of a neoliberal order (in addition to Brown’s, 2005, work, see Bergeron, 2011; Hindess, 1996; Rose, 1996). In looking at how postauthoritarian debates on compensation in Chile constituted the site for the consolidation of neoliberalism and patriarchy and the infiltration of their values into discourses and conceptions of justice, this article contributes to the study of neoliberal and patriarchal governmentality. Furthermore, in exploring how neoliberalism and patriarchy collide and interlock in compensation discourses, it aims to contribute to critical studies of social policy, their role in regulating social life, and their social function as instruments of ruling, discipline, and regulation.

The Logic of Compensational Justice

Compensation policies for human rights violations and historical injustices have become a widely accepted form of justice in international settings, and these practices have received considerable attention in the international literature on human rights (see, e.g., David & Yu-ping, 2005; Laplante & Theidon, 2007; Thompson, 2002; Torpey, 2001). Compensation policies have been discussed in such diverse transnational settings as South Korea (Han, 2005), Ghana (Ameh, 2006), and Latin America (Howland, 2008; Mendez, 1997) and concerning such diverse issues as the legacies of slavery for African Americans and the Japanese internment in Canada and the United States during World War II (see, e.g., Howard-Hassmann & Lombardo, 2007; Torpey, 2001). Lira and Loverman (2005) argued that in Chile, state reparation measures have had the effect of bringing victims into the fold of national reconciliation by providing concrete measures of justice that allow victims to feel morally and materially rehabilitated. Reparations measures, they contended, constitute an attainable form of justice that poses few challenges to the delicate balance of power in a postauthoritarian democracy (see also Espinoza, 2005; Gomez, 2005).

A critical issue in the literature is the role given to monetary compensation as a desirable measure of justice. Waldron (1992), for instance, argued that compensation should have the capacity of restituting the material and psychological loss experienced by individual victims, re-creating, or at least attempting to re-create, the original living conditions that people would have had, had injustice not occurred (see also Barkan, 2000a, 2000b; Khatchadourian, 2006; Marrus, 2009). On the other hand, authors such as Urban Walker (2006, p. 380) have challenged the idea that such reconstruction is possible when atrocities are massive and prolonged over history. Urban Walker did not dismiss the act of compensation; she merely suggested “that the framework of corrective justice strains, because it has never been meant to deal with either a massive scale or serious mayhem … that characterize oppressive and violently repressive systems” (p. 380). For these authors, the issue is the imperfect approaches to compensation, not its conceptualization as a desirable measure of justice (see also de Grieff, 2006; Roth-Arriaza, 2004). The idea that, as Lira and Loverman (2005) suggested, moral rehabilitation and social inclusion can be secured through compensation seems firmly established in the international literature on compensation.

Debates on compensation in Chile begin with the premise that “the disappearance or death of a loved one constitutes an irreparable loss,” but that reparation constitutes “an absolute requirement for a full transition into democracy” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 1991b, p. 2865). One finds a number of negotiations and discursive maneuvers in the space that separates “irreparable loss” and a nation-building project in which democracy requires some measure of justice: maneuvers and negotiations that eventually lead to a logic of compensational justice. In her analysis of political talk in Canada, Razack (2000) suggested that what gives vitality to policies that are discriminatory and contradictory in their nature is that these policies are grounded in narratives that call on people’s nationalist desires. The acceptance of these narratives, in spite of their detrimental impact, becomes “simple logic” for political subjects, a story that makes sense to national subjects, reducing confusion and providing a space in which claims of belonging can be ascertained (p. 186). In Chile, what determines that “irreparable losses” can be repaired through monetary compensation is an unquestionable acceptance of the logic that demands for justice can be addressed within the realm of the market. This logic is predicated, as Sznaider (2002, p. 107) observed, on the undisputed idea that “it is perfectly possible to satisfy justice by means of money. Money makes very different things equal; that is the whole point of it.”

The market becomes the realm in which a national reconciliation project can be achieved, accomplishing, as Brown (2005, p. 40) argued, the distribution of a market mentality into the realm of state policy. Economic action becomes moral action within this market mentality. In a historical context in which, as Moulian (1997) contended, the most important accomplishment of the authoritarian regime is a neoliberal social reorganization of the country that finally brings it into the fold of a neoliberal global order; monetary compensation sustains and consolidates the neoliberal transformation while safely imposing a neoliberal rationality on debates on justice. Furthermore, the logic of compensational justice reaches the realm of the subject, becoming for political actors, a moral imperative that can quiet the conscience, providing comfort as subjects join in a reconciled nation.

In debates on compensation, therefore, we witness how political subjects conduct themselves along the lines of a prescribed market-driven neoliberal subjectivity in which, as Brown (2005, p. 42) suggested, a homo economicus emerges as a humanitarian subject. This behavior is observable specifically in debates over how much compensation is sufficient to achieve justice. “Neoliberalism interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors,” Brown added, creating the conditions in Chile for the negotiations that effectively submitted experiences of injustice and violence to the calculation of cost and profitability. For example, politicians who challenged compensatory proposals did so on the basis of cost and benefit. As one Member of Parliament (MP) indicated, reparation measures are “an exceptional benefit that greatly exceeds existing pensions in the country,” and, as a result, “they generate disproportion” and an excessive burden on the economy (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 1991a, p. 378). Meanwhile, those who supported compensation argued that compensation should be as extensive as possible because of the extent of the loss, suggesting that the cost of the damage warranted the maximum amount of compensation. The MPs engaged in extensive negotiations and strategies of calculation that included the amount, length, and extent of compensation. These calculations extended, for example, to the estimation of the life span of widows and survivors of torture (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 1991b, p. 972). The calculation of loss ultimately allowed the MPs to argue that “the amount or value of the reparation does not correspond with the inflicted damage” (p. 961, italics added). This story is one of the subjects bartering for the lives of victims, negotiating and calculating the value of life, and determining how much would constitute sufficient payment and thus sufficient justice. Victims and survivors have become trapped in the logic that the irreparable can be repaired through specific calculations performed on bodies. The same calculations have relegated victims to a location in which their lives can be given or be deprived of value.

The discursive constitution of compensation as justice effectively places human rights violations within a neoliberal moral paradigm. In this paradigm, victims and survivors can make claims to dignity only along the prescribed lines of cost and benefit. Politicians, on the other hand, render authoritarian violence calculable and the object of negotiation and haggling and engage in a form of neoliberal performance that secures their condition as ideal citizens of a neoliberal nation. In fact, in the discourse on compensation, neoliberal rationality becomes a moral universe that, in a way that is similar to what Butler and Salih (2004, p. 110) identified in gender performativity, calls on the subject to engage in the “acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires” that create the illusion that neoliberalism is the natural environment for the articulation of justice. It is in this neoliberal environment, constituted as naturally occurring, that subjects can neatly and unquestionably tie compensation to a national project in which, as an MP stated, “[r]eparation … constitutes an absolutely necessary task that can lead to the strengthening of our democracy” (Government of Chile, Senate, 1992a, p. 3782).

The market mentality of neoliberalism provides a language akin to the discourse on compensation, which allows political subjects to transform irreparable loss into attainable justice. In this sense, while neoliberalism may not be the precursor of compensation discourses, the language of compensation finds a home in neoliberal governmentality, allowing for the expression of ideas of justice as compensation and providing a friendly environment for the articulation of entrepreneurial economic subjectivity. Through the articulation of discourse, the politicians and policy makers invest in compensation, embracing the idea that it will yield the profit of reconciliation that will ensure their place in the nation. As compensation is vested with morality, equating, as Brown (2005, p. 42) observed, “morality with rational action,” the calculation of life and death, through the calculation of compensation and its transformation into justice, assures the political subject’s moral superiority. Authoritarian terror and the life caught in it are placed in a scale against values of reconciliation to determine the cost of terror that would render the highest rate of return in terms of reconciliation. Arguments concerning proportionality—even when stating that pensions compensate insufficiently—submit life captured in the discourse on compensation to an economic discourse that as Read (2009, p. 31) observed, “becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action … can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure.”

Calculable Bodies

The calculability of life on which injustice has been inflicted and on which compensation can be enacted requires the materialization of specific bodies in the discourse on compensation: bodies that become the discursive terrain and the “cultural locus” of meaning on which political subjects, the legitimate subjects/citizens, negotiate belonging in the neoliberal nation (Butler & Salih, 2004, p. 23). The economy of life that calculates pain and assigns value achieves the symbolic production of a neoliberal national community through the commodification, appropriation, and discursive representation of gendered stories of pain. In fact, the experiences that are materialized in the image of the victim and beneficiary of compensation are primarily the experiences of dispossessed, hungry widows and violated tortured women. The naming of victims along these lines effectively materializes survivors as constrained within emphatically corporeal discourses of need, hunger, and dispossession, as well as the figures of rape, torture, wounds, and body decay. Victims are quite explicitly constituted as destitute and tortured to justify the payment of pensions and to confirm both that the nation has done something about the injustice and that a rationality of cost and benefit is the best way to deal with human rights demands. As one MP argued:

None of them are millionaires; they receive the benefits already in place with a rare mixture of anger, shame, and dignity because they need them for themselves and for their families; because they need to buy medication, finish paying [for] their homes, repair their dentures or, maybe, buy a plot in the cemetery where their bones can find final rest at the end of the path. (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 30)

In an economy of pain, bodies are calculated through their naked dispossession as in need of medication, dentures, or burial plots in which they are seen along notions of bodily need and ultimately just bones. Only through this material dispossession can life be measurable in terms of the economic resources needed to procure bodily needs. The production of the dispossessed bodies of widows and daughters authorizes their submission to the neoliberal morality of the market in which dentures, houses, and death have a price. Injustice is not the practices of torture or the infliction of death, but the monetary dispossession that, like torture and death, is lived on the bodies of women who need to “repair their dentures” or pay for a “plot in the cemetery.” As the quotation at the beginning of this article demonstrates, debates on compensation materialize hungry and naked widows and daughters in order for the nation to provide them a “bit of money to eat and dress themselves” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 1991b, p. 967). While the terror is what brings victims into the realm of governmental calculation, terror that, as politicians have argued, cannot be compensated, it is the dispossession of victims and their embodiment as the “hungry mouths” of widows that constitutes the injustice and the commodity that can be paid through compensation. Dispossession ultimately renders the pain of victims intelligible, since the victims become nothing but “hungry mouths” that the national subject is responsible for feeding. Victims emerge here in their full corporeality as bodies whose biological needs can be given value. At this moment, the experiences of terror, of unspeakable violence, become measurable and tradable.

Nevertheless, the story of torture and death cannot be forgotten, for it is this experience that has caused the monetary dispossession that the nation can compensate. It is also the story of trauma and torture that can secure the moral superiority of neoliberal subjects, their humanism, and their prerogative to grant compensation. In the Rettig debates, terror showed its bodies in the figure of poor, dispossessed, searching widows and mothers. As an MP observed, “I give my approval to this law thinking of a modest and poor woman, Doña Olga Reyes, … who after the coup went from detention center to detention center looking for Sonia Bustos” (Government of Chile, Senate, 1992b, p. 3789). As another added, “[t]his project allows us to honestly acknowledge … the families that have suffered because they cannot find the remains of their loved ones,” because they do not know where to “put a bunch of flowers or light a candle for their dead” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 1991b, p. 967).

For their part, the debates on torture offer a unique opportunity to observe how the appropriation of histories of torture through its detailed description is required to sustain compensation. Here the body demanding compensation materializes, for example, in the figure of “the 15-year-old mother who was raped and as a result had a son” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 45). The description of torture is required if the humanism of the neoliberal subject/citizen embodied in politicians is to be achieved through the calculation of the value of a victim’s life. However, as Razack (2007) reminded us, the achievement of humanism and calculation rests on the reinfliction of violence, which obliterates the subjectivity of the victims and precludes them from speaking or refusing to speak of the violence. For example, the MPs constantly argued that they would not go into details about the specific experience of torture; yet, this statement was always followed by the act of speaking about the indescribable pain. As an MP sensationally stated:

Atrocious methods of torture were used, which I will not describe because it is inappropriate, but [let me just say] that in this room there is a [female] colleague … whose sister’s nipples were cut. (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 30)

MPs spoke in great detail, for example, of the sexual torture subjected on women who were imprisoned in the infamous “Venda Sexy” or “The Sexy Blindfold,” the name given to a house located in the Quilín sector of Santiago that functioned as a detention center from January to July 1975. As this quote demonstrates:

It is just a matter of reading the testimony that I have in my hands … referring to that infamous place called “Venda Sexy,” I quote, “I was not penetrated by the dog, [but] while I was imprisoned one of our comrades that is now disappeared came back destroyed from the torture because she had been penetrated by the dog. We could only comfort her because we did not want to know details.” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 29)

In these quotes, we see how the bodies of women materialized in their most brutal nakedness—at the borders of humanity as bodies forced into bestial brutalities that reduced them to residues of humanity. This dehumanization confirms the humanity of the subject who gazes on terror and who, through the revisiting of violence on the victims, can, as Razack (2007) added, momentarily inhabit the tortured body, imagine the torture imprinted on it, without becoming the tortured body. Subjects come out of the experience with the conviction that they have witnessed the human body in its most extreme dispossession, but have not become the body. The experience reminds them of their humanity and confirms their role as saviors, the heroes of the story. For example, an MP stated:

I have no doubt that those women who conceived children as a result of torture and who were born in prison are now relieved … Those who were forced to abort as a result of the brutality must be crying … With this initiative we are taking an important step in the process to achieve national reconciliation. We can not turn our backs on those who suffered. (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 39)

Debates on compensation constitute a discursive field with double-sided effects. On one side, they constitute an example of what Agamben (1998), building on Foucault, identified as the biopolitical condition of humanitarianism in which human life is captured in discourse to submit it to calculations that render it intelligible and governable. This process of intelligibility turns bodies of women into the corporeal “locus” of meaning, relegated, as Butler and Salih (2004, p. 28) argued, to the “bodily sphere” on which not only discourses of compensation are imposed, but in which the “naming” of victims effectively revictimizes them. Through the “shortcut of definition” and the performative utterances that produce the feminized victim, we witness how victims get relegated to the “uninhabitable” and “unlivable” space of torture, hunger, and death (Butler, 1993, p. 3).

The detailed description of the pain suffered by victims, Razack (2007, p. 377), contended, ultimately confirms the dehumanization of the victim because “the pain can only come into existence at the expense of the [victim] as a subject.” As Malkki (1996, p. 388) added, the materialization of suffering reflects a condition of contemporary humanitarian work in which the bodies of victims are portrayed as “anonymous corporeality,” rendering them speechless by dismissing their stories and their knowledge. The logic of compensational justice that the materialization of the bodies of women sustains is one that is not only patriarchal in nature but also neoliberal. In other words, neoliberalism becomes patriarchal at the same time that patriarchy becomes neoliberal through the materialization of bodies of women in the space of the market in which compensation is negotiated.

On the other side of this argument, the logic of compensational justice interpellates political subjects as simultaneously patriarchal and neoliberal. These political subjects can become the disembodied male “I” that, produced against the backdrop of the feminized corporeality of victims, can claim belonging in a patriarchal nation. The construction of victims as destitute and violated feminine bodies supports the constitution of the national subject as privileged and rational. If the victim of the abuse is female and poor, the subject doing the saving, the reconciled national subject, is certainly not. National subjects are, first of all, the saviors of mothers, raped women, widows, daughters, and orphans, and the allocation of compensation sustains not only their benevolent patriarchal identity but their neoliberal morality. Furthermore, it is through the articulation of this neoliberal morality that subjects/citizens differentiate themselves from those who inflicted authoritarian violence in the first place. As one MP stated, “For a long time, victims were unprotected, isolated, and ignored by society and the state. Only in our new democracy, and according to our libertarian conceptions, we have been able to procure reparations and moral rehabilitation” (Government of Chile, Chamber of Deputies, 2004, p. 56).

Conclusion

Elsewhere I have argued that processes of accounting for human rights violations that are organized through such instruments as truth and reconciliation commissions constitute devices that perpetuate the centralization of human life and its instrumental role in the consolidation of neoliberal governmentality in Chile (Macias, 2013). That is, processes of accounting reimprint the power of the postauthoritarian state on the bodies of victims in ways that not only resemble authoritarian terror, but link authoritarian and postauthoritarian power. Such processes of accounting, like authoritarian terror, require the specific materialization of women’s bodies as victims for the consolidation of the postauthoritarian nation and subject. In this article, I have traced similar processes taking place in social policy debates concerning justice as compensation. I have demonstrated that these debates constituted the setting in which both those who supported and those who opposed authoritarianism were invited to engage in forms of neoliberal patriarchal discursive practices that continued to require the bodies of women as surfaces of inscription and as terrain on which a reconciled postauthoritarian neoliberal patriarchal nation was built.

This analysis suggests that patriarchy and neoliberalism in Chile did not emerge in isolation from one another or from other social relations. On the contrary, for patriarchy to produce feminized images of victims in ways that called on politicians and policy makers to be saviors, the act of saving needed to be specifically conceived along a market rationality. The subjects who were able to claim a place of belonging in the postauthoritarian nation were, therefore, neoliberal patriarchal subjects who understood themselves as not only patriarchal but as inhabiting a neoliberal order. Patriarchy and neoliberalism are mutually sustaining regimes that reach from the level of social policy and state action to the realm of human morality, infiltrating discourses of justice and humanitarianism.

It is important to mention that at the time of the compensation debates, the Chilean parliament was made up predominantly of male MPs with a small minority of women members. As a result, with a few exceptions, the quotations that are included correspond to interventions made by male MPs. Nevertheless, the few interventions made by female MPs, even if in the minority, did not stray from the normative patriarchal discourse that dominates the discourse on compensation. These interventions shed light on the widely interpellating power of neoliberalism and patriarchy and its capacity to implicate women as much as men in ways that, while deserving further attention, cannot be fully explored in this article.

The mutually constitutive character of neoliberalism and patriarchy and the manner in which the bodies of women constitute the surface of inscription for both projects present important challenges for those who advocate for social justice and feminists analyses and for those who are writing in the field of social policy in cases of violence. In critically mapping how social policy debates reinscribe and reimprint patriarchal neoliberal power on the bodies of women, we need to come to terms with the fact that it is impossible to untangle patriarchy and neoliberalism and their determining influence in social policy decisions. Any critical study of social policy needs to take an approach that looks at patriarchy, neoliberalism, and other social relations in tandem and as mutually sustaining conditions that determine how we understand injustice and envision justice.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The research for this article was partially funded by a Doctoral Fellowship of the Canadian International Development Research Centre

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“Tortured Women and Hungry Widows”: Patriarchal Neoliberalism and the Logic of Compensational Justice in Chile

Abstract

Keywords

A Word of Caution

Conceptual Framework

The Logic of Compensational Justice

Calculable Bodies

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

References