Feminism enacted: A/n (un)situated case to introduce (Chilean) feminist perspectives to STS folks
I’m looking at a revolution from a screen. In my country, a whole social movement is fighting for gender equity as many other countries in the world. At the same time, I am learning about the intellectual tradition of feminist scholars in the field, as well their contributions in our methods, research objects, and perspectives. I’m struggling with it as a virtual spectator of the current Chilean feminist movement.
Two days ago I was talking this week with the great Nikky Stevens, one of the most engaged and aware feminists of my class, and she did not know about this social movement in Chile. I was astonished. How could she not know about this feminist south American wave? I said to myself “That is normal, the world is flat, and international media avoid these social conflicts.” I tried to justify this fact with the information bubble, the threaten of life in a weaponized country or only because of media censorship.
But at the same time, I felt a global-local unfairness to my female friends, colleagues, teachers and nationals: this movement is paralyzing the universities, filling the streets with their breasts and demands, and re configuring the social contract of the place where I come from. In that way, I consider useful and importantly to make this translation/translocation of the expectation of the Chilean feminist conversation I’m reading from a month from today, and enact with the global discussion about women empowerment and our gender and scholars privileges.
For this reasons, the goal of this document is to share some of the news and debates that I get about this Chilean contingency, targeted towards my international colleagues in my scholastic community (a.k.a Science and Technology Studies). In addition, I also aim to open a little window in your screen to the current state of a global issue in a particular case. In some way, the feminist movement has always been latent there, yet today it is different. Most of the links relate to news and pages in Spanish, but in the digital era, you can ask Google to translate for you.
First, I must clarify that I’m not the best person to make this document, I consider that their protagonists may be much better on it. Some of my STS colleagues like Gloria Baigorrotegui, Carla Alvial, Lorena Valderrama, Patricia Pena, Soledad Quiroz, Nelida Pohl, Cecilia Ibarra, Barbara Silva, Jimena Carrasco, among many others could do much better than I do. From all of them, I have learned a lot (I’m still learning!). If you do not know who they are, you can start looking for their work on the internet. But if they have not written about this yet, I have at least one conviction: they are mobilizing, in their roles as mothers, team leaders, citizens along with thousands of women in my country for a fair, dignified and egalitarian treatment between genders. All my respect and admiration to all of them, present and future.
There are not “little humiliations.”
The current Ministry of Education of Chile, Gerardo Varela, refers to some machist attitudes as “Little humiliations” at the beginning of the current Feminist Movement in Chile. It was a grotesque political error because the primary centers of social mobilization are the universities and schools. Nevertheless, the minimizing character of the machist denounces abuses is common in Chile and in the world.
I will name other examples to bring some global perspective, last year, the person of the year was The Silence Breakers: Women that speak out the abuses they have endured from powerful men and public figures. The #MeToo movement is its most famous face, created in 1998 but popularized since the end of 2015 with the case of celebrities and public figures, which seeks to abolish male behaviors of harassment and abuse towards women, which systematically occurs within cultures. Women marching are reasserted over the world in different ways, from the Arabia Saudi’s driver license reform to the Latin-American movement Ni Una Menos, claiming for protection to women. Just today, Harvey Weinstein, the most recognizable face over in Hollywood abuse was arrested. Feminism is having a wave of successes in different scales.
Behaviors as the Weinstein are repeated all over the world; these behaviors are so naturalized and normalized that they are transparent to our own experience and we consider them to be expected situations, the experience between genders being intrinsically unequal. A grotesque example is a Case La Manada in Spain where a court questioned the collective rape of a woman by five men, dismissing obvious crimes. However, shocking it may be, this is found as common; It is part of the privilege of having a penis that our cultures consider usual abuse towards those who do not.
The Chilean case began in a similar way: In Chile some years ago a series of university situations of sexual abuse began to arise, with the same trajectories: Incomplete processes, lax sentences and abuse combined with complicity. In 2016, the experience into the Department of History of the University of Chile can be considered a preface to what followed at the beginning of this 2018.
During early April in Valdivia, a similar case in the Faculty of Sciences of the Austral University had an ‘alternative exit’ that partially excused the behavior of the harasser. In the same way, this community was taken by its students breaking the tranquility of the southern forests. Again in the University of Chile, another harassment denounce was filed with a Law scholar who was previously a member of the Constitutional Court of the country. The same complicity was manifested but did not have the expected silence on the part of the students. They started one of the first feminists takes that Chile has in this century.
The situation began to diffuse, not in a Gaussian curve, more than an exponential explosion of denounces and protests. The discussion in only one month goes from “isolated harassment cases” to “national structural gender inequality.” Here is where agency and structures collapse, and we need to pick attention to the systemic reclamation of Chilean women.
This movement expanded in marches, protests, shots and other forms of mobilizations. It is likely that the weavers continue, but these are not the protagonists of the mobilization in Chile. This time is more serious, because, after two hundred years of having a secondary role in all institutions, history and spaces of power, the women of Chile are demanding not only independence but also equality and gender parity. The historian Sol Serrano summarizes the historical crisis about the liberal democracies and feminism: “The process at the conceptual level, in my opinion, comes from the western democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that proclaim that all men are born free and equal. The history of democracy is the tension between that fundamental principle and its historical realization. No, we were not all free, nor all equal in dignity and rights. We are not. But we are much more than two centuries ago because in the democratic systems the different groups that have been postponed demand, so to speak, the right to the law.”
The 2018’s Chilean feminism movement is not only about harassment, abuse, and violations. It is about human rights unreachable for the half of our nationals, beacuse of machism behaviors, that I’m sure are not exclusive of Chilean people. This movement goes beyond: It is a discussion about our eco-socio-technical contract and the privileges we have, and what should be shared.
Why could this be interesting,relevant, important or useful to STS folks? Because knowledge, technology, and innovation embed the same bias. And this was concluded from our field during… the 80s (if not before!). But as part of my learning, we tend to repeat the veiling as any other field. More about this will come later.
Woman as the subject of opinion
Today, one of the newspapers that typically only had privileged men as columnists in their pages makes a “special edition” about female positions in Chile. The journalist Paula Vial put this demand on Twitter, making the newspaper La Tercera special. At the same time, this edition become a good opportunity for me to situate and share some of the south cone perspectives about radical enacted feminist (because It is ON FIRE!)
In my opinion, the particular special edition is like a little joke. For a media with a systematic invisibility of national female voices, at least this is the beginning of a daily policy of parity, they do not get it. The impression about the gender bias of this media I got like a year ago was one of my insights about the national press, which probably many had observed before (or maybe not). Nevertheless, a systematic approach to media gender bias in Chile is presented by Isabel Aninat, lawyer and researcher dedicate her op-ed in this special edition.
From here I want to pick some quotes of these, to express the clarity of this situation, which is not exclusive to Chile itself. Then, I will discuss the meaning of this “special edition.” If this media is a little bit serious, introducing from Sunday gender parity in their commentaries (if 43 for one day was something special, ten each day could be normal, no?) Question apart: How is the media gender inequality in your cities and the media that you read?
Starting with Ruth Olate, President of the syndicate of particular houseworkers who says “For centuries, private home workers have been burdened with social stigmas and discrimination, without employment contracts and in the “privacy of homes,” receiving low wages and mistreatment … Our work goes far beyond the care of a house. Our work has also allowed the insertion of women in the labor market.” Ruth’s summarize Schwartz-Cowan basics” class struggle, gender emancipation, and neo-liberalism labor embed in her non-researcher expertise. She’s Awesome!
Esperanza Cueto, leader of ComunidadMujer, organization that looks for women empowerment in Chile describes this times as “What we are living as a society is the result of a history that the pioneers in the conquest of women’s rights began to write, many decades ago, and which today is resignified in the light of the current social moment and the determined will of the students.” As several other Western-ish countries our “first” (declared) feminist wave was related to women votes, obtained in 1949 after 10–12 years of different movements and leaders. Why civic epistemologies don’t reflect about these exclusion more explicitly? Currently, the Chilean feminist movement is challenging this deep concept in a radical movement — more radical than innovation, more less than maintenance-
The Economist, Andrea Repetto discusses about the power and paradigms of men over Chilean economy “How many women have occupied the Ministry of Finance in the history of Chile? None… This phenomenon is just one more example of something we already know well: the low representativeness of women in positions of power. Changing this reality depends to a large extent on political will.” But she also goes against her own discipline “Likewise, the emphasis on economic thinking-competition and optimization of behavior-seems to come from models with a masculine tinge. What more symbolic than domestic work is called “leisure” in economic models?” (a.k.a epistemic cultures of gender inequity)
The historian and author Maria Jose Cumplido doubt about the tradition. She exemplifies on the of the oldest school in Chile, The National Institute, a public school only for men since 1813 in which many leaders of the Republic of Chile have studied. She asks: Who served that idea of Republic? Did he serve an elite? Did he serve society as a whole? Has this idea of republicanism served women? It seems that no. Then continues “The National Institute has forged a Republic of men where women have been accessory and marginalized to enter this renowned educational center. How can a country be forged by excluding half of the population?” (What about the Republic of science???)
The next three quotes from for female leaders in science, innovation and technology in Chile:
Some researchers, as the physicist and climate change researcher Maisa Rojas calls to women to embrace the challenges of our time: We have a planet highly disturbed by our development model, economic, extractivist and with high inequalities. Resolving this problem and giving sustainability to our life on this planet is the task of this century … If we need a different perspective and new methods, let’s summon women (and their underutilized talents in society) … Promote greater participation of Women can, therefore, provide diversity for innovative solutions to complex problems of the 21st century, in addition to reducing important gender gaps in wages, for example.
From Innovation world, Rocio Foncea, Innovation Manager of the Corporation of Productive Development answered in an interview-like column: Are there areas in which women are better at innovating? She recognizes women leadership on social issues and sustainability issues. “By nature we are articulators, and we like to solve problems.” She said.
The video game designer Maureen Bertho talks about the gender gap in national VG industry “From an ethical point of view, it seems unfair that women are less likely to participate in the video game industry, one of the creative areas of greatest growth and dynamism at the global.” She argues about the reasons of this “Possibly, the causes of the gap are related to the structural barriers that women face and that lead them to decide that careers associated with the development of video games are not possible, viable or interesting options for them.”
The last three testimonies illustrate the local manifestation of gender inequity on STI fields. These are not new, everybody knows about it. But, Why we don’t acknowledge this issue in our non-feminist based papers? Feminist women are the exclusive responsible of the perspective of gender in our papers and research?
Privilege, Critical engagement, and feminism
Based on media examples above, we can reflect about our field perspective drawing from some echoes from Chilean news. But at the same time, similar expressions are surrounding you, wherever you are. Women are (more than) the half of humankind, and our language, institutions, and artifacts seem to have commonly acknowledged this fact.
The STS community object of study is knowledge, socio-technical and innovation systems, but with my first year STS-class folks, we conclude that our canon is deficient in women. Is this because we don’t have enough female authors? Does someone think that women scholarly had less quality? These are not casual, because in general, parity is prevalent in our conferences and academic departments and communities. What happens within our field, in our classrooms, in our readings?
This collective awake of lack of diversity on our readings is not only in my course or school. I replicated this in the other courses that I took during this year with similar results, as well most of the syllabus published in 4S or available in internet from STS program and courses. Almost everyone had unbalanced attribution between genders. This issue is structural, and using the term that post-phenomenologist describe technology experiences, becomes transparent to us. WHY?!
One common thing that all STS scholars share is a critical approach to social engagement. Under this prism, I am motivated to share this strange experience of watching via video the revolution of my friends. (Sorry if it looks that I’m justifying for make this text, but it is) Their cause is also my cause, for my values. For that reason, being an observer is adequate but uncomfortable, because I see it from the comfort of my double privilege (being a man and not being in Chile at the moment).
Going to practical things, As Michael Mascharenas (2018) claims for more acknowledgment in our field to race, I want to emphasize with the cause from the feminist approach to STS . After 30 years (my age) seems that it is still impermeable to our syllabus and canon. If this is our current scenario in more than a quarter of a century, it does not leave me hopeful that we can fully integrate colonialism, race perspectives or less Queer STS beyond good intentions.
Nevertheless, I want to contribute translating (in epistemic and linguistic ways) the state of the art of this case. Chilean feminist movement is diversity, care and reflexivity embodied. It is a question of the State as male technology, an intellectual revolution and a normative-caring approach. It is politics being female. But at the same time in my case, it is taking the relevance of feminist contribution to my ways of thinking seriously.
The acknowledgement of diversity is life-long learning. But as privileged people and researchers, we should be the first in sharing and multiplicating the privilege that we have. Making academia/research is one human privilege that I posses. During a conversation today with one of the female professors of my school, she told me “I’m full of work, but I’m privileged with all the opportunities I have, and I wake up 4 a.m. to share it with everyone, especially my daughter”. In one word: Care.
We must be open to being a better (academic, citizen, collective, man) version of ourselves. Returning to the leanings of Chilean women movements, Alesia Injoque, a trans-women engineer said in the “special edition”: “I not only feel happy to be a woman but also feel pride to join those who fought; and struggle to change society for a fairer, break down barriers and that we can be the best version of ourselves.”
Finally, for sure similar cases (of lack of academic diversity, local feminist waves, gender bias and STS blaming in others the shared sins…) have been, and will be documented. But the present strikes with it stridency. Violent as our penis-based privilege, uncontested as liberal democracies remain human values to women. For this reason sharing and caring is part of this reflection, to listen louder and speak collectively.
